The State's Defence Dismantled: Five Institutional Arguments for Cannabis Prohibition Examined and Demolished
When the Mauritian government is challenged on the failures of the Dangerous Drugs Act 2000, it does not defend the law with new scientific research. It deploys a static, rehearsed repertoire of institutional fears, repeated in the National Assembly, by police commissioners, and in public health campaigns as absolute truths. When subjected to basic epidemiological and macroeconomic scrutiny, the state's defence collapses. The Meridian Intelligence Desk places the five core arguments on the record and documents exactly what the state has to ignore to keep making them.
The defence of a failing policy rarely takes the form of new evidence. It takes the form of repeated assertion. The five arguments documented below have been made by Mauritian state officials, police commissioners, and public health communicators across the entire lifespan of the Dangerous Drugs Act 2000. They are made as if they are settled science, as if the data that contradicts them does not exist, and as if the jurisdictions that have already answered these questions through actual legislation and actual public health measurement do not exist. This article names the claim, names the evidence that contradicts it, names the data the state has chosen to ignore, and names the verdict. The state has access to all of this information. The choice not to engage with it is a decision, not an oversight.
There is a fundamental difference between being impaired and testing positive. Unlike alcohol, which clears the bloodstream within hours, THC is lipid-soluble and stores in fat cells, releasing inactive metabolites into the blood and urine for weeks after consumption. When Mauritian police conduct roadside drug tests, they frequently detect inactive metabolites from cannabis consumed three weeks prior, not active intoxication. A positive drug test for cannabis does not establish impairment at the time of driving. This distinction is critical and is routinely collapsed in the state's road safety argument.
Canada legalised adult-use cannabis in 2018. Prohibitionists predicted highway carnage. Comprehensive studies published in the Canadian Journal of Public Health and by Transport Canada showed no statistically significant increase in cannabis-related traffic fatalities post-legalisation. Meanwhile, the Mauritian state licenses, regulates, taxes, and actively profits from the sale of alcohol, the substance responsible for the overwhelming majority of fatal road collisions on the island's roads. The road safety argument is not applied to alcohol. It is applied exclusively to cannabis. That selective application is the argument's refutation.
Over the last sixty years, global cannabis consumption has expanded from a counter-cultural niche to mainstream worldwide use involving hundreds of millions of people. If the botanical plant actively caused schizophrenia as a pharmacological mechanism, global schizophrenia rates would have risen in direct proportion. The epidemiological record shows they have not. The global prevalence of schizophrenia has remained entirely flat at approximately 1% of the population for decades across both the period of restricted use and the period of massively expanded use. Heavy high-THC cannabis use in adolescence may accelerate symptom onset in individuals with a genetic predisposition to psychosis. The plant does not create that predisposition in people who do not already carry it.
The actual psychosis emergency filling the Brown Sequard Mental Health Care Centre is driven by chimique , synthetic cannabinoids including 5F-ADB, AB-FUBINACA, and AB-CHMINACA, documented by the Mauritius Forensic Science Laboratory and confirmed in the EUDA report of 21 May 2026. These lethal, unregulated chemicals exist entirely because the state drove the price of botanical cannabis to Rs 3,000 per gram through prohibition, making the Rs 100 synthetic alternative the only economically accessible option for low-income users. The state's prohibition policy created the psychosis crisis it is now citing as the reason to maintain prohibition. The argument is circular and its consequences are in the hospital wards.
Unregulated street dealers do not check national identity cards. Criminal syndicates will sell to an eleven-year-old as readily as to an adult. In a regulated market, cannabis is removed from the illegal street supply and placed inside licensed, age-gated dispensaries with identity verification, security protocols, and severe licensing penalties for selling to minors. The regulation transfers the product from the criminal economy, which has no age verification mechanism, to a licensed economy, which is legally required to implement one.
The Colorado Healthy Kids Survey, the largest public health tracking exercise in that state's history, found that following adult-use cannabis legalisation in 2014, past-month youth cannabis use did not increase significantly and in some demographics declined. The same pattern was observed in Canadian post-legalisation youth use data. The state also ignores the fact that on 27 May 2026, two Grade 6 pupils were placed under police investigation for cannabis possession under the Dangerous Drugs Act 2000. They are approximately eleven years old. Prohibition is not protecting them. The illegal market found them first. That is what prohibition produces.
