Legalise Marijuana and Let Guyana Benefit

Dear Editor,

𝐈𝐭’𝐬 “𝐇𝐢𝐠𝐡” 𝐓𝐢𝐦𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐆𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐆𝐨𝐭 𝐏𝐚𝐢𝐝

There is a familiar comfort in the word 𝒅𝒆𝒄𝒓𝒊𝒎𝒊𝒏𝒂𝒍𝒊s𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏. Politicians reach for it the way a nervous swimmer reaches for the shallow end, far enough from the shore to look brave but close enough to touch bottom if things go wrong. In Guyana, we have not even gone that far. This week, I want to argue that our caution is not prudence at all. It is an expensive superstition. On the question of marijuana, the conventional wisdom holds that going slow is going safe.

𝐈 𝐛𝐞𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐝𝐢𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐫.

I was moved to write this after reading that CARICOM will convene a special meeting to examine the discrimination and marginalisation long faced by the Rastafarian community. It is a welcome and overdue reckoning. But we should be honest about what sits at the center of that history. For decades, the state treated a plant sacred to a people’s faith as contraband and then treated the people themselves as suspects. The apology CARICOM is now inching toward and the drug law still on our books are two chapters of the same book. If we are serious about the first, we cannot keep pretending the second is settled.

So let me lay out the case plainly.

𝐅𝐢𝐫𝐬𝐭: 𝐖𝐞 𝐝𝐨 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐝𝐞𝐜𝐫𝐢𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐢s𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧. 𝐖𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐚 𝐬𝐨𝐟𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐜𝐚𝐠𝐞.

Let us be precise, because precision is where this debate usually collapses. In 2021, Parliament passed, and in November 2022 finally brought into force, an amendment to the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (Control) Act that removed custodial sentences for possession of 30 grammes or less of cannabis. Possession of one to fifteen grammes now draws mandatory counselling; fifteen to thirty grammes draws community service for up to six months.

That was a humane step, and I do not diminish it. But read the fine print, because the Attorney General himself was at pains to say it out loud: this is not decriminalisation. Possession of even a single gramme remains a criminal offence.

We did not remove the crime. We removed the jail cell and left the criminal record standing. The young man caught with a spliff no longer goes to prison, but he is still processed by the system, still marked, and still counselled or sentenced to labour for an act that, across much of our own region, is now simply a ticket or nothing at all.

Look around the Caribbean and you will see how timid our position actually is. Jamaica decriminalised possession of up to two ounces back in 2015 and lets households grow five plants.

Trinidad and Tobago decriminalised up to 30 grammes in 2019 and permits four plants per adult. Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Saint Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, and Belize have each moved possession out of the realm of criminality for personal amounts, and several have built medical and sacramental frameworks besides. Guyana kept the crime and merely softened the punishment. We are not leading the regional conversation. We are trailing it and congratulating ourselves for the distance we have not travelled.

𝐒𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐝: 𝐧𝐨𝐛𝐨𝐝𝐲 𝐰𝐡𝐨 𝐰𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐬 𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐣𝐮𝐚𝐧𝐚 𝐢𝐧 𝐆𝐮𝐲𝐚𝐧𝐚 𝐢𝐬 𝐛𝐞𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐩𝐩𝐞𝐝.

Here is the part of the debate where the conservative argument quietly falls apart because it rests on a fantasy, the fantasy that the law is a wall.

It is not a wall. It is a sign that reads “Keep Out,” posted on a road everyone already knows how to walk around. Let us not insult one another’s intelligence. Every Guyanese who wants to use marijuana knows how to get it, where to get it, when to get it, and roughly what it costs. Access is not difficult. Access is trivial. From the corner of the village to the corridors of certain offices, the herb moves freely, daily, in quantities no one is measuring, through a network no one is taxing.

The law does not prevent use. What it prevents is visibility. The transaction happens in the dark, not because it is rare, but because we have insisted on keeping the lights off. And a government that keeps the lights off does not stop the party. It simply guarantees it cannot see who is in the room.

So we must retire, once and for all, the pretence that prohibition is protecting anyone from anything. The person who wants to abstain abstains. The person who wants to partake partakes. The statute changes neither. It changes only one thing: whether the exchange is recorded.

𝐓𝐡𝐢𝐫𝐝: 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐠𝐞𝐭𝐬 𝐩𝐚𝐢𝐝, 𝐞𝐱𝐜𝐞𝐩𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐞.

Follow the money, because this is the point I most want to land.

Think about what a single gramme of marijuana touches on its way to a user’s hand. Someone cultivated it. Someone transported it. Someone sold it. Somewhere along the chain, value was created, changed hands, and generated profit, exactly as it does with rice, with rum, with chicken, with cement. It is an economy. It is simply an invisible one, and because it is invisible, it pays no license fee, files no return, remits no VAT, funds no clinic, and paves no road.

Every single day, in every region of this country, marijuana transactions occur that we cannot see or count. The scale is wide enough that we honestly do not know how large it is, which is itself the whole problem. The grower earns. The middleman earns. The seller earns. The user gets what he sought. Value flows through every link in that chain. And the one entity that is entirely, deliberately locked out of it, the only party at the table not being paid, is the Government of Guyana, and by extension the Guyanese public whose schools, hospitals, and roads that revenue could fund.

We have, in effect, written ourselves out of our own economy. We have chosen to let a thriving trade enrich everyone but the treasury, and then we wonder aloud where the money is. The money is exactly where we banished it: underground, untraceable, and untaxed, precisely because we insisted it stay there.

𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐥𝐞𝐠𝐚𝐥𝐢s𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧-𝐚𝐧𝐝-𝐭𝐚𝐱 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬: 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐞𝐢𝐩𝐭𝐬

This is not theory. Other countries have run the experiment, and the numbers are in.

𝐂𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐝𝐚 legalised it nationally in 2018. In the six years since, the legal cannabis sector has contributed roughly $76.5 billion (CAD) to national GDP and generated about $29.6 billion in government tax revenue, while its direct economic footprint in a single year now exceeds that of the country’s breweries, wineries, and distilleries combined.

It supports on the order of 98,000 to 227,000 jobs, depending on how you count, spread across some 3,300 retailers and hundreds of licensed producers, the overwhelming majority of them small businesses. And crucially for us: the share of Canadians buying from the illegal market collapsed from 28 percent to just 3 percent. The underground economy did not merely shrink. It nearly vanished, pulled into the light, licensed, and taxed.

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐔𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐬, where cannabis is legal in 24 states despite remaining illegal federally, offers the largest tax dataset on earth: states have collected more than $28 billion in adult-use cannabis taxes since 2014, over $4.5 billion in 2025 alone. That money has gone to schools, healthcare, road-building, drug treatment, and community reinvestment. In some states cannabis now out-earns alcohol at the tax window.

𝐔𝐫𝐮𝐠𝐮𝐚𝐲 the world’s first fully legal nation, is the instructive contrast. It chose a public-health model over a commercial one, no sales tax, no advertising, prices fixed by the state, and so it earns comparatively little. That is a lesson, the fiscal reward is a design choice. Build a commercial, taxed, business-friendly framework and you reap Canada’s returns. Build a bare-bones state monopoly and you reap Uruguay’s control without its revenue. Guyana would be choosing the size of its own reward.

The through-line is simple. Legalisation does not create the marijuana economy; that economy already exists here, now, all around us. Legalisation merely decides whether the public gets a share of it. Right now, our answer is no.

𝐀𝐧𝐝 𝐧𝐨𝐰, 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐨𝐛𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐬𝐞𝐬

I can hear it already, because it is always the same: legalise, and you will unleash a wave of addiction and social ruin we will never contain. The runaway-social-ills argument. Let me be careful and fair here, because I am not going to overclaim.

I am not arguing that marijuana is harmless, nor that legalisation is some social good that benefits us all. I am arguing something narrower and sturdier: the predicted runaway catastrophe does not happen. The evidence says so.

In Uruguay, after a full decade of legal cannabis, the government’s own data shows problematic use holding flat at 2.1 percent, unchanged since before legalisation, while overall consumption actually fell, and the average age of first use rose from 18 to 20.

In Canada, teen use went down, not up: a study of nearly 40,000 students found fewer of them using cannabis after legalisation than before, and research on years of police data showed no spillover into property or violent crime. Even Jamaica, where researchers did flag a rise in first-time youth use, saw no descent into the social collapse the doom-mongers promised, and the lesson its own scholars drew was to pair reform with education and monitoring, not to reverse it.

Use may tick up, but a modest rise in use is not a society in freefall, and there is no clear case anywhere, not in Uruguay, not in Canada, not in our own region, that legalisation set off a self-amplifying spiral of degradation. The catastrophe did not arrive.

Now here is the argument that ought to end the health objection outright. If “𝒊𝒕 𝒄𝒂𝒓𝒓𝒊𝒆𝒔 𝒉𝒆𝒂𝒍𝒕𝒉 𝒓𝒊𝒔𝒌𝒔” were sufficient grounds to criminalise a substance, then alcohol and tobacco, both legal, both taxed, both woven into our social life, and both carrying harm profiles that by most serious measures exceed cannabis, would have been banned generations ago. Alcohol fuels violence, road death, and disease. Tobacco is a leading cause of preventable death on the planet. We do not prohibit them.

We regulate them, tax them, label them, restrict them by age, and educate against their misuse. That is precisely how a mature society handles a risky-but-legal product, and it is exactly the toolkit a regulated cannabis market would hand us. Indeed, regulation manages these risks better than prohibition: a legal product is dosed, labelled, and quality-controlled, while the underground gramme is none of those things.

So the health argument, honestly examined, is not an argument for prohibition at all. It is an argument for the very regulation prohibition prevents.

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐛𝐨𝐭𝐭𝐨𝐦 𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞

Put it together and the conservative position dissolves. Our law does not stop use since access is effortless. It does not prevent harm; it forfeits the tools that would manage harm. It does not protect society from ruin, because the ruin it warns of has failed to materialise wherever legalisation has been tried. What our law does, with remarkable efficiency, is guarantee that a large and busy economy operates in the shadows, enriching every participant except the public purse, while a community whose faith is bound up in this plant continues to carry the stain of criminality for who they are and what they believe.

CARICOM is right to sit down and confront the wrongs done to the Rastafarian community. But recognition without reform is a half-measure. You cannot apologize for marginalizing a people while keeping on the books the very law that made them criminals.

Decriminalisation, and beyond it, sensible, taxed, business-building legalisation, is almost always painted as the reckless option, the door we dare not open. I have looked at the money we are leaving on the table, the harm we are failing to manage, the citizens we are needlessly marking, and the catastrophe that never comes.

On the claim that caution here is wisdom, that keeping this trade in the dark keeps us safe, I can only say what I came to say.

𝐈 𝐛𝐞𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐝𝐢𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐫.

Yours truly,

Randolph J. Critchlow