It’s “high” time the government got paid

Jul 06, 2026 Letters

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Dear Editor,

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 shore to look brave, but, close enough to touch bottom if things go wrong. In Guyana, we have not even gone that far, and the conventional wisdom holds that going slow is going safe.

I beg to differ.

I was moved to write after reading that CARICOM will convene to examine the marginalisation long faced by the Rastafarian community. It is an overdue reckoning. But we should be honest about what sits at its centre: for decades the state treated a plant sacred to a people’s faith as contraband, and the people themselves as suspects. The apology CARICOM is inching toward and the drug law still on our books are two chapters of the same story.

First, let us be precise. We do not have decriminalisation; we have a softer cage. The 2021 amendment, in force since November 2022, removed custodial sentences for possession of thirty grammes or less. A humane step, but the Attorney General himself said it plainly: this is not decriminalisation. Possession of even a single gramme remains a criminal offence. We removed the jail cell and left the criminal record standing. Meanwhile Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, Antigua and St. Lucia have moved personal amounts out of criminality altogether. 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 here is being stopped. The law is not a wall. It is a sign reading keep out, posted on a road everyone already knows how to walk around. Every Guyanese who wishes to use it knows where, when, and roughly what it costs. The law does not prevent use, it prevents visibility. A government that keeps the lights off does not stop the party; it simply guarantees it cannot see who is in the room.

Third, everyone in that transaction gets paid except the state. Someone grows it, someone transports it, someone sells it. Value is created and profit changes hands, exactly as with rice, rum, or cement. It is an economy, merely an invisible one — and because it is invisible, it pays no licence fee, files no return, remits no VAT, funds no clinic, paves no road. The only party locked out is the Government of Guyana, and by extension the public whose schools and hospitals that revenue could fund.

This is not theory. Canada legalised in 2018; since then, legal cannabis has added roughly $76.5 billion (CAD) to GDP and generated some $29.6 billion in tax, while the share of Canadians buying illegally collapsed from 28 percent to 3 percent. American states have collected over $28 billion in cannabis taxes since 2014, more than $4.5 billion in 2025 alone, funding schools, healthcare and roads. Uruguay, which chose a bare-bones state model with no sales tax, earns little: proof that the fiscal reward is a design choice. Guyana would be choosing the size of its own.

Now the objection everyone raises: legalise, and addiction and ruin will follow. Let me be fair. I do not claim marijuana is harmless. I claim something narrower and sturdier; the predicted catastrophe does not arrive. In Uruguay, after a decade, problematic use held flat at 2.1 percent and the age of first use rose from 18 to 20. In Canada, teen use fell. Use may tick up; that is honest. But a modest rise is not a society in freefall.

Here is what ought to end the health objection. If risk alone justified prohibition, alcohol and tobacco, both legal, both taxed, both carrying harm that by serious measures exceeds cannabis, would have been banned generations ago. We do not prohibit them. We regulate, tax, label, and age-restrict them. That is how a mature society handles a risky-but-legal product, and it manages harm better than prohibition ever could: a legal gramme is dosed, labelled and quality-controlled; the underground one is none of these.

So, the conservative position dissolves.

Our law does not stop use, does not prevent harm, and does not protect us from a ruin that has failed to materialise wherever legalisation was tried. What it does, with remarkable efficiency, is keep a busy economy in the shadows while a community whose faith is bound up in this plant still carries the stain of criminality.

CARICOM is right to confront the wrongs done to the Rastafarian community. But you cannot apologise for marginalising a people while keeping on the books the very law that made them criminals.

Yours in national development,

Randolph J. Critchlow

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• decriminalisation, politicians, Randolph Critchlow

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