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Gareth Prince's case heads to mediation: one last chance to get government around the table
The Gareth Prince cannabis challenge has taken a turn worth understanding. After months of pushing for a full review of South Africa's cannabis laws, the applicants have stepped back from lawfare and opened settlement talks. The matter surfaced again in the Western Cape High Court on 31 July 2026, and on 4 August Prince confirmed that some of the respondents had shown a willingness to settle.
His words to Cannabiz Africa, worth reading in full: "Some of the respondents expressed a willingness to settle after I indicated that we are not interested in empty court victories. We would rather have the farmers ready for planting this season." And the fallback is clear: "If mediation fails, which is unlikely, we'll be back in court on 15 September 2026."
To understand why this matters, step back a bit. Prince is the attorney who took the government to the Constitutional Court in 2018 and won, with every justice concurring, on the right to use and cultivate cannabis in private. That court ruled narrowly on privacy and left Parliament to legislate the rest: equality, dignity, the right to earn a living, cultural freedom.
Parliament, in his view, did the least it could. The Cannabis for Private Purposes Act gives you a right to use cannabis in private, then offers no legal way to get it. Medical cannabis sits behind pharmaceutical licensing and a doctor's prescription. The hemp rules carry a THC limit that excludes South African landrace varieties by design. And the Act never defines "private place" to cover where most people actually live: communal yards, shared homes, rented back rooms, informal settlements.
The urgent application, lodged on 14 April 2026 by Prince, Rastafarian leaders and small scale farmers, rests on three arguments. The Act was tagged as a section 75 Bill when its reach across provinces needed a section 76 process, so the National Council of Provinces never properly deliberated on it. Parliament did not genuinely engage with submissions from the communities most affected. And the Act creates a right while making it impossible to exercise without a legal source of supply. Prince also asked for an immediate halt to cannabis arrests.
There is a longer history too. A June 2023 Cannabis and Hemp Phakisa resolved 19 policy principles, including removing cannabis from the Drugs and Drug Trafficking Act and setting up regulatory sandboxes for indigenous farmers. Two and a half years on, cannabis is still in that Act and the sandboxes never happened.
What the mediation means on the ground is the part that matters most. If the two sides actually reach a settlement, small scale and traditional farmers could be planting this season instead of waiting on a court judgment. That is a far more immediate outcome than a years-long appeal process. And if talks collapse, the court date is already locked for 15 September.
Where do you think this lands? Does mediation get farmers in the ground faster, or is a court ruling the only thing that actually changes the law?