I’ve come up with a strategy for how the police should handle hemp and pakalolo cultivation here in the Cook Islands.

In 2021, the Cook Islands Government legalised the importation of hemp products without testing them for their THC content, therefore any business and consumer who is engaged in any hemp product activity is acting within the law that before 2021 was deemed illicit drug activity because the Narcotics and Misuse of Drugs Act 2004 explicitly stated that any cannabis sativa product such as hemp or pakalolo that contained “any” THC was a criminal offence.

When a cultivator puts a seed in a small plant container to produce a seedling, they cannot be sure if that seed is a hemp seed which has become indigenous to the Cook Islands after decades of wild growth and was legalised by the Government in 2021 or if it is an illicit pakalolo seed – it’s veritably impossible to know the difference at this stage.

After the seedling becomes too big to hold in the plant container it is either transferred to a bigger pot or is planted in the ground

From the time a cultivator produces a seedling to the time it takes to produce flowers or buds it is a three-month period. Only after this three-month period when the buds are produced can a cultivator look at the pistil – the producing part of the bud and determine if it is a male hemp plant, which I have explained has been legalised by the Government or if it is an illicit bud producing pakalolo plant.

Up to a three-month period before cannabis produces buds it is still legally a hemp plant.

Now let me digress.

The police no longer have radar guns to check the speed of a moving vehicle while conducting traffic enforcement. No one has been issued a speeding ticket in the Cook Islands for quite a few years now because the police cannot determine what speed you are at unless it has been calibrated by a radar gun.

The same logic holds true for a cannabis plant. When a busybody wannabe narc calls up the police to file a complaint about cannabis cultivation or even when the cops for some reason spot the plants themselves, they cannot determine if the cannabis plants are legal hemp or illicit pakalolo that has been tested by a lab.

The strategy the police need to employ with any complaint of cultivation is to simply say we cannot legally determine if it is hemp or pakalolo unless we have it tested exactly in a lab and we do not have the resources and time to make that determination just as we do not have the resources to issue an individual with a speeding ticket to determine the exact speed they are travelling over the speed limit.

Now that we all know the law, let’s get on with our lives and let the police go after people using the white stuff and not the green stuff.

Steve Boggs