Jamaica has long been associated with cannabis in the western imagination, particularly here in the United States where our perception of the island\u2019s culture has been heavily influenced by the musical legacy of reggae legend (and vocal cannabis advocate) Bob Marley. His musical career began around the same time Jamaica gained independence in the early \u201960s, a time when cannabis was already making inroads into the American mainstream through the burgeoning counter culture, and when the Wailers got their big break in the early \u201970s, he became a central icon of that cannabis-loving subculture.<\/p>\n
But despite the American perception of Jamaica being a place where cannabis is enjoyed freely, the island nation has only recently begun to seriously implement legal reforms decriminalizing cannabis and creating a licensing framework for legal medical cannabis and hemp industries.<\/p>\n
So while it may seem like a ho-hum announcement in the states, where especially in an adult use state like California the opening of a new dispensary hardly qualifies as newsworthy, the recent ribbon cutting at Kaya Farms \u2014 Jamaica\u2019s first legal medical cannabis dispensary \u2014 is an absolutely historic event.<\/p>\n
Balram Vaswani, the chairman and \u201cchief ganja officer\u201d of Kaya Farms, told the\u00a0Cannabis Business Times<\/a>,\u00a0\u201cIt has been an arduous journey for all involved in making this dream a reality. We cannot forget the Indians who brought the plant, the Rastafarians that fought to advocate it, University of Technology, Government officials on both sides and corporate Jamaica that have all helped to steer this through the political landscape.\u201d<\/p>\n Vaswani said that he is confident that Jamaican farmers\u00a0\u201ccan compete internationally as ganja becomes a commodity.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n That \u201carduous journey\u201d reaches back into Jamaica\u2019s dark colonial past, long before the island nation gained independence in 1962. The original inhabitants of Jamaica were the Ta\u00edno people. When the Spanish colonized Jamaica in 1509, they enslaved the Ta\u00edno<\/a>, who suffered so badly from the toils of slavery and the foreign diseases brought by the Spanish that they were nearly eradicated.<\/p>\n The current character and culture of the island, though certainly rooted in the Ta\u00edno culture in some respects, is largely a product of British occupation, which began when Britain defeated Spanish forces and claimed the island as a colony around 1655. In keeping with colonial tradition, they used slaves imported from West Africa to work sugar cane plantations. Even when Britain officially abolished slavery in 1810 it took a violent slave uprising involving the wholesale destruction of several plantations to finally convince the British rulers of Jamaica, who finally\u00a0declared slavery illegal in 1838<\/a>.<\/p>\n All of that led to the importation of indentured servants from East India, who first brought cannabis to the island, calling it by its Hindi name \u201cganja,\u201d which is still the most common name used for cannabis in Jamaica. As in the United States, cannabis quickly grew popular with low income communities because it provided an inexpensive means of relaxation. And, as in the U.S., it inspired a reactionary disinformation campaign that lead to prohibitions and selective, often violent enforcement of those prohibitions.<\/p>\n The original cannabis prohibition law was the brainchild of a group called the Council of Evangelical Churches in Jamaica, and was largely intended as a repression of Rastafarianism, which had become a central religious current on the island and which encouraged the ritual use of ganja.<\/p>\n From the Jamaica Observer<\/a>:<\/p>\n The emergence of the campaign and preparation of this oppressive instrument, the 1913 Law and its Amendment in the 1920\u2019s, was led by the Church and white elites\u2026\u00a0The planter-controlled society meted out severe punishment to black labourers in the form of extremely high fines for penalties from court cases in the post-emancipation period. The fine for ganja, \u201ca victimless crime\u201d, was exorbitant for people who had little or no money.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n The first amendments to the Dangerous Drugs Act decriminalizing ganja<\/a> didn\u2019t happen until just a few years ago in 2015, and it\u2019s undeniable that the pace of licensing for legal cannabis businesses is slow<\/a> in Jamaica. But while tourists visiting \u201cJamrock\u201d \u2014 who have always enjoyed relative lenience when it came to enforcement of cannabis prohibition \u2014 may not notice these glacial shifts in policy, for regular Jamaicans it\u2019s another slow but steady step towards just laws and safe access.<\/p>\n TELL US,\u00a0<\/strong>have you ever smoked Jamaican cannabis?<\/p>\n The post Legal Cannabis Inches Forward in Jamaica<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Jamaica has long been associated with cannabis in the western imagination, particularly here in the United States where our perception of the island\u2019s culture has been heavily influenced by the musical legacy of reggae legend (and vocal cannabis advocate) Bob Marley. His musical career began around the same time JamaicaContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,94,900,3774,284,81],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24800"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24800"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24800\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24801,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24800\/revisions\/24801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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\nRead More: Legal Cannabis Inches Forward in Jamaica<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"