Pubdate: Thu, 25 Sep 2014
Source: Globe and Mail (Canada)
Copyright: 2014 The Globe and Mail Company
Contact:  http://www.theglobeandmail.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/168
Author: Stephanie Nolen
Pages: A8-A9

WHY URUGUAY LEGALIZED POT, FROM THE TOP DOWN

In a reverse of the bottom-up process playing out in North America,
Uruguay's socialist government legalized marijuana in the face of
stiff disapproval from the majority of its citizens. Lawmakers believe
legalization is the best way to neutralize drug

For a room full of potheads, with a ceiling wreathed in pale grey
smoke, there is a surprising amount of bustle in Urugrow on a Tuesday
afternoon.

This small shop in the heart of the Uruguayan capital is the premiere
location for those seeking to grow their own marijuana, and the three
young owners cannot import the big, boxy, vinyl grow kits fast enough.

But the store is also an informal clearinghouse of information on how
to join a "cannabis club," a meeting point for would be foreign
investors who want in on the new commercial cannabis market opening up
here - and the first destination of hopeful tourists from other
countries looking to score a bag of weed. (They can't - under
Uruguay's new law, only citizens can buy, and only from the state.) It
makes for a crowded shop. "It's pretty crazy," said Juan Manuel
Varela, when the last grow kit has been loaded into a customer's car
and he can lock up for a day. Fortunately he's got a little something
to take the edge off.

Urugrow, which Mr. Varela helped create, has been around for a couple
of years. Until last December, it was a "gardening store," where the
products for sale were all geared for a specific kind of home
cultivator, but discretion was required. Then Uruguay became the first
country in the world to legalize marijuana and the country's growers
burst out of their brightly lit closets.

In complete reverse of the process that recently played out in several
U.S. states, and that looms in the offing in Canada, Uruguay's
legalization came from the top.

President Jose Mujica pushed it in the face of strong disapproval from
a majority of his citizens. He embraced legalization as the bold but
obvious best way to neutralize drug traffickers, who had been growing
in power in this small country in the south of the continent. But he
sent Uruguay into uncharted territory, which lawmakers and enforcement
are still muddling through, while their project is watched with a
mixture of fascination and alarm by the rest of the world.

Mr. Mujica was a socialist guerrilla in his youth, and spent 14 years
being tortured in prison for his political convictions, so he wasn't
likely to be dissuaded by the disapproval of the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Agency or the United Nations.

And when his own people said they did not favour legalization, he
urged them to trust him, and forged ahead. He directed a committee of
legislators to study other models for legalization: the cannabis clubs
of Barcelona, the cafes of Amsterdam, the homegrown recreational use
in Colorado and medical marijuana in the United States and Canada. And
then, to go further.

The law the Mujica administration came up with has three prongs. It
legalizes home-growing (each adult who signs up in a national registry
can have up to six plants), or growing through a registered club. It
makes it legal for a person to purchase up to 40 grams a month of
marijuana from the state through a pharmacy for personal consumption.
And it legalizes cannabis production for medical and industrial
purposes. (Technically, it's been legal to smoke pot in Uruguay since
1970 - but it wasn't legal to grow it, or buy and sell it, rendering
the old law ridiculous.)

"The opposition was saying, 'Marijuana is very bad for you physically
and mentally, and must be banned,' " said Julio Bango, a Socialist
Party member of the General Assembly who was one of the authors of the
law. "We said, 'Okay, but then ban alcohol and tobacco.' We're not
disputing that it's not beneficial for health, but we're saying, treat
it like alcohol and tobacco."

Given the choice, he would have deregulated completely, handling pot
like booze. But he understands the need for this very conservative
style of liberalization. "It's a new idea with the public and it's a
gradual road. The first thing is to show we're not trying to promote
it. Our law exists in a regional and global context, and given that,
it's brave but realistic."

Supply shops in demand

Since the first part of that law, for home-growing, went into effect
last December, shops selling supplies have sprouted all over the country.

