When I was a child and I am now going back to the late 1940”s my favourite television programme was “Muffin the Mule”.

The presenter was Annette Mills, sister of John Mills, and Annette sat at a grand piano and various puppet characters would appear along the huge lid (that was closed) of the piano. The main character being Muffin who was a mule. There was a host of other puppets – Crumpet the Clown, Mr. Peregrine Esquire the penguin, Louise the Lamb, Willie the Worm, Peter the Pup, Poppy the Parrot, Grace the Giraffe, Wally the Gog, Hubert the Hippo, Katy the Kangaroo, Kirri the Kiwi, Monty the Monkey, Maurice and Doris the Mice, Zebbie the Zebra, Sally the Sea-lion, Prudence and Primrose Kitten, and my favourite Oswald the Ostrich.

Oswald would walk clumsily along the piano to appear in front of Annette and he would hardly say a word except open his mouth and leave it as such. Annette would then say, “Don’t gape Oswald”. And I would laugh and laugh. You see, down the road where I lived was a boy of my age called Oswald and he would be teased unmercifully every time he opened his mouth. In fact everyone called him Gape.

Oswald looked silly and whenever I see live Ostriches I think of Oswald – both of them.

When I see our Members of the Legislative Assembly gape at anyone who mentions the word ganja/marijuana, shake their heads and walk off with hardly a word I picture them as ostriches and expect to find them all lined up on our beaches with their heads buried in the sand.

Ganja and its legalization issue is not going away. It will have to be addressed. Our Courts system is loaded down with possession of/and intent to supply of GANJA.

Whilst the rest of the world is realizing the medical benefits of ganja we here in Cayman waste millions of dollars fighting, vainly and without much success, its importation.

Next door to us we have Jamaica and at the beginning of April Jamaica’s Cannabis Licensing Authority (CLA) will begin accepting applications for ganja licences.

In a release, the CLA said, “Under the regulations, 11 types of licences across five main categories will be made available to interested persons – cultivator, transportation, processing, retailing, and R&D – ensuring coverage over the entire value chain for the medicinal marijuana industry.”

So we can expect our two prisons will be filled to bursting point with ganja convicts who would be using the weed legally in many and increasing parts of the world. Even where it is not legal there are discussions to make it so and there is a high tolerance factor. Here we have a zero tolerance and whilst the police are busting the ganja smokers the real hard druggies and dealers are laughing their heads off. We don’t have the manpower, nor the court time and especially the prison space.

The pros for legalising medical ganja far outweigh the cons.

But we pretend we are ostriches.

Even if our name isn’t Oswald.