WHEN 'WEED' BECOMES THE LAW, WHO NEEDS LAW ENFORCERS?

A group of idlers were smoking their marijuana in a Kampala slum
market the other day.

The use of narcotic drugs is a serious offence though the penalties
prescribed in the penal code are outdated and no longer deterrent
enough. So the police organised to go and arrest them so they would
at least spend a few weeks in the cooler.

You would have expected this to be a fairly simple operation. The
police shows up in uniform, grab some three chaps while two manage to
escape and life continues.

It does not happen like that anymore. The police showed up, heavily
armed with automatic assault weapons and the marijuana smokers were
not amused at the rude interruption. They started beating the
policemen, throwing stones and anything they could lay their hands on.

The police decided to use their guns, and in the process shot one
fellow policeman and a 12-year old boy bystander. None of the
marijuana smokers was harmed - only the policeman and the innocent bystander.

The local people got so incensed by the police's carelessness that
they joined the drug abusers in fighting the law keepers.

Soon as the police realised the public was getting the better of
them, they radioed for reinforcement and more troops arrived, turning
the slum market into a real battleground.

The national police spokeswoman, one pretty Judith who graces our
living rooms every evening as she explains matters of law and order
on TV, spent most of the episode lying in the dust under a patrol pickup.

The drug abusers "confiscated" all her equipment from her camera crew
whom they also beat up badly. Incidentally they did not touch any of
the media cameras, indicating that they were not averse to the publicity.

The rest was as usually happens these days. The government fumbled
with explaining the incident while opposition politicians went into a
chorus of condemning the police.

How and when did we become a city that feeds on narcotics to the
extent that the public will join criminals to stop the police from
dealing with the scourge?

Some people attribute the growth of the problem to the traditional
loopholes of marijuana having medicinal attributes that justifies
livestock keepers maintaining a few plants for the wellbeing of their animals.

Authorities will therefore not destroy all the marijuana plants they
find on a farm, as that would be cruel condemnation of someone's
herds. The dealers end up encouraging the farmers to grow much more
than their animals need.

Worse still, people without any livestock now grow the stuff purely
for criminal consumption and profit.

That takes care of the supply side. But how did demand for marijuana
get stimulated? Talking to some people who participated in the bush
wars of the 1980s (without naming which guerrilla group), you learn
that fighters learnt to control hunger by taking limited amounts of marijuana.

It was a tightly controlled process, with the commander determining
how many puffs a man or kadogo (boy soldier) could take. That was
over two decades ago, but the guys returned to civilian life with the
knowledge that a few puffs of the grass can postpone hunger.

So if you cannot afford food in the city, a pull at a joint can sort
you out, or so many people have come to believe. And before you know
it, you are addicted.

Besides food, marijuana has also become a substitute for shelter and
clothing. In other words, it partially takes care of all man's basic
needs - plus the kick which comes as a bonus.

You are broke in a slum without a house? Get a puff and you won't
care anymore, just crouch in some corner and snore away. Similarly,
your clothing does not need to be that warm once you have dragged at
a joint. It is that bad, and simple.

Ironically, the judicial process has also discovered great value in
the illegal drug.

With many commercial rental disputes raging, court brokers have found
that enforcement is best implemented by muscle men locally called
kanyama(s), when they are high on grass.

So an essential step in getting a defaulter legally evicted is buying
joints of grass for the team that raids the disputed premises before
daylight and they start breaking the doors and throwing property outside.

In the deep slum of Kisenyi, we are told that the phone number of the
supplier of "grass" to make eviction implementers high is readily
available. With the illegal grass being used for enforcing the law,
is it likely it will be eradicated anytime soon?