This argument fundamentally misunderstands what regulation is. A legal cannabis market does not require armed police officers to manage it. It is managed by agricultural inspectors, civil servants, health regulators, and the Mauritius Revenue Authority. Legalisation removes cannabis from the jurisdiction of the criminal code and places it under the jurisdiction of the tax code and agricultural licensing law. The burden on the ADSU does not increase. It decreases. The ADSU is currently overwhelmed by cannabis precisely because the Dangerous Drugs Act 2000 makes cannabis a criminal matter. Removing it from the criminal code removes it from the ADSU's mandate.
The ADSU uproots an average of 60,000 cannabis plants per year, deploys helicopter surveillance, and conducts sustained ground operations across the Mauritian interior to manage a botanical plant that grows naturally in the island's soil. Every police hour, helicopter fuel budget, and personnel cost deployed on those operations is unavailable for the genuinely dangerous work of intercepting synthetic drug precursor shipments through Port Louis Harbour, disrupting the heroin trafficking networks documented by the JCPC in the Gurroby case, and addressing the transnational organised crime infrastructure that the synthetic drug crisis documented in Chapter Three of this edition describes. Legalisation frees the ADSU for its actual purpose.
The human body possesses an endocannabinoid system , a vast network of CB1 and CB2 receptors specifically evolved to receive cannabinoid molecular structures to maintain biological homeostasis. The endocannabinoid system is present in all vertebrates. It evolved approximately 600 million years ago. The body produces its own endocannabinoids, including anandamide and 2-AG, which are delivered in human breast milk to trigger the suckling reflex in newborns. Cannabinoid receptors do not control respiratory function, which is why a fatal cannabis overdose is biologically impossible. Zero have been recorded in all of documented medical history.
The state ignores US Patent 6,630,507, held by the United States Department of Health and Human Services, which explicitly documents cannabinoids as neuroprotectants and antioxidants effective for stroke, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and HIV dementia. It ignores the FDA approval of Epidiolex, a cannabis-derived medicine, for paediatric epilepsy. It ignores the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs' December 2020 vote to remove cannabis from Schedule IV after 59 years, formally acknowledging its medical utility. And most damningly, it ignores its own Hansard. In 2022, the Mauritian parliament passed the Dangerous Drugs (Amendment) Act to allow medical cannabis access. The act of passing that amendment constitutes a formal legislative admission by the Mauritian state itself that the plant has verified medical value. The state cannot simultaneously pass a medical cannabis amendment and claim the plant has no medical value.
The defence of the Dangerous Drugs Act 2000 requires the Mauritian government to deny pharmacology, ignore macroeconomic realities, dismiss the public health data of the G7 nations, and contradict its own parliamentary record. The state is not defending its citizens from a plant. It is defending a broken institutional status quo from the truth.
Every argument the Mauritian state makes against cannabis reform requires ignoring data that is publicly available, internationally peer-reviewed, and in several cases produced by the very institutions whose authority the state invokes when it suits it. The road safety argument requires ignoring Canadian traffic fatality data. The psychosis argument requires ignoring the chimique crisis the state's own prohibition created. The youth access argument requires ignoring the Grade 6 pupils already in police files under the current law. The enforcement argument requires ignoring the resource drain of the helicopter programme. The no medical value argument requires ignoring the state's own 2022 amendment.
This is not a state that lacks access to the evidence. This is a state that has the evidence and has chosen the institutional status quo over the evidence. That is a political choice, not a scientific position. Chapter Four of this edition has documented five myths used to sustain that choice. None of them survive scrutiny. The scrutiny is now published. The choice must now be justified on other grounds, because the scientific grounds have been removed.
This is the fifth article of Chapter Four: The Myths and the Racism. The final article of Chapter Four examines the voice of the opposition: what the Commissioner of Police and the Ministry of Health actually say on the record, and what that record reveals about the institutional position being defended. The complete edition is published at themeridian.info/june-2026.
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