At Urugrow, the typical customer is a middle-class man between the
ages of 25 and 40. Now that it's legal, they have more customers over
50 and more women, who today represent about 10 per cent of customers,
and turnover at the shop has doubled, Mr. Varela said. "There is way
more bureaucracy now, but I'm not living in fear of going to go to
jail, so I'll take it."

Growers are meant to enroll in a new national database of marijuana
users, and 378 had done so as of Sept. 11, the most recent date on
which figures were released.

"Many people don't trust having the state have your information. Okay,
today it's fine, but what if tomorrow the government changes and your
name is on what becomes the Black List?" asked Nicolas, a 24-year-old
political-science student who is now growing six plants on his roof
(where the smell drives his sister crazy).

Neither he nor his partner, Sarah, 21, felt safe being identified by
their full names. Sure, it's theoretically legal now, but most people
(including her family) still disapprove. "What if I go to a job
interview and people know I grow?"

The fact that the registry involves a thumbprint is a particular
source of concern. "It's the same way I need to identify myself to try
to get into the United States," one would-be grower pointed out.

Mr. Bango countered that the registry is held by the Health Ministry,
governed by the national personal-data law and would be protected even
should government change. (There is a national election in Uruguay in
October, where the governing left-wing coalition of which he is a part
may well lose control of parliament, the House of Representatives. Mr.
Mujica will be leaving office after the mandatory single term.)

Mr. Bango also said he understands the stigma in coming out as a
smoker today. But that will pass, he said, in the same way that people
were embarrassed buying condoms when he was young, but no one thinks
twice today.

Nicolas and others believe that the worst that will happen if they are
caught with plants without registering is the loss of their stash and
their garden.

Mr. Bango insisted that was not true: Drug-enforcement resources will
now be directed at unregistered scofflaws, he said. But it is hard to
imagine Uruguay's already overstretched law enforcement will have a
lot of time to spend on random spot checks of rooftops and gardens.

Other growers, meanwhile, are beginning to form clubs, which can grow
a maximum of 99 plants each. Some clubs are high-end, and are paying
an experienced grower to raise premium plants. Others are functioning
more like co-operatives, operating out of basement rooms furnished in
battered cast-offs, where everyone takes turns nurturing the
notoriously temperamental plants.

The official registration process for clubs has not yet begun,
although some already have plants in pots.

Hurdles of state production

The state production has proved more complicated. The government is
finalizing the terms of a tender for the 20 tonnes it intends to see
grown here each year, and hopes to have a first crop by December, Mr.
Bango said.

Twenty-two companies have registered to bid: eight local, 10 foreign,
the rest partnerships, according to the new Institute for the
Regulation and Control of Cannabis. The marijuana will be grown on
state land, Mr. Bango said - possibly army bases - to make it easy to
secure.

The plan is for smokers to register, be given a buyer's card and then
make a monthly purchase of up to 40 grams from a local pharmacy. This
route is intended to appeal to cannabis users who at present buy from
an illegal dealer, and the marijuana will be sold at the same price as
the black market. It offers users the dual advantage of getting a
quality-controlled product, and of not breaking the law, Mr. Bango
said. (Buying from dealers remains illegal.)

But there is still a fair bit to be worked out. Uruguay needs to
reassure its neighbours and the United Nations that its homegrown pot
is all being consumed domestically. That is easier said than done: The
government has already considered and rejected a range of methods to
make its product easily traceable, from the low tech (making the pot
into prerolled cigarettes it sells in packs) to the very high
(breeding a genetic marker into the strains it grows). None of these
seem like they will fly.

Beyond that, the Uruguayan government, understandably, lacks expertise
in how, exactly, to grow marijuana. For that, it has turned to the
same people it spent years prosecuting for advice.

On Aug. 27, when the registry was launched, for example, expectant
would-be growers signed up and then asked for their seeds. "Seeds?"
said the Institute. "We don't have seeds."

