Decriminalize marijuana use or not?

Despite the six-year brutal war on drugs during Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency, law enforcers have failed to stop the circulation of shabu.

Authorities have also failed to prevent marijuana plants (also known as cannabis, among other names) from sprouting in mountain barangays in Cebu.

Just last Thursday afternoon, Oct. 6, 2022, police officers from the 2nd Provincial Mobile Force Company uprooted around 2,000 marijuana plants in the mountain village of Juan Climaco Sr. in Toledo City, and they arrested one of the cultivators.

This was not the first time that authorities—either police or the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (Pdea)—raided a marijuana plantation. There had been several uprootings and burnings of marijuana in the past, and there had been several cultivators who were either arrested or killed for reportedly resisting authorities.

Why does the drug problem keep on bugging the Philippines? The Duterte-style crackdown on illegal drugs did not stop it.

Is it time for the government to rethink its drug policies and explore the possibility of amending Republic Act (RA) 9165, or the Comprehensive Dangerous Drugs Act of 2002?

One of the things the government and Congress can explore is the suggestion of some medical experts to legalize marijuana use for medical purposes.

Sen. Robin Padilla recently filed Senate Bill 230, which seeks to grant access to medical cannabis as a compassionate alternative means of medical treatment. The neophyte legislator has said that medical marijuana use could play a major role in funding government programs.

However, Padilla’s proposed law is still in line with the punitive RA 9165, which metes out the “penalty of life imprisonment ... and a fine ranging from P500,000 to P10 million to any person who “shall plant, cultivate or culture marijuana ... regardless of quantity.”

Padilla’s measure does not allow a qualified patient possession or smoking of marijuana in its raw form and selling and giving of the plant, among others.

A person who has no illness and thus not qualified for the medical marijuana use would surely be charged with violation of RA 9165 if arrested.

Why can’t the government also explore the possibility of allowing a regulated use of cannabis for recreation? This has been allowed in some parts of the United States. Also, US President Joe Biden recently granted pardons to people convicted of possessing small amounts of marijuana, a step seen as a move to decriminalize cannabis possession.

The United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs delisted in 2020 marijuana from Schedule 4 (dangerous and highly addictive drugs) of its drug classification list, which is “expected to bolster efforts to study the drug’s therapeutic and medical benefits,” Padilla said in his bill’s explanatory note.

If the government moves to strike marijuana out of RA 9165, the police and the PDEA could concentrate their efforts and scarce resources in urban centers where shabu (a drug that has no medical use) and other kinds of narcotics are sold by drug players.*