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Is it Popcru or Potcrew?
21/06/2007 22:58 - (SA)
Antoinette Pienaar, Beeld
Pretoria - Is it Popcru or Potcrew? This is what Christian doctors' organisation Doctors for Life (DFL) want to know after a proposal on Thursday by the Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union (Popcru) to legalise dagga.
Among other points was the argument that the weed had been around in Africa "since before the settlers came".
The doctors had heard about the proposal, which was made after Popcru's annual congress in Cape Town. The organisation draws its members from the police and correctional services.
One of the members felt that South Africans should be able to decide if dagga should be legalised, because the country was a democracy and, in any case, the use of dagga could not be regulated.
Another said he would never have been where he was now, but for the dagga that his family had cultivated in a rural area of KwaZulu-Natal.
A third claimed that "most of our children are educated, thanks to the money generated from dagga".
Popcru president Zizamele Cebekhulu said it (dagga) generated a percentage of the gross national product, and he suggested that there should be research on the dangers of dagga.
10 times more damaging than smoking
Doctors for Life said this argument was old as the hills.
"We are shocked and amused by this debacle. Is it Popcru or Potcrew?" they said in a statement.
The (most recent) decision not to legalise dagga was in 2002. DFL said that, according to research by the British Lung Foundation, dagga caused 10 times more damage to lungs than cigarette smoke.
"The fact that cultivating dagga is a lucrative industry is irrelevant. So is selling children or heroin."
- Beeld
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