AN international drug policy reform advocate is urging Jamaica to be fearless despite talk of a diplomatic backlash by the United States if the island decriminalises ganja.

Kasia Malinowska-Sempruch did not mince words as she spoke to reporters and editors at the Jamaica Observer’s weekly Monday Exchange about the dangers and backwardness of prohibition.

“The sovereignty of your State is what you should have on your mind. I understand the concerns about the US. I get it. I think the prohibitionist flag that the US is carrying, and this big stick that it’s carrying has been dis-empowered,” she said.

Malinowska-Sempruch is director of the Global Drug Policy Programme at the Open Society Foundations which advocates the implementation of drug policies that are based on human rights and which promote public health.

The group’s promotional literature says it works in more than 70 countries to “advance health, rights and equality, education and youth, governance and accountability, and media and arts”.

Yesterday, Malinowska-Sempruch pointed to the fact that some 20 American states legalised marijuana last year. “They have it in their own borders,” she said, and argued that drug prohibition-based policies cause a rise in drug-related violence, prison overcrowding, and an increase in the HIV epidemic.

The violence in Mexico, which has led to thousands of deaths, including multiple cases of mass murder, is a result of a failed war on drugs, she said, adding that her organisation would be attending the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Drugs in 2016 to argue the point that prohibition has not been effective and should be disbanded.

She said Portugal had decriminalised all drugs for personal use without any dire effects on its society. Holland and the Czech Republic, she added, had long approved head shops, where people are allowed to purchase and smoke marijuana without being hassled by police, while Uruguay had snubbed its nose at the UN and legalised ganja.

Her position was supported by Josh Stanley of Strains of Hope, who argued that prohibition of ganja was a retrograde step.

He said the evidence was clear in his native state of Colorado where small ganja farmers, who were once hunted and locked up by agents of the State, are now contributing to a booming economy which has earned US$20 million since the plant was decriminalised last year.

“We have replaced the crimes and fines with jobs and revenue. We put a regulatory framework around it,” he said. “Prohibition never works. With prohibition we create a mystique around it and create problems for ourselves.”

Marijuana was once an important part of the American economy for more than a century and fines were even levied at persons who did not grow the plant on their land.

One acre of the plant can produce the same amount of paper produced from 10 acres of trees and its by-products include rope, clothes, cosmetics, environmentally-friendly fuel, and a host of medicinal substances.

The plant contains omega six oils which are very good for the hair and are more potent than fish oils which contain omega 3.

However, despite the plant being smoked only by Mexican-Americans and African-Americans from the southern United States, it was banned after an effort by the lumber lobby which felt threatened that its profits would dwindle significantly.

In 1937, the US Government imposed taxes of US$1 per ounce, much more than the actual price of the plant at that time. The Government also imposed a US$100 per ounce tax on persons wishing to use the plant for undefined purposes, such as smoking.

Ganja has long been criminalised in Jamaica and is seen in some quarters as being responsible for abnormal psychotic behaviour in some persons who smoke it.

While no survey has been conducted, it is widely felt that a great majority of Jamaicans smoke ganja without any adverse psychiatric effects.