An entire country – Uruguay – is now poised to end prohibition of a plant much less dangerous to your health than alcohol or nicotine:
Under the legislation, Uruguay’s government would license pot-growers, sellers and consumers, and update a confidential registry to keep people from buying more than 40g a month. Carrying, growing or selling marijuana without a licence could bring prison terms, but licensed consumers could grow up to six plants at a time at home. Growing clubs with up to 45 members each would be encouraged, fostering enough marijuana production to drive out unlicensed dealers and draw a line between marijuana smokers and users of harder drugs.
That makes it the first country to allow free cultivation of marijuana for recreational use and the first to set up a legal and regulatory framework to manage it. A lot rides on the outcome, but Tim Padgett was optimistic only recently:
Uruguay over the past decade has proved to be one of Latin America’s more competent states. (A few years ago, in fact, a U.S. diplomat told me, “It’s a shame Uruguay’s Presidents don’t head a bigger country.”) It has one of the strongest economies on the continent as well as one of the highest rankings on the U.N. Human Development Index and Transparency International’s corruption gauge. And as the pragmatic [President José] Mujica pointed out last week, experiments like this are often best undertaken by smaller nations like Uruguay and Portugal, which can serve as more-controlled laboratories for larger countries to study.
Sadly, the US is leading globally from behind on this (via Washington and Colorado). But the direction across South America is becoming quite clear. The prohibition of marijuana is now a much bigger problem than marijuana itself. If you really want to tackle the chaos of the drug cartels, reduce their range of products.
The Dish 