A 2009 ban on selling rhino horn in South Africa has been lifted, and it’s now legal to buy and sell the precious commodity, long considered a cure in Vietnam for hangovers and cancer, PopularScience reported.

Two South African rhino ranchers filed a lawsuit to invalidate the country’s rhino horn ban. The government appealed. The ranchers won in South Africa’s Supreme Court of Appeal.

Some say the move by the South African court is necessary to save the species. Others say it will open a door to criminal activity and doom it.

The court’s decision Friday opened a flood of feedback from proponents and opponents of the ban, who all say they want the same thing —  to save rhinos, according to ChristianScienceMonitor.

“The reality is the trade ban has not worked … and on the contrary has helped create a vast illegal market dominated by transnational crime syndicates that remain untouchable,” said Pelham Jones, chairman of the Private Rhino Owners Association, in an article in RhinoAlive. “Like the illegal drugs trade, will demand go away?

Ranchers raise rhino like dairy cows in South Africa, NationalGeographic reported. They periodically anesthetize them, saw off their horns, and stockpile the lumps of keratin, prized in China and Vietnam for health benefits and cures that have never been proven scientifically. Keratin is found in fingernails. If a rhino’s horn is cut off above the root, it grows back.

There is virtually no market for rhino horn inside South Africa so it’s expected that horn will now be smuggled out of South Africa to Asia.

International trade in rhino horn has been banned since 1977 between the now 182 member countries of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Fauna and Flora (CITES), the body that governs international wildlife trade.

But CITES does not apply to trade within a country’s own borders. South Africa, home to the world’s largest rhino population, and nearly all of the world’s 20,000 white rhinos, allowed domestic trade in white rhino horns until 2009. In response to increased poaching, the government imposed a moratorium in 2009, shutting down the internal trade.

John Hume, the world’s largest rhinoceros rancher, farms almost 1,300 rhinos on his property outside Johannesburg. He’s stockpiled about five tons of rhino horn. He and safari operator Johan Kruger sued the government to overturn the 2009 moratorium.

Hume is skeptical that the court’s decision last week means he’ll be allowed to sell rhino horn on the South African market again.

“Up until 2008, we had no rhinos being poached in South Africa because demand was being supplied by legal sales from live rhino,” Hume told The Telegraph. “It’s not the demand for rhino horn that’s killing our rhino, it’s the way the demand is currently supplied.”

Ban opponents may have statistics on their sides, ChristianMonitor reported. Rhino poaching has risen dramatically since the moratorium went into effect. There were 122 rhinos poached in 2009, and 1,175 rhinos poached in 2015, according to the South African Department of Environmental Affairs.

“This option may in fact be the very best thing for all the rhinos in the world,” said Tanya Jacobsen with RhinoAlive, in a Christian Science Monitor interview. “The required paradigm shift that would be necessary for (the ban) to be effective is probably decades away – our rhinos simply do not have the luxury of time.”

South African buyers are likely to be investors, said Cathy Dean, director of Save the Rhino International. “We do not believe that these investors will be content to let their rhino horns remain, unsold, in a stockpile for years,” she told the Monitor. “It seems obvious that there is huge potential for leakage into the illegal trade, and we’re deeply concerned by these new developments.”