An important report by the West Africa Commission on Drugs (WACD) in June 2014, “Not Just for Transit: Drugs, the State and Society in West Africa”, emphasized decriminalizing some degree of narcotic drug use and possession for personal use, while calling for drug traffickers and their accomplices to face the full force of the law. This sensible recommendation is particularly appropriate for marijuana or cannabis, which is widely cultivated and used in West Africa. Its users, partly because they are mostly young and poor, continue to be disproportionately penalized by the criminal justice systems in the region – a serious human rights and governance problem. This violation must be urgently stopped.

On 9 November 2013, Liberia’s Transnational Crime Unit (TCU) caused widespread sensation when it announced the apprehension of 10 bags of cannabis with a street value in Monrovia of $36,618.in the Grand Cape Mount County. The drugs, intercepted while being trafficked from Sierra Leone, was insignificant in the context of multibillion dollar global drug trade. In fact, in May 2011, police in Sierra Leone seized three tons of marijuana with an estimated street value of some $10 million. The Liberian seizure, however, apparently occurred while the drugs were being trafficked in a vehicle bearing the official insignia of one of the Liberian National Police’s Presidential Escort; and one of those arrested in it was Superintendent Perry Dolo, the police chief of presidential escort. Also arrested was a Sierra Leonean army personnel, Sheku Rogers. According to the TCU’s breathless report on the incident, that particular vehicle “has been in the constant habit of using siren to cross the border into Liberia without security check at the Bo-waterside and being suspected of trafficking illicit drugs through the Sierra Leone-Liberia border for some period of time.”

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The American social psychologist Robert MacCoun and criminologist Peter Reuter argued in a paper published by the British Journal of Psychiatry in February 2001 that the physiological or behavioral harms related to the use of marijuana are mild. Certainly the costs related to the medical harm that it could cause are negligible when compared to the enforcement costs relating to its penalization. UNODC’s World Drug Report of 2015, however, observed that the current global cannabis market has varieties and genetically modified strains which “appear to be more harmful than their predecessors.” This issue is doubtless worthy of close monitoring, as the UNODC report recommends, placing the problem in the domain of public health, not criminal justice.