LALIT’s Submission on Cannabis De-Criminalization in the Context of more Freedom - 2026
26.06.2026
Today is the UN World Drug Day, and we are publishing the LALIT submission made on Sunday to the Committee on the Legalization and De-Crininalisation of Cannabis set up by the National Agency for Drug Control.
Introduction
When LALIT presented its arguments before the 1984 Select Committee of the National Assembly on Drugs, we were, by chance, one of the last to be called in. When we had completed our deposition, Ms. Sheila Bappoo, on the Committee, said she had listened with interest to our arguments, but had one question. How was it that LALIT was the only organization to argue that drug abuse could be minimized by simple “social control” rather than by State repression? Every party or NGO or Social Workers’ group that had come before the Select Committee had argued, she said, for more repression.
Today this has changed. Almost everyone in the country is now in favour of less repression, many even in favour of no repression at all against drug users. Now, we just have to agree how to go about it. We have to permit people who find themselves in drug problems of any kind to be able to free themselves from the pyramid-shaped mini-mafias that supply them. It is these dealers, inevitably and inexorably linked by definition to the repressive apparatus of the State, that need to be deprived of their control over people. So the laws designed to protect people from drugs end up being the instruments that give more power to the drug dealers, and the police that they are intertwined with. The logical thing for society to do is to deprive the “dealers/police” nexus of its super-profits. And even this will only work when it is part of a holistic approach.
Stress
Something more fundamental also needs to shift. Capitalist society creates stress. And people, to cope, develop social traditions to soften the unpleasantness of constant anxiety of not having a secure future. The future looks bleak to young students or school-leavers. They are not mistaken. It is bleak. It is, of course, bleaker still if so many people are heavily dependent upon very dangerous, illegal substances. Others see unemployment ahead, and seek to flee the country. It’s enough to cause stress.
So, traditionally, here as elsewhere, people group together and share an alcoholic drink, smoke a gandya joint, sip some bhang, and meet a work-mate for a cigarette to get a 5-minute break from the constant pressure of studies and then work. All this is done, just to be “yourself”, to “de-compress”.
Cannabis in Mauritius
Cannabis or, colloquially “gandya”, has a long tradition, ancestral in fact, in Mauritius. It has been used in groups for relaxation and recreation from slave times, through indenture and into modern society. It has been used in popular religions of different kinds, too, and quite openly in the form of “bhang” or in the form of inhaling its smoke.
Cannabis was perfectly legal until 1923. People planted what they used. It was also sold under government license at what were called “gandya ke dukann”, corner stores, just as until today shops are licensed to sell liquor or cigarettes. The license fee that owners of gandya off-license shops had to pay was Rs 150, due every six months. Only adults over 21 years old could purchase gandya, and no more than 20 grams could be sold to any one customer in one day. Gandya was declared an illegal substance only in 1923 and only under pressure. That pressure came from the sugar estate owners at a time when they faced the total collapse in the price of sugar after the end of the 1914-18 World War. One way the colonial authorities cushioned this crisis for the bosses was by outlawing the planting, usage and sale of gandya, and thus stimulating the sale of sugar estates’ rum, a profitable by-product of sugar sold to the working class, thus allowing the bosses to “claw back” part of their fortnightly wage bill.
These are some of the historical facts that we all need to keep in mind.
Once declared illegal, thousands of people continued to use gandya. Though some young men turned to rum for recreational use, all those over 25 stuck, until they died, to their old ways, though from then on they did it behind closed doors, out of sight of the police. Criminal charges were usually the result of some other dispute between neighbours that escalated and ended up with one neighbour, opportunistically, denouncing another to the police for planting six gandya bushes. There were even nation-wide campaigns against alcohol run by populist trade unionists, who later became MPs, Hurrypersad Ramnarain and Sharma Jugdambi. This earned them the nick-names, “Rom-narain and Gajak-dambi”.
