AG: Cannabis bill for dead senator

Attorney General Faris Al-Rawi - Ayanna Kinsale
Attorney General Faris Al-Rawi - Ayanna Kinsale

On Friday in the Senate the Attorney General dedicated a cannabis bill to a deceased former senator who he said had used the herb to ease her pain in her last days as she died of cancer.

Piloting the Dangerous Drugs (Amendment) Bill 2019 (passed already in the Lower House), Faris Al-Rawi recalled visiting former Independent Senator Corinne Baptiste-Mc Knight at Vitas House, a cancer hospice.

He related that once when he had visited her she had said, “Faris, you might want to leave the room, boy. I need to smoke a little thing.”

Al-Rawi apologised to the House several times for being emotional in giving his recollections. “Corinne, today we do this for you,” he said.

The AG said Chief Justice Ivor Archie, in his annual speeches, has often spoken in favour of decriminalisation.

He added, “I want to commend the Prime Minister, who led Cabinet. I may have been a bit of a nag.”

Al-Rawi gave a breakdown by age of people charged for cannabis in 2015-2018, as under-15 - 38; 15-19 - 902; 20-25 - 2,848; 25-29 - 2,783; 30-34 - 2,466 and 35-39 - 1,639. “It is worse when we talk about ethnicity. There is a preponderance of tripping of the law by our African population and our youth.”

In a snapshot for an unstated period, he said of people aged 18-35 charged for cannabis, 352 were of African descent, 124 East Indian and 185 mixed-race.

He said the bill was all about social justice and criminal justice and was also driven by statistics. Saying most cannabis charges were for simple possession, Al-Rawi said 4,321 cases are pending in the magistrates court. Further, he said 80 per cent of the time taken on drug analysis at Forensic Science Centre was for cannabis, with just 20 per cent for cocaine.

The AG then warned that people are not encouraged to smoke, saying, “Cannabis is not cabbage. I don’t personally recommend the smoking of cannabis. People must be careful.”

He said Tourism Minister Randall Mitchell had told him horror stories of some of their former south Trinidad schoolmates who had ended up in St Ann’s Hospital, with their lives thrown away, after smoking what he said was cannabis tainted with additives.

“It is not like alcohol. It is a psychotropic substance with different effects on different people.”

The AG said the bill also bans drugs such as ecstasy, LSD and ketamine.

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"AG: Cannabis bill for dead senator"

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