Tobi Adebayo
Governor of Ondo State, Rotimi Akeredolu has said that Nigeria must find a way to legalise the monitored cultivation of cannabis for medical purposes.

Akeredolu made the call during a live interview programme tagged ‘Governor Speaks’ in commemoration of his 100 days of his second term in office.

Recall that the House of Representatives was proposing the legalisation of cultivation and trading in cannabis for revenue generation for the country.

The governor said “We must find a way to legalise the cultivation of cannabis for medicinal purposes. There is nothing wrong with it. We are only shooting ourselves in the foot. It is a foreign exchange earner for people outside the country. People want this. We ourselves, even our pharmacies want to develop.

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“I travelled out of here and I was in Thailand trying to study the cultivation of cannabis for pharmaceutical use. We did all these. We even went there with the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) chairman. Maybe he came and said what he went for was for a different thing. All I felt was for us to look at the way they do things over there.

“Everybody has a drug problem. Most countries have drug problems. We are having it here.  It is just not as pronounced here as in other places. There are ways they went about these things that those who are involved in drugs, those who are selling, those who are exporting had other ways of doing things that they had to leave it. So, when we talk about cultivation, we are talking about a monitored one, in which NDLEA will have offices near farms.”