South Africa’s Private Cannabis Act Has No Start Date

President Cyril Ramaphosa signed the private-use cannabis Act into law on 28 May 2024. The statute has not commenced.

Gazette 50744 published the Cannabis for Private Purposes Act 7 of 2024 on 3 June 2024. The official text lists commencement as to be proclaimed, and that notice has not appeared. Until it does, the Constitutional Court’s 2018 order in Minister of Justice v Prince is the rule that actually governs private dagga.

A Signed Act Waiting on a Gazette Notice

The Presidency said the Act would regulate cultivation, possession and use by adults in a private setting, strip cannabis out of the Drugs and Drug Trafficking Act, and open later changes to medicines and plant laws. It also said dealing would stay prohibited. None of those schedule changes start until the President names a date in the Gazette, and different sections may start on different days.

Quantity limits were left to the Minister of Justice. On 3 February 2026 the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development said draft regulations opened for public comment, with a 5 March 2026 deadline. Attorneys reading Government Notice R.7067 say the draft would let an adult hold up to 750 grams in a private or public place during a single day, grow up to five plants in a private place, and move up to 750 grams if the load is kept out of public view. Those figures are proposals. The department said the limits must go to Parliament before they take effect.

No later gazette has published final numbers. Shops, delivery pages and club doors have not waited. They sell in the open while the written law still treats a sale as dealing.

THE ROAD FROM PRINCE TO A PAPER ACT

1. 18 September 2018: The Constitutional Court holds that criminalising private adult use, possession and home growing breaches the right to privacy, and gives Parliament time to rewrite the Drugs Act.
2. 1 September 2020: The Cannabis for Private Purposes Bill is introduced in the National Assembly.
3. 27 February 2024: The National Council of Provinces passes the Bill and sends it to the President.
4. 28 May 2024: Ramaphosa assents. The Act is published on 3 June 2024 with commencement to be proclaimed.
5. 2 February 2026: Draft possession, plant, transport and expungement rules are published. Comment closes on 5 March 2026. Parliament must still approve the limits.
6. 18 September 2026: The Prince order turns eight years old. The Act has not started.

Expungement of old possession and use records is written into the Act as an application, not an automatic wipe, and that process also waits on commencement and on the forms the draft regulations describe.

Prince Still Governs Daily Cannabis Life

After Parliament missed the court’s original rewrite window, the reading-in from Prince became the working law. An adult may use, possess and grow cannabis for personal consumption in a private place. Public smoking is not covered. Buying and selling were never part of the order. The Justice Department repeated that limit when it published the draft rules: the court did not extend the right to the buying and selling of cannabis.

The uncommenced Act would add detail around that core. An adult is 18 or older. A private place is anywhere the public has no right of access, including a house, room, shed, tent, boat or a portion of communal land that a community sets aside for private growing. Private purpose means exclusive use, possession and cultivation, kept out of public view. An adult may possess cannabis in public if it is not used there. Section 2(1)(b) would let adults give or receive cannabis in private without consideration, a gift rule that stops the moment money, a favour or a membership fee is attached.

Justice officials said during the Bill process that defence-force members keep the same off-duty rights as other adults. The Act as printed does not carve them out. Use on duty is a separate employment and command question, which is where most of the live litigation now sits.

Police practice is a patchwork. A 2023 High Court matter involving residents of Industry House backed the need for a prosecutor’s warrant before officers seize cannabis from a private home, and a 2023 national police directive told members to pause ordinary possession arrests. Rastafari groups later told the South African Human Rights Commission that searches and arrests continued anyway, often in front of children. Gareth Prince’s order stopped the crime of a quiet joint at home. It did not stop a raid dressed up as a dealing case.

The Club Case That Ended in a Sealed File

Grow clubs tried to sit in the gap Prince left. Members would pay a fee, claim a plant, and hire horticulturists to tend it on a sub-leased plot, arguing they were growing for themselves rather than buying a bag. The Haze Club in Ottery, Cape Town, became the test. On 13 October 2020 police raided the site as a suspected hydroponic dagga laboratory they valued at R250 000. Director Neil Liddell and a staff member were arrested.

