We have spent the last few weeks on this platform celebrating. The 420 reflection. The 4/22 extension. The community, the culture, the ritual, the shared history of a plant that connects South Africans across generations and geographies in ways that nothing else quite does.

This week the celebration gives way to something more urgent.

Because while we have been talking about what cannabis means to this community — the old Durban Poison, the gravity bong sessions, the joints passed around fires, the culture that survived decades of criminalisation — hundreds of South Africans have been arrested. This week. While you were reading. While you were celebrating 420. Every single day, between 260 and 315 people are arrested in South Africa for cannabis. For a right the Constitutional Court said they have. Seven years ago.

That is the situation that Ras Garreth Prince and the Rastafari Nation Council are returning to the Western Cape High Court to address. There is a Back a Buddy campaign running now to fund the legal fight. And this community needs to show up for it.

What Happened in 2018 — And Why It Still Matters

In September 2018, the Constitutional Court of South Africa handed down a unanimous ruling in the case brought by Garreth Prince. The court found that criminalising the use, possession, and cultivation of cannabis by an adult in a private place is an unconstitutional violation of the right to privacy. Every judge on the bench agreed. It was a historic moment. It felt like the beginning of something real.

Seven years later, the arrests continue. The plants are still being destroyed. The right the court declared is, in the words of the campaign, hollow. The police know at the point of arrest that the majority of these cases have no legal foundation — and they arrest anyway. A person loses a day, a job opportunity, their dignity, and sometimes much more. And then the case disappears quietly before it reaches a courtroom.

This is not a legal grey zone. The court spoke clearly. What is happening is the state choosing not to honour what the court said.

The IKS Farmers — The Broken Promise Nobody Is Talking About

There is a dimension to this case that goes beyond the individual cannabis user's right to smoke in private, and it deserves more attention than it receives in the mainstream cannabis conversation.

Over three thousand IKS smallholder farmers — indigenous knowledge system farmers, the ancestral cultivators of the dagga belt, the families who have grown this plant for generations in Mpondoland and communities like it — submitted their data to the state. They did this in reliance on a Department of Trade, Industry and Competition endorsement supporting the IKS Cannabis Sandbox Trials. They trusted the process. They gave the state what it asked for.

The approval was abandoned. No authorisation was granted. Those farmers now face an active growing season with no lawful pathway to operate, and the constant threat of arrest for cultivating the same plant their grandparents cultivated.

The regulatory framework that is supposed to open up the South African cannabis economy is, in its current form, designed in a way that excludes the communities who have the most legitimate historical claim to participate in it. Independent research puts the annual value locked in the cannabis economy at up to R3.4 billion. Communities in Mpondoland are sitting directly on top of that economic potential with no lawful way to access it.

Who Is Bringing This Case

Ras Garreth Prince is not a newcomer to this fight. He is the First Applicant in the 2018 victory — the person whose name is on the ruling that the state is failing to honour. He is an attorney. He has been doing this work for decades, through courts that were hostile, through legal processes that were expensive and slow, because he believed the constitutional argument was right.

He was right. The court agreed with him.

Now he is going back, alongside the Rastafari Nation Council, to demand that the state honour what the court said. To stop unconstitutional enforcement. To account for the abandoned commitments to IKS farmers. To create real pathways for the communities that have been excluded from the cannabis economy that their plant, their land, and their generations of cultivation have made possible.

The Budget — What the Money Is For

The campaign is raising funds to finance the return to court, with the hearing set for 8 June 2026. The goal is R420,000 — take the number for what it is: a real legal budget covering real costs. Here is exactly where every rand goes.

The campaign has two stages. R200,000 gets the case into court — that is the filing threshold. R420,000 covers the full case including expert witnesses, community affidavits, media, and public education throughout the process. Every donor receives regular updates from filing through to the courtroom on 8 June 2026 and beyond.

Why This Community Should Back It

If you have been reading this platform over the last several weeks, you have been part of a conversation about what cannabis means — the science of it, the culture of it, the history of it, the endocannabinoid system, the terpenes, the landrace genetics, the community that has kept this plant alive through decades of criminalisation.

This case is where that conversation connects to action. The people being arrested every day are not abstractions — they are people from this community. The IKS farmers who submitted their data to the state and were abandoned are the direct custodians of the landrace genetics we have been discussing — the Durban Poison, the indigenous varieties that carry centuries of natural selection and cultural history that cannot be recreated by a commercial breeder.

The court already did the hard part. In 2018, the highest court in the land said clearly that this criminalisation is unconstitutional. What is required now is the enforcement of that ruling — and enforcement requires someone willing to go back to court, with the resources to do it properly, and demand that the state comply.

That is what this campaign is funding.

The court ruled in 2018. The right remains hollow. Help enforce it. Back the fight. Restore dignity. One Love.

Campaign: Fund the Fight — Unlock SA's R3B Cannabis Economy  ·  backabuddy.co.za/campaign/fund-the-fight-unlock-sas-r3b-cannabis-economy
Applicants: Ras Garreth Prince & Rastafari Nation Council NPC  ·  Hearing: 8 June 2026  ·  Western Cape High Court