Episode 124: Karma Koala Podcast 331: Same Francis, the Caribbean - new report, "From the Code Noir to GACP/GMP: Cannabis and the New Colonial Economy"

I spoke to Same last year about the policy work he is doing with multiple jurisdictions in the Caribbean.He has now published the report"From the Code Noir to GACP/GMP: Cannabis and the New Colonial Economy"The Caribbean is dismantling prohibition. The harder task is ensuring that legal cannabis does not reproduce an older economic order in which the South grows the commodity while standards, capital, certification and value are controlled elsewhere.In May 2026, France's National Assembly adopted at first reading a bill providing for the repeal of the Code Noir, the 1685 edict that helped organise slavery in France's American colonies. The measure is not yet final and remains in the parliamentary process. One detail of the debate, however, is revealing. The text uses the language of abrogation. An amendment proposed replacing that word with annulment. The distinction is not merely semantic. Abrogation removes a rule from the legal order. Nullity goes further by challenging its legal validity at the root. France used that stronger logic after the fall of the Vichy regime, including for measures that established or applied discrimination based on Jewish status. The amendment on the Code Noir was withdrawn, and the text retained the language of abrogation. [1][2][3]There is no moral or legal equivalence between the Code Noir and modern cannabis standards such as Good Agricultural and Collection Practice or Good Manufacturing Practice. GACP and GMP are quality systems. The Code Noir belonged to a legal order of slavery. Nor is there a direct legal genealogy connecting them. The comparison is narrower and more useful. A society can remove a rule without necessarily dismantling the economic structures and relationships of power that developed around it.That question matters for cannabis reform. Caribbean governments are gradually removing prohibition, creating regulators and writing the rules of legal markets. But ending criminalisation does not decide who will own the industry that replaces it, who will define quality, who will finance compliance or where the highest-value parts of the value chain will sit. The plant can become legal while its value chain remains externally controlled. That is the new colonial question. We speak about the work he is doing with regulators throughout the region as well as the report and his websites including the International Society of CannabisSame is a prominent commentator and strategist who tracks the development of legal cannabis frameworks, market infrastructure, and regulatory rollouts across the regionhttps://cannabislaw.report/karma-koala-podcast-331-same-francis-the-caribbean-new-report-from-the-code-noir-to-gacp-gmp-cannabis-and-the-new-colonial-economy/