Cannabis, ‘Simik’, and the Law

Opinion

By Jan Arden

A couple of years ago, while waiting for a car wash in a quiet village up-north, I had some brief exchanges with a mid-thirties lorry driver waiting his turn. In that chance encounter, he told me he was from a nearby “cité”, married with two school-age kids, earned a more than decent living by operating and managing the lorry a benefactor had placed at his disposal, against the proviso of running some occasional errands for him.

Cannabis – Depenalisation. Pic – Getty Images

Somehow the conversation turned to drug consumption by youths in his “cité” and the surrounding areas. Omnipresent was his stark depiction: “simik” (synthetic drugs) affecting most of his neighbours, friends, family, and cousins living near his home. This was a matter of considerable duress that neither he, nor priests called in, nor well-wishers were in a position to rein in — a familiar story of utter helplessness and desolation.

 Asked how he had stayed out of it, he admitted having a daily routine, when, upon coming home, he would invariably have a quiet half-hour, rolling up a « petard » (cannabis joint) to have a few destressing puffs. Everybody in his household respected his chosen therapeutic and quasi-spiritual half-hour and, he added, he himself never felt the need to migrate to anything else, but his entourage of young consumers was too far down the road to listen to his entreaties.

Of course, one swallow does not make a spring but with the ongoing conversation about cannabis depenalisation or legalisation it came to mind. The risks of cannabis acting as a “gateway drug” to more harmful substances cannot be ignored. These and other risks were analyzed by the committee of experts set up in 2020, and their recommendation was enacted in 2022, namely that cannabis and derived low-THC products could be authorized for medical use under strict medical supervision in a specific number of difficult conditions intractable to other painkillers. [“Low-THC cannabis” refers to cannabis plants or products that contain a minimal amount of Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) – the primary psychoactive compound responsible for the “high” or intoxicating effects.]

Three years later an assessment of the measure by the relevant professionals would not be amiss, with possible broadening of the medical conditions associated with its prescription and use. This review might even be invited to probe further the accumulating scientific, medical data, the evolving international legislation and country cases, regarding the « recreational » usage of low-THC cannabis by adults.

Since the beginning of this century, calls for the legislation of cannabis usage under a strong framework preventing abuse have grown. While it remains an outlawed practice in the majority of countries, several have gathered trend data concerning the risks of its usage. Has it been shown to be a “gateway drug,” or, conversely, an alternative that, within a well-structured panoply of other measures, can effectively reduce the attractiveness or necessity of harder substances?

Canada for instance has legalised and regulated the non-medical or recreational cannabis usage by adults since October 2018. Since then, Malta, Luxembourg and Germany have done so – each with a different set of regulations and while we certainly should not hurry with legislation, our new Drug Agency can monitor the country cases, their regulations and the impact of a more liberal policy, within a strong framework against abuse.

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REA: The Soured Experiment?

In trying to innovate and exercise his ministerial responsibilities with a welcome spirit of openness by calling for expressions of interest from potential candidates to the National Empowerment Foundation (NEF) board, Minister Ashok Subron of the ReA component in the governing alliance, seems to have landed himself in some unnecessary hot soup.

Most of us will abstain from believing there was anything more than inexperience or a cultural chasm in governing from a party that has long held beliefs and convictions while outside government, but it has left considerable unease. True it is that those were political appointments for which, by law, he need not have consulted anybody other than his better judgment, and he was commended initially by the media for making his mark by taking the public procedure chosen. Where did it go sour then?

Several factors may have contributed to the sorry state of affairs that must have caused some embarrassment in the Cabinet, and it is important for ReA’s sake and its leader to draw early conclusions from it. While the delegation of authority to Junior Minister Kugan Parapen and the selection committee formed by him and the Minister’s companion—both ReA activists—triggered the initial media backlash, the immediate responses from the ReA politburo and those involved only added fuel to the fire. These actions were seen as insensitive, further compounded by the perceived arrogance of the newly appointed NEF CEO, former journalist Axel Cheney, whose social media reactions were widely considered inappropriate and, by some, an unacceptable reminder of the previous regime.

A total of 263 individuals responded to the call for expressions of interest to serve on the NEF Board, submitting their CVs for consideration. Were these applications properly filtered, short-listed, and interviewed? Were those appointed genuinely qualified or simply party loyalists? These are the questions that have been swirling in the public domain. After ten days of mounting pressure, Minister Ashok Subron has appeared to take some steps to contain the fallout. But he must urgently dispel any perception that his Ministry is a chasse gardée of ReA, operating like an extension of an internal ReA “kitchen cabinet”—whether by intent or default, as Labour MP Raviraj Beechook pointedly remarked.

One hopes the ReA leadership takes a moment for introspection. This should have been a simple matter of saying: “Sorry, guys. We meant well but messed up. We’ll learn from this.” Instead, the defensive posture and drawn-out explanations have only allowed the controversy to linger unnecessarily. A kind suggestion: get your house in order—pronto.

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 Education: Lessons from the 1975 Protests and Beyond
Rupture and rethinking require fresh dynamism and a willingness to chart the new

In May 1975, the student-led protests of May 20, 1975, commemorated last week on their 60th anniversary, took place during deep social and political unrest. These protests shook a fragile coalition government between the Labour Party and the PMSD, an uneasy alliance formed to bring stability and development after the hard-fought independence struggle in 1968.

