The plant aspect of this legislation is only a very minor part from their perspective. These schedules are mostly about synthetic drugs and precursors, and I can guarantee you that these sections will be implemented in full. As for the plant schedules it is really hard to say what the outcome will be. However we can take a good guess by looking at who is behind them, why they were created, and what they are supposed to achieve. That sadly leaves a very bleak outlook. The overriding principle is that these are MODEL schedules which means that they are not only suppsoed to be federal schedules, but that the feds expect them to be implemented into state drug law over time to harmonise the legislation in all states. Hence the reference to MODEL. To ensure that no state is 'worse off' with the implementation the model schedules need to include ALL substances currently in state schedules. As SA already has the listing of 'all DMT/mescaline containing plants', this definition is almost certainly going to be part of the federal schedules.
I know there was a lot of opposition to the initial proposal, but after continued communication with the attourney generals department I am convinced that this has been of virtually no impact [other than maybe making their approach more sneaky by keeping it out of parliament]. After nearly 2 years and hundreds of letters telling them so [including published analyses], they STILL claim that there are no dmt containing native plants and that this is all news to them. It takes a lot more than a few people chatting on ABC to sway government policy and sadly the people who did talk about the issue largely failed to get mainstream support. Bottom line is that the only mainstream stakeholder that was willing to speak out against this was the rep from the nursery association and he was recruited to the cause by the rather conservative guys from gardenfreedom, not by members of the ethnobotany community. Since that time a couple of cactus society chapters have also shown support, but the vast majority of them refuse to get involved in anything that is tainted by a perception of pro-drugs. To really have an impact it would ahve required ALL nursery associations, cactus societies and various ethnic groups to unite behind this, but this was impossible. I feel that the only option we have now is to wait till the schedules are presented in their final form and then challenge them in the courts.
There is also a small hope that the government will issue a collectors permit system which will likely cost plenty of money and will establish a database of all collectors. This is what they did when they wanted to shut the kava market down. By pretending to run a long term permit system they got a registry of all kava importers and dealers, so when they closed the market 2 years later they could notify all permit holders and thus ensure that all prosecutions would be successful [impossible to plead ignorance if you were on the permit system]. A permit system would also spread out the opposition. Satisfy hardcore collectors now by giving permits which then marginalises the rest of the opposition. Then some years latr when the first lot has forgotten about their loss of freedoms they can strip the collectors of their rights. A nice way to divide the opposition. That's exactly the same effect the permit system had on the opposition to the kava restrictions and it worked brilliantly.
As for Nen's comment at the time, i am not sure how that would help. The model schedules did not list any species, so publishing new ones will not change the schedules' relevance. It's a great way to make the laws more futile, so definitely great advice, but it in no way helps to protect our rights, which is my primary focus. It may in fact harm things if there is a raid. A person is only likely to be convicted if a plant was found to contain DMT and the person was reasonably expected to know that it did contain DMT. So if someone looked up whether his acacia collection contains any illegals and the authorities find the document in the cache or HD then the defendant will not be able to sucessfully claim ignorance. The more you know the more liable you are. hence I am currently very busy forgetting everything I know about acacias 