Merry Christmas, Uruguay Officially Legalized Marijuana!
This week, the entire world received an early Christmas present in the form of a new law signed by President Jose Mujica of Uruguay. With his signature late Monday night on legislation passed by the Uruguayan House and Senate, the tiny South American country officially legalized marijuana, becoming the first country in the world to regulate its marijuana market.
This means as of Christmas Eve in Uruguay, any adult age 18 and older can grow up to six plants in the home and harvest up to 480 grams (almost 17 ounces) for personal use. Additionally, collectives of between 15 and 45 adults can cultivate up to 99 plants per year.
President Mujica’s signature gives the Uruguayan government until April 9 to set up the regulations for the marijuana market that will include a marijuana registry to track adult purchases, which will be capped at 40 grams per month. Only Uruguayan citizens will be accepted on the registry. Pharmacies are expected to sell cannabis at about $1 per gram in order to severely undercut illegal traffickers.
The legalization of marijuana ends a contradiction in Uruguayan law where the possession of personal amounts of marijuana has always been legal, but the buying, selling, and production of marijuana has been strictly illegal. Similar laws exist throughout South America, where the personal use of drugs is treated as a public health issue and most countries do not criminally prosecute for possession of small amounts. As the Uruguayan experiment unfolds, international observers are hoping for success in undercutting illegal criminal markets and improving public safety and that those successes lead to further legalization efforts in the hemisphere.
Meanwhile, in America, parents of children with epilepsy in New Jersey are fighting an intractable governor who thinks CBD oil for sick kids will lead inexorably to teenage potheads, motorists in New Mexico are suffering through torturous body cavity searches during fruitless law enforcement searches for small personal amounts of drugs, and thousands of young blacks and Latinos in New York City are being stopped and frisked without cause by cops looking for easy pot busts. Despite our success as a movement, sick and disabled Americans in thirty states who choose cannabis as medicine are still criminals, as are healthy people who enjoy smoking marijuana in forty-eight states. Even in Washington, one of the two states that emboldened Uruguay, people who cultivate marijuana for personal use are still criminals. We still have a long way to go… but this is clearly marijuana’s best Christmas in a long time.
