Party divide over NRP’s marijuana election plan

Holes are being punched into the Nevis Reformation Party’s election pledge to decriminalise marijuana.

NRP Deputy leader Hensley Daniel, in an interview with WINN FM last week, explained that the NRP was pushing decriminalisation as a campaign issue.

However one former NRP official, Glenville Herbert, argues that this particular strategy could backfire, if the party is hoping to attract votes through that policy.

“Look at the masses the people who go to church and the middle class and the people who vote are generally older people. Young people you literally have to pull them to the polls,” he said.

“So in terms of raw numbers, from a pragmatic standpoint, if you’re going to make that a plank in your politics so to speak, in you advocacy so to speak, it might not be the most brilliant thing because where the masses lie and where the real voters are might be turned off, the church going public and that class that who are the real voters in any society or the older people, may not be excited by that so you have to think through what you are saying.

“And another thing is if you lie to people, I’m not saying they are or that anybody is, but if you lie to a person for example what tends to happen is that they become apathetic over time.”

Different rules across federation?

Herbert and host Newrish Nital, host of the Voices show, questioned whether Nevis, which belongs to a two-island federation, can make a unilateral decision to decriminalise ganja.

“I am not an attorney but from what I gather it has to be in a federal act because how do the police police it? They police it St Kitts and not in Nevis, a little confusing message they are sending.”

Hensley Daniel argued that decriminalising marijuana and fashioning an industry around it would yield financial benefits to Nevis that would benefit education and other sectors.

“Ganja has a brighter future than sugar and bananas and we have a competitive and a comparative advantage in the production of marijuana,” he fold Freedom FM.

“And if it is that production and manufacturing and sale of marijuana is a sin and we are saying in the Nevis Reformation Party that we want to put this into a formal industry and contribute money to the development of health, education and all the critical sectors.

“But I just want to make this point, if it is a sin to sell ganga, I think it’s a greater sin to have children finishing grade six and can only read at grade three level, simply because of limited resources and limited investment in education.

“And it must be a sin for half the children in high school to finish without any subjects because of the limited resources and we haven’t pumped the kind of money that is required in education.”

Editor's note: WIC News has been informed that Glenville Herbert, described as a Nevis Reformation Party official in the source of this article, has never "ever been an official of the NRP party past or present".