The Chevannes Commission Recommends Ganja as a Rastafari Sacrament

In 2001, twenty years after Bob Marley received a Jamaican state funeral in 1981, already recorded here, and fourteen years before Jamaica legalized Rastafari sacramental ganja use in 2015, also recorded here, Jamaica's National Commission on Ganja, chaired by the anthropologist Barry Chevannes, submitted its report to Prime Minister P.J. Patterson recommending that Parliament decriminalize ganja both for personal use in small quantities by adults and, separately, for use as a religious sacrament. Chevannes, whose doctoral research at Columbia University and 1994 book Rastafari: Roots and Ideology had made him the movement's leading academic authority, heard testimony from Rastafari representatives who compared sacramental ganja use to the Christian doctrine of transubstantiation, and the commission's report formally acknowledged that many Jamaicans, Rastafari and otherwise, used ganja for spiritual and meditative purposes. The government did not act on the recommendations at the time, and Parliament did not decriminalize ganja for religious sacramental use until 2015, but the Chevannes report stood as the first official government body to recognize Rastafari's ganja sacrament as a legitimate religious practice deserving legal accommodation.