Uruguay’s marijuana law turns pharmacists into dealers
The rules are a bit of a buzzkill. Drug users must officially register with the government. Machines will scan buyers’ fingerprints at every purchase, and there are strict quotas to prevent overindulgence.
But when Uruguay’s marijuana legalisation law takes full effect on Wednesday, getting high will take a simple visit to the pharmacy.
As American states legalise marijuana and governments in the hemisphere rethink the fight against drugs, Uruguay is taking a significant step further: It is the first nation in the world to fully legalise the production and sale of marijuana for recreational use.
“The great responsibility we have in Uruguay is to show the world that this system of freedom with regulation works better than prohibition,” said Eduardo Blasina, the founder of the Montevideo Cannabis Museum.
The final stage of Uruguay’s marijuana law comes as voters, lawmakers and courts across the Americas are increasingly leaning toward regulation and away from prohibition. Supporters of the shift say this tiny South American nation, which has low crime, a high standard of living and political stability, is now an ideal laboratory for what the future of drug policy in the region could look like.
“This follows from increasing momentum by leaders in Latin America in calling for alternatives to the war on drugs,” said Hannah Hetzer, an analyst at the Drug Policy Alliance, which favors decriminalisation. “What’s so important about this is it takes a debate about the need for alternatives and provides an actual proposal for an actual policy.”
But the law has been contentious for many Uruguayans. The thorniest part of it — establishing a system for the state-controlled production and sale of marijuana — took years to work out. Sales at pharmacies start on Wednesday.
Government officials worried that allowing a cannabis scene like the one in Amsterdam would make Uruguay a pariah among neighbouring countries wary about legalisation. So they developed an onerous registration process and ruled out marketing the country as a mecca for pot tourism. Under the law, only Uruguayan citizens and legal permanent residents are allowed to purchase or grow pot.
The government limits how much people can buy each week. And in an effort to undercut drug traffickers, it is setting the price below black market rates, charging roughly $13 for 10 grams, enough for about 15 joints, advocates say. The law also bars advertising and sets aside a percentage of proceeds from commercial sales to pay for addiction treatment and public awareness campaigns about the risks of drug use.
“These are measures designed to help people who are already users without encouraging others who don’t consume,” said Alejandro Antalich, the vice president of the Center of Pharmacies in Uruguay, an industry group. “If this works as planned, other countries could adopt it as a model.”
One of the main architects of Uruguay’s pot legalisation law was Sebastián Sabini, a scrappy lawmaker who introduced a bill in 2011 as a newly elected member of Congress from the leftist Broad Front coalition, the political force in power since 2004. Sabini, 36, who says he is an occasional pot smoker, framed the legalisation as a matter of social justice.
“The sectors that bear the brunt of drug policies are the poorest ones,” he said. “The ones who are sent to jail are the poor people.”
That rationale resonated with the president at the time, José Mujica, a former guerrilla leader and political prisoner who championed other contentious policies, including the legalisation of same-sex marriage and the decriminalisation of abortion. By legalising the production and sale of marijuana, Mujica reasoned, Uruguay stood to drive drug traffickers out of business.
“Worse than drug addiction is drug trafficking,” Mujica said in a 2014 interview with laSexta, a Spanish news network.
Uruguay’s law has been rolled out in phases. After its passage in December 2013, users who registered with the government were allowed to grow as many as six plants at home for personal use. To date, nearly 7,000 people have done so. The legislation also allowed “clubs” of as many as 45 people to operate grow houses with 99 plants for members’ personal use.
For commercial sales, some pharmacy executives offered to run the distribution, noting they already had mechanisms to control the disbursement of powerful medications. While that may not seem particularly relevant for the recreational sale of marijuana, it fit the government’s vision for a framework that would allow, but not promote, marijuana use.
While several pharmacists were eager to become pot dealers, some were adamantly opposed. Juan José Rodríguez, who has run an independent pharmacy with his wife here in the capital, Montevideo, for 17 years, said the law put Uruguay on a dangerous course.