On 29 August 2022 Judge Slingers in the Western Cape High Court dismissed the club’s bid for a declaration that the model was lawful (case 2101/2021). The court held that handing cultivation to the club was not personal growing in a private place, and that legalising a supply model was work for Parliament. Leave to appeal followed in November 2022. Fields of Green for ALL was admitted as a friend of the court at the Supreme Court of Appeal in November 2023. Then the file went dark.

Fields of Green for ALL says The Haze Club settled the appeal in November 2024 with government departments and the National Director of Public Prosecutions. The terms are confidential. The NGO has not seen them and says it never will. The High Court refusal stands as the last public judgment. Cape Town attorneys later put the practical result in plain terms: the refusal does not make every club a crime scene on its own, but operators and banks now treat the model as a seizure risk.

WHAT THE CLUB FILE LEFT UNSETTLED

• The High Court: A grow-it-for-you club is not personal cultivation in a private place under Prince, and a declaratory order was refused.
• The appeal: The Supreme Court of Appeal never delivered a ruling because the parties settled and the appeal was withdrawn.
• The fee problem: The Act’s definition of “deal in” includes providing cannabis for consideration, and a membership fee can be read as exactly that.
• The eviction track: In August 2024 the Western Cape High Court ordered Infusion Social Club out of Camps Bay premises after the landlord showed the tenant had not disclosed cannabis sales.
• The department line: On 6 March 2026, Makubela Mokulubete of the Justice Department told Parliament private clubs had no place in the coming rules.

Clubs did not vanish. They just lost the judgment that would have told a prosecutor, a landlord or a bank what they are.

Barloworld Owes Two Years’ Pay After a Home Joint

The same week the private-use Bill was waiting on the President’s desk, the Labour Appeal Court did more to define daily cannabis life than Parliament had managed in six years. Bernadette Enever, an office-based category analyst at Barloworld Equipment, was dismissed after urine tests came back positive for cannabis she used recreationally at home. She did not work on heavy plant. There was no proof she was impaired on site.

On 23 April 2024 the Labour Appeal Court declared the dismissal automatically unfair. Judge Mlambo, with Judges Waglay and Davis, held that a blanket zero-tolerance rule, applied to an office worker with no showing of intoxication, violated dignity and privacy and amounted to unfair discrimination. The court awarded 24 months’ compensation, the maximum for an automatically unfair dismissal, and said a safety policy cannot ignore the actual job.

That is not a free pass for every workplace. In National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa obo Nyawuza v PFG Building Glass, a bargaining-council arbitrator set aside a glass-plant dismissal where the worker had been left on the line for six days after a positive test, which undercut the claim of an urgent safety risk. Hazardous sites have gone the other way when the rule was clear and the work involved furnaces, vehicles or firearms. In June 2026 the Cape Town Labour Court heard the City of Cape Town’s bid for leave to appeal a ruling involving a metro employee, with the city arguing that Enever is not a blanket licence for law-enforcement staff.

Employers who have not separated desk work from machine work are the ones walking into the next Enever. Firms that rewrote workplace policies after the Act was signed still have to prove impairment, or an inherent safety requirement, rather than a stale urine result from a Saturday night.

What Happens When a Child Is Caught With Dagga?

A child found with cannabis is steered into care law, not a criminal court. The Constitutional Court said so in Centre for Child Law v Director of Public Prosecutions in 2022, building on S v LM in 2020, and the uncommenced Act copies that split: use or possession by a child is handled under the Children’s Act and substance-abuse law; dealing by a child can also go through the Child Justice Act.