But the draconian repression against drug use – against not only gandya but also against the opium dens in Port Louis – only began in earnest much later.
Repression
This was under the impetus of the USA’s erroneous global “war on drugs”. It kicked off when in 1971 President Nixon declared drugs “public enemy number one” as the USA was losing the Vietnam War. Draconian repression then became part of USA foreign policy, directly contributing to pushing socially controlled drug-users “underground”, and into the clutches of various Mafias, not just in the USA, but gradually elsewhere. In Mauritius, that is how gandya became severely criminalized, as did the “fimri lopyom”, which had been a fairly benign institution in Port Louis. And this is how the totally illegal injected “brown sugar”, rough-and-ready only partly refined heroin, ended up being marketed to ex-users of both gandya and smoked opium. The shift is not because one drug leads to another, the so-called “gate-way” argument, but because one drug yields easier profit than the others for the dealer, once the whole process moves out of social control and into the control of the dealers.
A series of electoral campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s were run against the incumbent on the right-wing slogan of “law and order”, and taunting outgoing Governments with their inability to get the Mafia “genie” back into the bottle once it had been created as an unintended consequence of crack-downs on drugs.
Cigarettes banned
Even smoking cigarettes, which had been literally “pushed” by private companies’ advertising and by the film and fashion industries, is now repressed – for health reasons that were long kept hidden. Everywhere is “no smoking”. Taxes are high. The unintended consequence is that the banning has wiped out one other way people had of relaxing for a few minutes.
Alcohol repressed
The crackdown on gandya in Mauritius, has since then been aggravated by the crackdown on alcohol. In 2009, and only slowly enforced over the next 10 years, alcohol was banned from public spaces. This meant the old tradition of four men sitting on a comfortable rock each playing dominoes under a tree on every other street corner, with another three spectators watching over their shoulders, each with a bottle of beer from the shop, became illegal. Soon, drinking in public became a conviction that marred people’s “sertifika moralite” and they couldn’t get a job.
Then in 2018, a decade after the banning of alcohol from public spaces, driving after drinking even less than one drink became illegal. In England and the USA, the legal limit is about four times as high as in Mauritius. All this to say that in Mauritius, all social drinking has gradually become suppressed – either by being banned in public, or by not being able to drive – and social drinking has been pushed into people’s own homes, where their families are. This, in turn, has other unintended consequences like increasing both domestic violence and sexual abuse, including of children. In some cases, whole families end up drinking too much, because of this isolation causing an absence of the traditional social controls. The repression has also caused the mushrooming of illegal shebeens.
Taxes on alcohol increase with every budget. Instead of decreasing taxes on beer and cider, for example, they are as heavily taxed as wine and even spirits. The policy is totally irrational.
Synthetic Drugs
And with the repression of gandya, then cigarettes, then alcohol, it is not surprising that the various dealers have come up with synthetic drugs. This then causes all the well-meaning pundits to throw their hands into the air, and blame the youngsters that have fallen prey to synthetic drugs, called “simik” in the rural areas, and “sinte” in the towns.
These synthetic drugs are now causing massive social destruction in Mauritius. The molecules in the drugs change constantly, thus making them invisible to the laws.
These drugs have reached every little street of every little village as well as having crept into every inch of every city and town.
The effects on users’ physical and mental health is unpredictable, and is very serious. The social problems abound. Families fall apart. Though cheap, the synthetic drugs cost money. And once people use them, the users often end up not working, not getting a job, or even being in a physical and mental state where they can no longer work. But they still need the drug, just to keep the pangs of pain at bay.
So, they often need to beg their family for money just to calm the pain of being “an mank”. When the family refuses, as eventually it must, the drug user may, and often does, become violent. So we have abuse, aggression and even killings within the family. And we have an increase in thefts and burglaries all over the country.
