Barbados: Ras Simba Says He Has Appealed Sacramental Cannabis Ruling

As of 3 September 2026, the Rastafari challenge to Barbados’ cannabis laws has a second act. Paul “Ras Simba” Rock told Barbados Today that he has taken July’s High Court ruling to the Court of Appeal. The same day, writing as Ras Simba Akoma, he published an open letter asking the Prime Minister to change the law without waiting for the court to do it.

What he said

“I’ve appealed the case. The grounds on which I lost are very flimsy,” Rock told Barbados Today, in a report bylined Ricardo Roberts. He called the outcome “just denial of our full constitutional rights, you know, says a lot.”

What the report establishes is worth stating precisely, because the wording shifts tense. Rock says an appeal exists. Barbados Today gives no filing date, names no registry, and carries no response from the Attorney General’s chambers. Justice Michelle Weekes dismissed the claim at the No. 8 Supreme Court on 4 July, and Rock said at the time that he intended to appeal inside the 28-day window with help from the Legal Aid Department. That window closed in early August with nothing reported. This is the first word since. Attorney Lalu Hanuman continues to act for him.

The letter to the Prime Minister

The open letter, published by The Bajan Reporter, runs on a separate track from the appeal. It asks Prime Minister Mia Mottley to amend the law so that private, home-based sacramental use is fully decriminalized for the Rastafari community, rather than confined to registered places of worship as the Sacramental Cannabis Act, 2019-45 requires. Akoma frames the ask through reparative justice, citing a declaration of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and arguing that the policing of cannabis has functioned historically as an instrument of systemic racism against people of African descent.

That route follows the judgment rather than fighting it. In her written reasons on 31 July, Weekes found the sacramental carve-out narrow but constitutional, and wrote that widening it “lies with Parliament.” The letter is that argument delivered to the address the judge named. It also arrives a day after he told Barbados Today that every Barbadian should be allowed seven to nine female plants, following the St John eradication.

What This Means

For travelers, nothing has changed at ground level, and no ruling in this case has ever been likely to change it. Possession of 14 grams or less still draws a $200 fine instead of a criminal charge, anything above that stays a criminal offence, and Barbados still has no retail counter where a visitor can lawfully buy. Sacramental permits remain tied to registered places of worship, so a Rastafari traveler planning to worship on the island should plan around a tabernacle, not a rental villa or a hotel balcony.

For the region, the interest is in the method. Barbados now has a worked example of a government defending cannabis restrictions on public-health evidence, and the side that lost is testing both remaining doors at once: the appellate bench and the Cabinet. Other Eastern Caribbean jurisdictions drafting sacramental provisions will watch which one opens.

What to watch

Whether a filing appears on the Court of Appeal’s record, which would convert Rock’s statement into a docketed case with a hearing date. Whether the Attorney General or the Barbados Medicinal Cannabis Licensing Authority answers the home-use proposal. And whether Mottley’s office responds to the letter at all, since silence there pushes the whole question back to a bench that has already ruled once.