 Can you first introduce yourself and the organization you work for? My name is Myrtle Clark and I'm managing director of Fields of Green for All, Cannabis Legalization Non-Profit Company. Can you explain us what are the laws in regard to cannabis in your country and how the legislation has been changing recently? So in September 2018 one of our court cases, civil society court cases, had a victory in our constitutional court where we got the right to use, possess and cultivate cannabis within private spaces. No trade is allowed yet. And at that time the court gave the government two years to amend the offending parts of the legislation and that two years will now expire in September 2020. So we're in a bit of a rush to get the government to adopt fair regulations that are evidence-based and that also pass our constitution because South Africa has one of the most advanced and human rights-based constitutions in the world. So we've only just because we've been fighting our governments in court we've only just started to engage governments so it's starting to get busier and busier. What do you think how the new law should look like? How should it regulate the market? Well that is one of our challenges as the only cannabis legalization NGO in South Africa. So what we've done is we've actually drawn up a manifesto for policy reform. We've written a whole book for the government. Our final draft is out and we're busy with the final edition which hopefully will be out in May or June this year. And what we want is a regulation system that is based on the existing cannabis market because as you know we've been using cultivating and trading in cannabis in Southern Africa for over 500 years. So to support this we are also going to conduct a large nationwide cannabis survey with a very reputable survey company and we want to take that together with our public petition and propose that we have a type of a co-operative model. We call it the hub system. That is for the commercial market. Obviously the pharmaceutical market will be controlled by our health practitioners regulatory authority but then we're also proposing what we call the Dacha Private Clubs which is the cannabis social club model. So it would have three tiers for the different uses because what we're seeing now and our president announced this two weeks ago in his State of the Nation address is the government willingness to regulate medical and industrial cannabis but they have forgotten out two very very important parts which is adult use and traditional cultural and religious use. So that is why we want the Dacha Private Clubs so that can cover what the government are not aware of at all and are leaving out in their discussions. Is there any opposition to reform in your country? Yes, yes there is. South Africa is essentially a very conservative place. It's also very religious. So the main opposition obviously comes from conservative church groups and this is mainly the Christian religion. We don't seem to get very much opposition from the other religions and then there's also from the rehab fraternity. We find that there's very well funded, often religious rehabilitation organisations that are often funded with American money and they opposed us in court back in 2017 and they're still around in the background. But this is I think can be overcome, can be overcome with sensible regulations. How do you address the concerns of people like not these religious groups but the everyday people when they are asking you like, okay, so how can you ensure that young people will be kept safe and the market will not be too much commercial, there won't be so many advertisements everywhere. We always assure them that right now in the unregulated market children are far more danger and particularly when it comes to drug education in institutions like schools and training colleges and universities the drug education is obviously a lot of misinformation and scaremongering tactics that's all fair based. So we are assuring people with those concerns that we need evidence based drug education for our younger people in our society because young people are not stupid and they're really good with the internet and information gathering and so when their elders or those people in positions of authority are giving them misinformation they're likely to know so we owe it to our young people to actually tell the truth. This is this is really important and I think also with the over commercialization we're seeing it already, you know, we have large Canadian American companies coming to South Africa, they're there already and we would that is why we are pushing the private club model so hard because that is to preserve cannabis culture first of all and our traditions and also to allow for a non-profit sector because we're very concerned about licensing and how it'll work because we have possibly one of the most corrupt countries in the whole world. You know for a whole day before we left we didn't have any electricity at home because we have rolling blackouts because the government stole all the money so it's a very very big concern this over commercialization and corruption but we're watching and I've already written very strongly worded letters to companies like particularly the big Canadian companies and I've said to them that we will fight them in court to preserve our South African right to our people's plant.