Adults carry the hard end. No adult may knowingly let a child use or possess cannabis, or supply it, unless a doctor has prescribed it and a responsible adult administers it. Cannabis in the house must be stored where a child cannot reach it. Engaging a child to deal is its own offence. Use in the immediate presence of a child would be a fine once the Act starts. The Justice Department said the child rules rest on medical concern about the developing brain, and that the court never legalised use by anyone under 18.

Those duties only become the Act’s offences when the statute commences. Until then, Prince plus the child-law judgments are what a prosecutor has. The penalty schedule below is the one Parliament has already written for the day the Gazette notice arrives.

PENALTIES WRITTEN INTO ACT 7 OF 2024

The 10-year dealing ceiling is the number the 2024 Bill debates kept circling. It is also the number that still hangs over anyone whose harvest looks, to a prosecutor, like stock rather than a private stash.

Commercial Flower Sales Remain a Criminal Offence

The Justice Department drew a hard line around its own statute when it published the draft rules.

Matters relating to the commercial cultivation, buying or selling of cannabis or cannabis products, as well as the recognition of traditional growers, fall outside the scope of the Act and are being addressed by other government departments, including those responsible for Trade, Industry and Competition, Agriculture, and Health.

Department of Justice and Constitutional Development, 3 February 2026 statement

Three lawful doors are open. Private adult use and home growing rest on Prince. Medical cannabis moves through a South African Health Products Regulatory Authority licence. Industrial hemp, under a higher THC threshold than the old crop rules, can be grown, imported and exported under permit after plant-improvement legislation took effect on 1 December 2025. A retail flower shop for adult use is not on that list.

THREE DOORS THAT OPEN, AND ONE THAT DOES NOT

• Private use: Adults may grow and consume in private under Prince; the 2024 Act would add caps, transport rules and expungement once it starts.
• Medical: Licensed cultivation and manufacture under health-products law, with THC still tightly scheduled.
• Hemp: Permit-based commercial growing and trade after the December 2025 plant-improvement commencement.
• Adult-use retail: Still a dealing offence. No shop licence exists for selling flowering cannabis to the public.

In the 2025 State of the Nation Address, Ramaphosa said South Africa should lead in the commercial production of hemp and cannabis. A Department of Trade, Industry and Competition reply to Parliament put a hemp-and-cannabis commercialisation policy and legislation at the end of the 2026/2027 financial year. Attorneys tracking the file say a unifying Bill is being aimed at a later parliamentary cycle. Hemp is the door that actually moved. Flower retail is the door everyone already walks through, without a key.

Pondoland Growers Are Still Selling Outside the Law

Traditional growers in Pondoland and other rural belts have been feeding city demand for generations. The Act they were told would recognise them does not mention them. Medical licences demand capital and clean-room standards they do not have. Hemp is a different crop and a different buyer. Clubs, the one model that looked like a bridge, came back from Bloemfontein with a sealed settlement and a High Court judgment that refused to bless them.

Trenton Birch, founder of Cheeba Africa Cannabis and Hemp Academy, put the squeeze in one line. “Without a recreational market, we have no opportunity for rural legacy farmers to participate. There’s just no opportunity because they’re never going to be able to grow medical. They don’t want to grow hemp.” In Pondoland, he said, people who have grown so their children can go to school are still criminals.

That is the design, not an accident of timing. A privacy judgment produced a privacy statute. The statute was signed, gazetted and then left without a start date, while draft gram and plant caps sat in a comment box and the commercial file was handed to other departments. Eight years after Prince, an adult can grow a plant at home and still has no legal counter at which to buy one.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting and legal analysis for general information. It is not legal advice, is not a determination of anyone’s rights or criminal exposure, and should not be used as a substitute for advice on a charge, a workplace process, a licence or a cultivation plan. Readers who need to act on South African cannabis rules should consult a qualified attorney admitted in South Africa, and employers should take advice from an employment-law practitioner before changing testing or discipline policies. Penalty figures, draft quantity limits, licence routes and the commencement status of Act 7 of 2024 are those stated in the official texts and departmental notices cited here and can change when regulations are finalised or a proclamation is gazetted.