MOSSEL BAY NEWS & VIDEO - Sharon Price, a registered herbalist from the Brandwag area near Mossel Bay, is to appear in the High Court in Cape Town today on a charge of cultivating dagga.
Price is well known for healing patients using cannabis oil. She has a number of patients who have shared their testimonies. Besides cancer sufferers, among her healed patients are a former diabetic and a former Alzheimer's disease sufferer.
Price's farm was raided in March last year. Great Brak police officers confiscated nine dagga plants and one of the officers shot dead her 11-year-old dog, a female pitbull. Price's son was arrested. "Because the police had threatened to arrest my whole family which includes my mother in her 70s and my ex-husband who is on an oxygen machine 24/7, I decided to hand myself in."
Price refused to plead in a conventional court, saying: "I am not a criminal." She was successful in applying for the case to be moved to the High Court. Associates of Price and believers in cannabis oil treatment reacted with outrage on social media after the raid at Price's farm last year.
Also today, Judge Dennis Davis will be handing down judgment in the Cape Town High Court on whether some sections of the Criminal Prohibition of Dagga Act are unconstitutional.
Rastafarian Garreth Prince and the leader of the Dagga Party, Jeremy Acton, are challenging parts of the Medicines and Related Substances Act. Prince and Acton believe it should be all South Africans' legal right to use dagga as they wish - whether it be for recreational, medicinal, spiritual or commercial use.
The SAPS and the ministries of Health, Trade and Industry, and Justice and Constitutional development, as well as the Director of Public Prosecutions, are opposing the application.
Co-incidentally, today is the deadline day for members of the public to comment on the Medicines Control Council's (MCC) draft guidelines for the cultivation and processing of dagga for medicinal purposes.
Price says she and other believers in cannabis oil are not happy with the MCC draft.
She said that what was the most bitter pill to swallow for her and her associates was that: "This is a bill for big pharmaceuticals.
"If the guidelines become regulations, thousands wouldn't be able to use cannabis oil. Very few doctors will have the right to prescribe it. Our largest concern is that the MCC didn't do its homework. The guidelines are merely a 'cut and paste' from the 14-year-old Dutch guidelines. They have also copied the Australian medical guideline.
"We need proper regulations, not sections copied from another country's guideline. We are a unique country."
She refers to a website, where criticism of the MCC draft guidelines is posted. At the deadline time of the Mossel Bay Advertiser on Wednesday this week, there were more than 1 000 signatures on the website, criticising the MCC draft guidelines.
Price said the aim was to ramp up the number of signatures by today.
- Excessively unattainable application restrictions
- Illogical Security, Personnel, Equipment and Cultivation requirements
- No Home Cultivation, Co-op or Social-club models considered
- No Primary Care Giving or Compassionate Care model
- No clarity on different forms of cannabis administration
- Lack appropriate cannabis dispensing models
- Unsubstantiated INCB restrictions and quotas
- No affordable patient access to medical cannabis discussed
Price noted that there were already three cannabis medicines on the market – made by synthesis or extracted. "Don't ask me how they got it right," she adds. She pointed out that when the medicine was made in a laboratory it was no longer natural and side effects could be expected.
"You must use the full plant – there are more than 500 medicinal components in it. Man can't make it in a lab.
"Many doctors have had training regarding treatment with cannabis oil already. We are now finding incredible interest among oncologists.
"Our concern if for patients and their healing."
Price said the MCC was working with nuclear scientists, who were used to synthetic medicine and who had no idea of the bio-molecular make-up of cannabis or of organic medicines in general.
"It is not that we are against regulations. We want regulations. People are taking in 'dirty' medicine. The problem with the prohibition right now is that it makes it a gangster world out there; it is making the black market worse."
Price said a group called poison.org was doing a positive documentary on cannabis oil, in which she features. The documentary is due out in the middle of the year.
Watch the trailer of the documentary, below:
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