Dear Editor, On August 1st 2022, an overwhelming 62 per cent of the voters said yes to reviewing laws to allow for the research and medical use of cannabis.

Here it is over nine months later and the people of the Cook Islands are a long way off from individually cultivating cannabis to treat their physical and emotional ailments.

The Prime Minister Mark Brown had good intentions when he formed a medicinal cannabis committee but given the history of the excessive amount of time it takes for an Act to become law in this nation, it will be years before a policy is formulated and acted on to make the legalisation of medicinal cannabis a reality.

We don’t want to wait any longer, let alone years for medicinal cannabis to be available for us locally. But fortunately there is a remedy to this indefensible situation of not allowing Cook Islanders to meet their medical necessities that medicinal cannabis provides, but I’ll get to that later in this letter.

The laws regarding cannabis in the Narcotics and Misuse of Drugs Act 2004 are not only completely out of date in today’s world but more importantly they are unconstitutional.

The Drugs Act’s description of cannabis is wrong because it only takes into account that it is only used for recreational purposes and not for its medicinal usage.

The draconian language of the Act makes it unable to adapt to the change that has taken place in our society and its heavy-handed punishment must be addressed immediately.

The Misuse of Drugs Act is now the opposite of what it was originally intended to achieve and it’s being used in a harmful way to punish medicinal cannabis patients making it in direct conflict of its original purpose.

Furthermore, it is unconstitutional because the security of the person must be extended to the right to secure medical treatment.

I urge the Prime Minister to take the appropriate action because the Constitution says the Government must prevent the doing of anything it deems contrary to the public good, and that is exactly what is taking place now.

The fact of the matter is the Ministry of Health is not able to meet the medical necessity of dispensing medicinal cannabis to patients and this can easily be rectified virtually overnight with the allowance under the Health Act to adopt the code of practice of the appropriate nation of Canada that allows for the personal cultivation of four medicinal cannabis plants per household.

This action does need to go to Parliament but simply only needs the approval of the Minister of Health in writing.

The Prime Minister has a mandate from the people of the Cook Islands to get this done.

The PM promised us he would act very quickly to get this programme up and running but it is my belief there are insubordinates on the medicinal cannabis committee who are too overly officious and are sabotaging the process.

I don’t want to see it get any uglier around here with the wasting of the taxpayer money by the police with their unnecessary surveillance of medicinal cannabis patients when their time must be spent on trying to stop the carnage on our roads being caused by drunken motorist.

With your permission Mr. Editor I’ll have a lot more to say at a later date.

Sincerely,

Steve Bogg