The Bermuda Cannabis Association, a non-profit division of the Green Framework Foundation, believes Bermuda now has an opportunity to take a responsible, evidence-based approach to cannabis policy that puts health, safety, and patients first.

Ryan Robinson Perinchief's appointment as Minister of National Security deserves genuine congratulation. Not just the polite, obligatory kind extended to any new minister but the kind that is reserved for an appointment that actually fits the moment. His youth isn’t a liability to critique but an asset Bermuda can utilise.

I applaud Minister Robinson Perinchief in prioritising cannabis reform. His qualifications could genuinely lead to bona fide reform. Taking over national security is a difficult endeavour and being a British Overseas Territory adds layers to the issue. This is a multi-year project and we finally have a minister who can plausibly work on it long term.

He also arrives with something almost no predecessor in this seat has had: a documented, peer-reviewed intellectual position on the exact policy area now sitting on his desk. His Durham University dissertation isn’t a passing student paper but a sustained argument built on Elizabeth Anderson's theory of democratic equality. Understanding cannabis reform is one thing but addressing the mechanism that explains the position we find ourselves in is a completely different matter.

Bermuda’s cannabis prohibition was never founded on health evidence but on racial prejudice at the highest levels of governance and the continued enforcement has reproduced that prejudice as policy.

He cites, from Bermuda's own Drug Reform Committee, that Black residents make up 54 per cent of the population but account for 90 per cent of all cannabis possession charges; and that roughly 17,000 stop-and-searches were conducted in a single year against an island of fewer than 63,000 people. This foundational knowledge points to a systemic issue persisting despite global and UN governance acknowledging prohibition has done exponentially more harm than good.

His predecessor, Michael Weeks, held this same portfolio while promising cannabis legislation reform in the Progressive Labour Party government's own Throne Speech. Commitments quietly failed to materialise, businesses opened and closed at the drop of a hat, and this commitment was omitted from the last Throne Speech entirely.

This quietness was not forgotten by those that were sold dreams of opening businesses, medical patients looking for alternative options and those communities affected by violence and unregulated cannabis products.

Bermuda does not need another minister asserting cannabis reform as a priority in a press conference only for another political cycle to end. The last minister had the title and mandate yet delivered neither the legislation nor reckoned with enforcement disparities his own government had already documented years earlier through its Drug Reform Committee.

It is genuinely good news that Minister Robinson Perinchief has named cannabis reform among his immediate priorities, alongside speed cameras, and that the Premier has publicly tied his appointment to getting this legislation through the House before the end of the current session.

But a public commitment is not policy and this ministry's most recent occupant is proof that the phrase "immediate priority" can be absorbed by Bermuda's political system without producing a single line of enacted law. The test of this ministry will not be another committee, another budget to hire experts that fades away, or another framework paper.

Minister Robinson Perinchief's own scholarship already contains the menu of what comes next:

• Cannabis legalisation reform as the necessary response to a prohibitive system built on prejudice rather than evidence

• Expungement of past cannabis convictions so Bermudians still carrying possession charges are not left as permanent casualties of a policy he has personally called indefensible

We need to implement a model that focuses on diversion from prison for nonviolent offences, patient-centric safeguards and equity-focused participation in a future legal cannabis economy. Bermudians who were imprisoned and/or fined should not have to watch a newly licensed industry formed by those who perpetrated prohibition in the first place.

There is also an uncomfortable tension the minister will need to resolve publicly, not privately. The same office that now asks him to advance cannabis reform also hands him operational responsibility for the policing and stop-and-search practices his dissertation critiques. His predecessor never had to answer that question in public because his predecessor never got the legislation far enough to be forced to.

Minister Robinson Perinchief cannot credibly hold both responsibilities without saying, in his own voice, how he intends to reconcile them and doing so while goodwill is still on his side, is far better than being cornered into it later.

None of this diminishes what is a genuinely encouraging start and it is worth saying that Bermuda rarely gets a minister who walks into a portfolio having already done the intellectual work most ministers commission from consultants after the fact. That head start deserves recognition, and Minister Robinson Perinchief deserves the warm congratulations due to anyone who has earned an admirable position this early in their career.

But the goodwill extended to a promising new minister is not a substitute for the accountability owed by a government that has already let cannabis reform stall under the last person to hold this position.

The minister has already written the case for urgency, in his own dissertation, years before he had the power to act on it. Bermuda should be hopeful that he now has both the conviction and the authority to finish what his predecessor could not start. The only remaining question is whether he intends to govern by the case he has already made.

• Kim Nicole Caisey is executive director of the Bermuda Cannabis Association