In September 2018, the Constitutional Court of South Africa made a landmark ruling: the prohibition on the personal, private use and cultivation of cannabis by adults was declared unconstitutional. That ruling changed everything.

For decades, cannabis users in South Africa — disproportionately from Black and Coloured communities — were criminalised, harassed, and imprisoned for something that grew naturally in their own backyards. The law didn't just prohibit a plant. It was used as a tool of control, targeting the very communities that had the deepest cultural relationship with cannabis. Communities like ours.

The 2018 ruling didn't just decriminalise a substance. It gave back something far more important — dignity. It acknowledged what many of us always knew: that what an adult chooses to do privately, in their own space, is nobody else's business. It was a constitutional recognition of personal autonomy, privacy, and freedom.

But a court ruling alone doesn't undo generations of stigma. It doesn't rebuild what was taken. It doesn't create safe spaces, fair access, or community infrastructure for the people who were most affected by prohibition. That work has to be done by us — from the ground up.