Thoughts from the void: Cannabis and Georgia

Georgia has been in the news regarding its government's plan to legalize the medical use of cannabis and its cultivation for export. This has been met with some opposition from the conservative Georgian church which has gone on to say that it may allow the legalization of cannabis for medical use but it is opposed to the legalization of cannabis for recreational use and will never permit the same to happen.

The church's interference in matters that are beyond the scope of its expertise and the damage that this causes in society is evident from the fact that, while the church opposes cannabis, a traditional, medicinal, natural recreation plant that has been used by humans for tens of thousands of years for many purposes, especially spirituality, methamphetamine flows into Georgia from traditionally Iran and increasingly Afghanistan as stated in the 2020 UNODC World Drug Report. Failing to recognize the need for healthy recreational drugs, of which cannabis is the world's foremost, and opposing it while dangerous synthetic drugs flood the market in addition to the legal, but harmful, alcohol and tobacco is an example of misdirected energy that causes more harm than good.

The cannabis plant offers an opportunity for Georgia to address its health, agricultural, economic, industrial and recreational problems and to move towards correcting the harms that have been inflicted on society through the wrong laws that have prohibited cannabis. Legalizing the plant for adult recreational use within Georgia is more important than cultivating the crop for export to other countries. It is important to first provide one's people with healthy medicine before trying to sell it to others. Correcting these laws represents a chance for the country to be a part of the word wide cannabis revolution which represents a chance for man to correct his headlong path towards self destruction or at the very least of slowing down the inevitable. Whether the government and the church leaders have the vision to see this and to embrace the divine plant in time remains to be seen.

In December 2020, the UN voted to remove cannabis from its most restricted Schedule IV category of the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. It does however still remain in Schedule I, which is the least restrictive. This one move by the UN itself should be sufficient to bring about the recreational legalization of cannabis in every nation and an overhaul of national drug laws.

It must be noted that in most places where cannabis legalization has happened it took the efforts of the people who mobilized themselves through grassroots level movements to bring about this change. Left to lawmakers legalization would have been impossible, as the main interests of lawmakers concern the protection of the big industries opposed to cannabis such as pharmaceuticals, petrochemicals, medical, alcohol and tobacco. For something that truly benefits the people, the people themselves have had to make the change.

Listed below are articles taken from various media related to the above subject. Words in italics are the thoughts of your truly at the time of reading the article.

'Most of the clandestine methamphetamine manufacture in the Near and Middle East/South-West Asia has traditionally been in the Islamic Republic of Iran, being manufactured both for the local market and for export to countries in East and South-East Asia (including Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand) as well as for export to Central Asia and the Caucasus (Azerbaijan, Georgia and Tajikistan) and to Europe (including Bulgaria, France, the Russian Federation, Turkey and the United Kingdom). However, the Islamic Republic of Iran is not the main source of the methamphetamine found in other countries in the Near and Middle East/SouthWest Asia (with the exception of Iraq and the Syrian Arab Republic). The main source countries for other countries in this subregion seem to continue to be countries in East and South-East Asia. The extent of clandestine methamphetamine manufacture in the Islamic Republic of Iran actually appears to be declining, while manufacturing is rapidly increasing in neighbouring Afghanistan.' - United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, World Drug Report 2020, https://wdr.unodc.org/wdr2020/field/WDR20_BOOKLET_4.pdf