CANNABIS CULTURE – A growing chorus of equity movements are swaying courts, one case at a time.
Spurred on by the conviction and lengthy jail sentence imposed on a teenage boy – a grassroots group of Malawian artists and advocates are demanding changes in the countries cannabis policy, a policy they say is unjust.
Mussa John in Handcuffs
Via Twitter
In June, a magistrate court in Blyntre, the commercial capital city of Malawi, condemned Mr. Mussa
John, a teenager, to 8 years in prison for possessing 134 kilograms of Indian hemp.
“It made no sense, it was an overdo, it was cruel,” says Dada Phiri, a Malawi youth musician who
advocated strongly for the teenager to be shown leniency.
Legal if you’re rich
Malawi, the southeast African nation of 18 million, passed a bill decriminalizing cannabis for medicinal and industrial purposes in 2020, almost five years after a motion to legalize industrial hemp was adopted. This was hailed as big dawn in light of the lucrative rise in global demand for medicinal cannabis and Malawi’s tumbling yields in tobacco, a crop that the country used to lead the world in supply.
But grassroots cannabis