The good intentions behind that coalition derailed with the perceived excesses of a declared state of emergency. This included the postponement of general elections due in 1972, appointed commissars replacing municipal councillors, press censorship, silenced trade unions, and a ban on public gatherings. These were among the more nefarious features of that difficult time in our history.

Set against a backdrop of high unemployment, particularly among the young, many public leaders were seen as aging freedom fighters, out of touch with common people or the aspirations of youth. Public college education in particular was fee-paying and confined mostly to the two Royal Colleges, the QEC and John Kennedy College. Confessional and subsidized colleges offered a somewhat equivalent capacity, but most private colleges in many regions fought bravely to provide some post-primary education in modest facilities with whatever teaching staff they could get, with parents paying for student books, fees, and transport.

Students at our vanguard and only University began throwing up a host of new ideas and ideals. These included the end of communalism in politics and recruitment, especially in the private sector, participative democracy, Kreol as a unifying language, and the end of an elitist education system. Some even demanded the closure of the University since it could not provide jobs, jostled amongst others. From around 1973, discontent gradually grew toward an Education Minister seen as out of touch and a government struggling to respond, until the dams burst on May 20, 1975, when some 20,000 students took to the streets, planning a march to Parliament and clashing with police forces.

The fuse that lit a powder keg

It was revealing that education policy and students were the fuse that lit a powder keg, rapidly bringing about fundamental changes that last to this day. These included the end of the emergency state and press censorship, general elections to be held in 1976, voting age lowered to 18, and critically, free secondary education. This campaign pledge certainly played a role in the LP holding on to power another five years. Alongside confessional colleges, private colleges in rural agglomerations from Triolet to Goodlands, Mahebourg, or Rose-Belle, benefiting from state support, began turning out decent SC and HSC results. This also meant that output from our best public colleges heading for overseas university studies (UK, France, and India) or the University of Mauritius were no longer the only pool producing our “elite” public service administrators. New opportunities and avenues abounded; scholarships previously awarded to some one hundred secondary school entrants were no longer the race for which many parents were willing to sacrifice.

Conversely, free secondary education intensified demand, and the competitive nature of the primary-end examination, which took on the mantle of grading students for admission to our “star” colleges, increased. In popular perception, those were the four state colleges of old and some of the better confessional schools. In parallel, communities and sections of the population not used to placing the same priorities on education or what demands that imposed on parents began campaigning against the meritocratic primary school leaving examination, as either too early or too demanding at ages 11-12.

Even with the creation of Junior and Senior State Secondary Colleges to address demand, the system remained overstretched. Institutions like the MIE, the Private Secondary Schools Authority to manage state financial disbursements, or the MES or Education Ministry cadres did not manage to defuse the situation. This has left a lot on the plate of the current Labour Party Minister who organized the recent ‘Assises de l’Education’ to get views and recommendations from the pedagogue community and unions before firming out a master-plan for an education architecture and system that is resilient and geared for the next 25 years.

Alternative models

This brief summary does not fully capture the range of developments within the education ecosystem, including the growth of the private tuition industry, the emergence of several private teacher training colleges, and the establishment of lycées based on alternative models (International Baccalaureate, French-funded colleges and lycées, the admirable story of the mixed gender of the Mahatma Gandhi state colleges). We have several private tertiary institutions working to international standards and four public universities today. This certainly opened access but did not bode well for identifying public institutions that might have aimed for a better profile on the international education scene, capable of vying for at least a top twenty spot on the scale of African universities at the very least and attracting foreign students and professors to Chairs or for their sabbaticals.

On that front, the last political dispensation made matters worse by enabling state funding of tertiary studies for first-timers, turning them into extended or glorified secondary institutions. Rather than make every labourer, artisan, and fisherman or retiree fund the university studies of many who can afford them, a widespread scholarship or student loan scheme for those with difficulties might have better served our national interests and those of our institutions.

Statistics will show that thousands of our students and parents prefer paying 180-200 thousand rupees per year (as opposed to several times more in UK, Canada, Australia, or the US) to private providers hooked up to international universities, perceived as better-quality tertiary institutions. It may be difficult to roll back populist measures born of some ill-informed advisor, but in times of austerity and dilapidation of public funds, it is probably antinomic to social justice and to a quest for quality at our public tertiary institutions.

New vision

A bold new vision is expected from the appropriate Ministry to shake the routine and turn around the sorry sagas we keep hearing at times from public universities. As for the UoM, it is time, as we proposed here and elsewhere, to raise its international profile and turn it into a paying residential campus, at least for a minimum of some 200 first-year students, with a decent canteen or cafeteria. That would be indispensable to start attracting foreign students or visiting staff and can be achieved more conveniently through a Public-Private partnership. The University, as the Glover report pointed out decades ago, cannot remain an eight-to-four college; its amphitheatres should become alive as places of cultural and scientific lectures, taking academia out of its current limitations and expanding the horizons of our youth or society at large.

Rupture and rethinking require fresh dynamism and a willingness to chart the new, not the persistence of old ideas.

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 30 May 2025