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Making Children Visible: Global Commission’s Youth Drug Policy Call and What It Means for South Africa’s Cannabis Debate
Original source:
Daily Maverick – “Global commission urges youth-focused drug policy reform” (11 September 2026) by Tamsin Metelerkamp
Shared by: The Dagga Couple (@DaggaCouple)
Key images from coverage (retain/link):
• Global Commission launch / policy context imagery
• Juan Manuel Santos (commissioner, former Colombian president)
• Charity Monareng (Students for Sensible Drug Policy International)
• Related South African enforcement / school search imagery referenced in the original reporting
On 9 September 2026 the Global Commission on Drug Policy released a new policy brief with a deliberately provocative title: Making Children and Young People Visible in Drug Policy: A Child Rights-based Agenda for Reform. The document, developed through consultations with roughly 150 people across 47 countries (including South Africa), argues that children and young people have for too long been used as a rhetorical justification for punitive drug policies while remaining almost invisible in the actual design, evaluation and accountability of those policies.
The Commission’s central claim is stark. Harsh enforcement has been defended for decades on the grounds that it protects the young. The evidence, the brief contends, shows a more complicated and often damaging picture. Children and young people are profoundly affected by drug laws whether or not they themselves use drugs. They experience arrest and detention, loss of educational opportunity, family separation, barriers to essential medicines, and recruitment into illicit economies. Yet their rights, experiences and voices are rarely centred in policy conversations.
This article examines the Commission’s four priority areas for reform, the South African voices that appear in the Daily Maverick coverage, and the direct relevance of the brief to the ongoing cannabis formalisation debate in South Africa.
The Four Urgent Priorities
The policy brief identifies four areas where change is described as urgent:
1. End the arrest, detention and prosecution of children and young people for drug-related offences rooted in punitive frameworks. Governments should invest instead in diversion, restorative justice and community-based responses.
2. Guarantee equitable access to essential controlled medicines for children and young people who need them for palliative care, pain relief and other medical conditions. Scarcity and regulatory barriers continue to cause unnecessary suffering.
3. Provide evidence-based, child- and youth-friendly health services that prevent and reduce drug-related harms. Age restrictions, stigma, lack of confidentiality and the criminalisation of use itself currently keep many young people away from timely, accurate support.
4. Recognise children and young people recruited or exploited within illicit drug economies primarily as victims, not as offenders to be processed through the criminal justice system.
These recommendations are grounded in a child-rights framework rather than a narrow drug-control logic. They insist that policies be judged by their actual effects on the young rather than by the protective language used to sell them.
South African Voices in the Conversation
The Daily Maverick reporting gives particular space to South African perspectives. Charity Monareng, executive director of Students for Sensible Drug Policy International, notes that South Africa already has very limited rehabilitative and health support services for adults who use drugs. Services that are genuinely youth-friendly or youth-specific are “virtually non-existent.”
She points to a telling legal contrast. The Children’s Act allows children over 12 to access condoms and other contraceptives without parental consent — a recognition that young people can and should be empowered in matters of sexual health. No equivalent empowering, health-oriented approach exists for substance use. Instead, substance use continues to be framed primarily as a criminal issue. The result is fear of arrest, fear of stigma, and avoidance of the very services that could reduce harm.
Monareng is especially critical of the way schools have become sites of first contact with the police. Under the Basic Education Laws Amendment Act, a learner accused of certain drug-related offences on school premises can face immediate suspension and formal charging by the South African Police Service. Schools, which should be protective environments, risk becoming the entry point into the criminal justice system for children. A social and community response, she argues, would be more consistent with the duty to protect.
Kamogelo Moleane, a representative of the Youth Rise International Working Group and a person with lived experience, describes starting drug use at 13 and eventually finding a turning point through an opioid substitution therapy programme. He now works as a peer educator. His testimony underscores two recurring themes: the near-total absence of clinics and services designed for adolescents who use drugs, and the chilling effect of criminalisation on help-seeking. Young people fear both the legal consequences and the pressure to inform on others. Moleane also calls for more recreational and developmental spaces that offer genuine alternatives to gang involvement and substance use, and for the meaningful inclusion of people with lived experience in the design of programmes.
Why This Matters for the Cannabis Movement
South Africa’s cannabis conversation has been dominated in recent years by the 2018 Constitutional Court judgment, the slow implementation of the Cannabis for Private Purposes Act, draft possession and cultivation limits, the growth of a medical export sector, the proliferation of delivery services and private clubs, and the steady drumbeat of enforcement actions against unlicensed activity. Children and young people appear in this conversation mainly as a reason for caution — the group that must be protected from the plant — rather than as rights-holders whose current treatment under drug laws requires scrutiny.
The Global Commission’s brief challenges that asymmetry. If the protection of children is the stated goal, then the actual effects of policy on children must be measured. Arresting and charging learners, creating criminal records that close future opportunities, denying age-appropriate health information and services, and failing to address the social conditions that make drug economies attractive to marginalised youth are all outcomes that require justification. Rhetoric about protection is not enough.
The brief also speaks indirectly to the formalisation debate. A regulated adult market with clear rules, quality controls and social-equity provisions is one way of shrinking the illicit economy that currently recruits and endangers young people. Criminalisation of personal use and small-scale activity, by contrast, tends to expand the clandestine market and the harms that accompany it. The Commission’s emphasis on treating exploited children as victims rather than offenders aligns with long-standing arguments made by South African reform organisations: the proper response to young people caught in supply chains is protection and exit pathways, not simply prosecution.
From Global Principle to Local Practice
Translating the Commission’s recommendations into South African reality would require coordinated movement across several departments — Basic Education, Social Development, Health, Justice and Police. It would mean revisiting school search-and-seizure practices, expanding youth-specific harm-reduction and treatment capacity, ensuring that diversion options exist in law and in practice, and creating genuine channels for young people (including those with lived experience) to shape the policies that affect them.
It would also require honesty about resource allocation. Punitive approaches are not cost-free. Police time, court time, detention and the long-term consequences of criminal records all carry public and private costs. Redirecting a portion of that effort toward health, education and social support is not softness; it is a different calculation of how best to protect the young.
A Rights-Based Standard
The deeper contribution of the Global Commission’s brief is the standard it sets. Policies that claim to protect children must be able to demonstrate that they actually do so. When evidence shows that arrest, stigma, service exclusion and the expansion of illicit markets are harming the very group invoked as justification, the policies themselves must change.
For South Africa’s cannabis movement, the brief supplies both a challenge and a resource. The challenge is to keep children and young people visible — not only as a reason for careful regulation, but as a constituency whose current treatment under the law demands reform. The resource is an internationally credible, rights-based framework that can be cited in advocacy, in submissions, and in public argument.
The girl offered yellow flowers on Enkutatash; the young person seeking help without fear of a criminal record; the learner who encounters support rather than handcuffs at school — these are measures of whether renewal is real. The Global Commission has placed children and young people at the centre of the frame. The task now is to keep them there.
Primary source: Daily Maverick, 11 September 2026.
Policy brief: Global Commission on Drug Policy – Making Children and Young People Visible in Drug Policy (September 2026).