So, a new social reality has been created, and is being perpetuated by the continued repression of the less harmful substances used for de-stressing. Both gandya and alcohol are substances that can easily be, and generally are, under social control. They should not be left under police control. Once the police control and suppress these socially-controllable ways of relaxing, then the State is effectively pushing ordinary people into the clutches of the Mafia. The Mafia, in turn, sells to whoever they want whatever they want. They judge only by the easiest to get away with at the highest profits at any one moment. At the moment, it is “simik”. Tomorrow it could be something even worse.
Job Creation and Imagining a Future for All
To come back to the beginning of our argumentation. Society, itself, is what needs changing. And the process of seeking this change, is already the change. Once we all construct a shared view of a future that ensures the good life for everyone – or at least aims to ensure that good life – then the stress immediately gets less. So, we need an economy that produces something – not just living off income as “rentier” through real estate deals, financial shady deals, making money from money. We need a society that makes things, and provides services, equal for all. Everyone must have a job that they can do, and want to do. Everyone must be assured of a roof over their head. Everyone must be able to live in peace without foreign military installations in our country, including those from countries that “militarize” policing, thus creating more powerful Mafias.
LALIT Demands
1. That the Police Commissioner immediately announce, as the London Police Chief did in 2001, that it is not his department’s priority to run after anyone who has a bit of gandya on them.
2. The Government must simultaneously legislate that it is no longer illegal for anyone to plant up to a certain number of plants of gandya for their own personal use, or to have a certain amount in their possession. These measures will cause the price to drop drastically, and will free youngsters from links with the entire Mafia. Social control can be re-established in each neighbourhood this way.
3. There must be an industry for producing Cannabis under license for medicinal purposes and for recreational purposes. Medical practitioners must be free to prescribe Cannabis-based medicines and all useful medicinal drugs, without a huge repressive bureaucracy, which has the opposite effect of that intended.
4. The distribution and sale of cannabis products must also be under license, and must include a reasonable tax.
5. Alcoholic drinks like beer, port and cider, which contain less alcohol must be de-taxed. Alcohol must once again be able to be consumed on shop verandah’s and under trees in public spaces. Remember that in Mauritius there is no public transport at night. The level of alcohol for driving could be raised to a reasonable level by international standards. This way socially controlled consumption of alcohol will gradually re-instate itself.
6. All those dependent on opiates must be able to get their Methadone or other weaning substance at local Dispensaries. The de-centralization will permit social control on those awaiting their medicine.
7. Institutions must help people who have become dependent to be able, when they feel strong enough to do so, to go through the pain of de-tox and the brave enterprise of rehabilitating themselves, while in the process of also getting a job, establishing friendships, and getting housing.
8. The State must make creation of productive industries its priority, thus creating jobs for all and ensuring housing for all.
9. People must be encouraged to join political organizations in order to struggle to create a new society where there is more freedom, more equality of possessions and of revenue, more genuine security, more justice, and generalized peace. In short, we need to create a world in which we have a shared idea of a “future” for all of us. It is this shared hope that reduces the unbearable stress of living a life without any apparent future.
10. Social control is what works, if the State just backs off from its violent threats, and its bureaucratic labyrinth of systems of repressive control.
18 June 2026
List of selected LALIT documents:
* LALIT’s Bilingual Compendium of its articles, book called “The Drug Issue - LALIT Stands: 1980-2015”.
https://www.lalitmauritius.org/modules/documents/files/LalitMauritius-621bf66ddb7c962aa0d22ac97d69b793.pdf
* LALIT article with a section on Cannabis in the context of “Truth and Falsehood on the Death of Kaya and on the Ensuing Uprising”, 2019.
https://www.lalitmauritius.org/en/newsarticle/2236/truth-and-falsehood-on-the-death-of-kaya-and-on-the-ensuing-uprising/
* “LALIT tultan finn Lavangard dan Konba pu Dekriminaliz Ladrog”, 2022.
https://www.lalitmauritius.org/en/newsarticle/3092/lalit-tultan-finn-lavangard-dan-konba-pu-dekriminaliz-ladrog/