Bewildered, they referred the growers to Juan Vaz - a long-time
campaigner for legalization who spent 11 months in jail, just six
years ago, when he was caught with fewer flowering marijuana plants
than are now permitted by law, and who was once arrested for
possessing, yes, seeds he planned to give to friends.

Near-fatal levels of irony notwithstanding, Mr. Vaz and other
colleagues from the growers' movement have graciously agreed to advise
the government, biting their tongues at some of the crazier schemes
such as radioactive markers on the leaves. "This is what happens when
people who have never seen a fish write a book about fishing," Mr. Vaz
said, his tone both rueful and affectionate.

Fast-talking pot-trepreneurs

The commercial cannabis-products industry here, meanwhile, remains in
its infancy, but has drawn a wave of fast-talking pot-trepeneurs.

Julian Strauss, a 36-year-old former stockbroker from Toronto, reborn
as a cannabis-oil producer based in Togo, Sask. (where hemp is used as
a rotational crop), is among those who have moved to Montevideo in
recent months looking for a piece of a still uncertain market. He has
rented a farm on the edge of the city and is converting the barn into
a lab.

"Uruguay is our best chance as a staging ground to use science, to
gather facts and evidence on the chemical and applied benefits of the
plant," he said.

Mr. Strauss believes the payoff for this country of 3.3 million, where
the main industry is still beef cattle, could be big. "It's rare to
have a whole new industry open up."

But Uruguay will have to act fast to establish itself as the market
leader, he said, because other countries, including Morocco and
Jamaica, are already looking at legalizing some industrial uses of the
cannabis plant.

Mr. Varela, the co-owner of Urugrow, says that the store has built up
a list of people with epilepsy, chronic pain and cancer who have come
in seeking medicinal cannabis products. "At the moment, I have nothing
to sell them," he said. "But I want to see it: This country always
makes exports. We need to do value-added. I want to see us making
something here with Uruguayan hands."

Mr. Mujica doesn't talk about job creation when he talks about pot. He
said that a key driver for legalization was to be able to identify
problem pot smokers. "When users are underground, you can't detect
that they are addicts, and if you can't do that, you can't treat
them," he said in an interview at his farm outside the capital. Eight
per cent of Uruguayans, ages 15 to 69, say they smoked marijuana at
least once in the past year.

The other motive Mr. Mujica cites - and this one is perhaps more
plausible - is to try to undermine the drug market. Sixty per cent of
cases in Uruguay's courts are related to drug trafficking, according
to the Institute for the Regulation and Control of Cannabis, while 33
per cent of people in prison were convicted of drug-related crime.

Marijuana users, Mr. Mujica acknowledged, are not drivers of violent
crime. (That, in Uruguay, tends to come from users of a cheap and
highly addictive drug called pasta base, a sticky brown byproduct of
cocaine production.) But marijuana is the drug most sold by
traffickers and the one with the highest profit margin, the government
says.

"The marijuana industry makes $50-million [U.S.] a year in Uruguay and
they don't give it to charity," Mr. Vaz said. "What do they do? They
buy cars and guns and telecommunications equipment and it pays
criminals. The best way to close down that industry is to chop
$50-million from its bottom line."

Mr. Bango, the legislator, noted that 64 per cent of Uruguayans
currently say they oppose the legalization. But if, in the same
conversation, you ask them if a user should buy from an illegal dealer
or the state, 80 per cent say the state, he said. And that gives the
government an opportunity to change minds - while legalization gives
them a space to figure out new solutions.

"We're not dogmatic: The law has to go through a reality test and if
it has to change, we'll change it," he said.

Today, he and his fellow authors of the legislation find themselves in
high demand. Just recently, they have been invited to Mexico, France
and Cuba to discuss their experience with legalization.

Mr. Vaz, the long-time grower, rolls his bloodshot eyes at the idea of
Uruguayan officials as the new pot experts, but he also gets it.

"The rest of the world knows even less than our politicians, so this
is the best [legalization] project in the world. It's not the best
model, but it's the one we have. And if you have nothing, you have
nothing to improve."
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MAP posted-by: Matt