Letter to PM of Trinidad & Tobago on the decriminalization of marijuana
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- Parent Category: Comment
- Category: In brief
- Last Updated: Tuesday, 29 September 2020 16:56
- Published: Tuesday, 29 September 2020 14:20
- Written by Biko Agozino
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September 27, 2020
Dear Honourable Prime Minister Dr. Keith Rowley,
Many congratulations on your well-deserved victory at the just concluded general
elections. If anyone asks me why I think that your victory is well-deserved, I will point to
your courageous decriminalization of marijuana as a bold policy in response to the
needs of the people. If you remember correctly, I had sent you an open letter long
before the elections recommending that you should legalize the herb to nice up the
nation, as the people say on the streets.
Well done Dr. Prime Minister! History will remember you as a leader who listened to
scientific evidence and provided intellectual and moral leadership even when some
religious leaders and conservative politicians continued to press for the colonial laws
against marijuana to be retained and used to criminalize the poor masses who choose
to use it for recreation or for medication. Tell anyone who wants to continue oppressing
the people with anachronistic colonial prohibitions already being abandoned by the
colonizers that: Massa Day Done!
Now, I write to you openly again to urge you to keep stepping on this track of advancing
freedom for the people by going beyond decriminalization to authorize the legalization of
the herb that is thousands of times safer than alcohol and tobacco that kill millions
around the world and still remain legal simply because they generate tax revenues. You
can tax marijuana sales too to generate huge revenues and at the same time prevent
underage children from being able to buy from licensed sellers, deny the drugs gangs
their monopoly over the trade, give the farmers an opportunity to create wealth and jobs
legitimately, and allow patients who need the herb for medicinal purposes to buy it from
Hi-Lo rather than go to the shooter around the corner. It is a win-win-win solution for all.
Legalize it.
Finally, I appeal to you to use your good offices to drop charges against Nazma Muller
who got arrested and was recently detained in the women’s prison, Golden Grove,
because of her effort to plant a herb seed to heal the sick. Instead of criminalizing her
for her heroic activism, I recommend that you should free up the herb and appoint her
as an Independent Senator so that she could provide your government with informed
critique of your policy initiatives in order to improve the effectiveness of your leadership
in sweet T&T.
Full disclosure, Nazma Muller interviewed me for an article,
‘A Brutalised Society Must Be Violent…’ in The Trinidad Express Newspaper when I was a
Professor at UWI, St. Augustine, and I advocated penal abolitionism as the way to reduce
violent crimes in the country. That interview has been republished by
The Express in January 2009 and it was reprinted as a booklet that was sent to banks later.
One of the policy suggestions that I made during my interview with Ms Muller is the abolition
of the death penalty because it brutalizes the conscience of the people and that advice led to
a paper that I co-authored with David Greenberg of NYU in the British Journal of Criminology
to demonstrate that the death penalty is not a deterrent to crime. Ms Muller and I are also
among those credited with written testimonies by the CARICOM Regional Commission on Marijuana
which recommended a change of policy towards harm reduction. Feel free to consult me on your
policies if necessary.
Yours truly,
Biko Agozino
Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech, VA. USA
