Aketi, Pass Me A Wrap Of Marijuana, Please -By Festus Adedayo

Governor Oluwarotimi Akeredolu of Ondo State has come under a welter of flaks in the last few days since he made that unconventional call on the Federal Government to support the growing of marijuana, otherwise known as hemp, in his state. One of those who took umbrage against him was the Presidential Advisory Committee for the Elimination of Drug Abuse (PACEDA) superintended over by Mohammed Buba Marwa, former military governor of Lagos State, which said, among other doggerels, that the call was “disturbing” especially now that the country had an approximate 10 million Nigerian youth in the cannabis smoking net at the moment.

Akeredolu had earlier, on his twitter handle, commenting on his recent visit to Thailand, undertaken with the Chairman of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency, (NDLEA) Col. Muhammad Mustapha (rtd), for a programme tagged, ‘Medicinal Cannabis Extract Development,” said the state was going to be in partnership with the NDLEA to appropriate the wide cultivation of hemp in his state. According to him, Nigeria stood the chance of being shortchanged by about $145bn-worth of cannabis grown in Ondo State, between now and 2025, if she did not tap into the legal marijuana market, with an estimated 1000 jobs as icing on its cake. Senator Shehu Sanni of Kaduna State also joined the fray in condemning this initiative.

My major bother with Nigerians and their governments at all levels is the preponderance of ignorance, naivety and fascination with the dross of doing same old things same way and yet expecting different results that are on display in the public square. Condemnations against the governor range from Sanni’s usual loose talks censoring Akeredolu as having misdirected his energy and some other commentators saying that he wants to implode the number of cannabis users in the country.

Ever since I heard that seminal discussion by Omoyele Sowore, presidential candidate of the African Action Congress (AAC) in the last election on the huge market Nigeria is losing by criminalizing the cultivation of the psychoactive drug, I had been a convert into the marijuana debate. His averment had been that Nigeria will become a major exporter of the drug which can be used for medical or recreational purposes.

“We have to start taking care of our weed, igbo, such that we can also contribute to the GDP of the world. Some of the best weeds in the world are grown in Ekiti state. I’m very serious and people are making billions out of that particular plant that is very potent in Nigeria. We should be focusing on it,” he had said. Sowore was apparently unaware that Akeredolu’s Ondo State is one of Nigeria’s hugest cultivators of cannabis. If you approximate the cannabis growth in Eleyowo, Ogbese and Ilu-Abo, you would have a chunk of foreign currencies at your finger tip.

The naivety and hypocrisy behind the anti-cannabis advocacy is that our people are deliberately blinding their eyes to social and economic change that is a clarion call in other climes. Rather, we are allowing ourselves to be pinned down and enslaved by the cants of western religions and centuries-old practices, when those who bequeathed them to us have since moved ahead. Canada, on October 17, 2018, decriminalized recreational marijuana in full. Growers only require a licence from the central government. Jamaica did in 2015, Argentina in March, 2017, so also Columbia, Ecuador, Peru and many more. Some states in America have too.

The truth is that, we enjoy tomfoolery in Nigeria and our hypocrisy is blindingly alarming. Our prudery against the growth of marijuana is ancient but by the tip of our noses, Tramadol and other drugs are imported into the country. Only a few days ago, N1billion worth of Tramadol was reported to have been imported into Kano and our children are hooked on this global fad of drugs use like a junkie is glued to a fix. A far more armful drug but which the colonialists decriminalized because they were hooked on its consumption themselves – cigarette – has stuck to our consciousness for over a century now. This drug has caused so many dangers to its consumers, chief of which are cancer and allied diseases.

Apart from the curative portents of marijuana, as it is used in the treatment of asthma, influenza and tuberculosis, its recreational potentials have been underscored by medical scientists. Yet, Nigeria, steeped in tradition and old methods, slavishly promotes cigarettes and criminalizes cannabis. Yes, cannabis has been fingered in the mental railroad of many of our children but the fact still remains that we can license its cultivation for export while strengthening social and legal mechanisms against its misuse by the public. Already, in spite of its criminalization, marijuana is widely available at the discotheque and at joints, even in the hands of law enforcement officers. I remember Peter Tosh in Nah go a jail saying that “This here spliff (marijuana) that you see me with sir, I just got it from a Priest, sir… from (a) police officer…” He uses this to say that cannabis is of wide acceptance across social strata. I remember that when Tosh smoked the Nigerian cannabis on his visit to Sunny Okosuns’ Irrua home in current Edo State in the early 80s, he said Nigeria’s variant was the best in the world.   

What we don’t know as Nigerians is that cannabis has left the realm that the conservative world thinks it inhabits. In her book entitled Higher etiquette: A guide to the world of cannabis, from dispensaries to dinner table, Uzzie Post looks at theetiquette of cannabis consumption and how to smoke it. According to her, cannabis has come mainstream and needed to be accorded that due. For instance, if you have a party and cannabis needs to be served, how do you announce to the audience that you had wraps of it for your guests? And again, how are its side industries like alcohol factored into the chain of its consumption? A great, great granddaughter of Emily Post, the American woman author famous for writing about etiquettes who passed on in 1960, Uzzie has been a cannabis supporter for an upward of 20 years.

Akeredolu apparently knows that, just as Kebbi State is blessed with the cultivation of rice, his state has an abundance of cannabis and he could, with the help of the Federal Government, harvest foreign currency therefrom, as well as employing the state’s army of unemployed youth. Nigerians will rather encourage charlatan pastors and Imams who turn our moribund industries into church parishes and mosques where idle youth are enslaved ad infinitum than think right out of the box where their consciousness is imprisoned over the years. That is Aketi’s message from Thailand.