Sadhguru
Showing posts with label marijuana. Show all posts
Showing posts with label marijuana. Show all posts
Friday, 25 March 2016
Saturday, 12 March 2016
Shiva Is A God Who Likes Marijuana — And So Do Many Of His Followers
Danielle Priess in Goats and Soda
A Hindu holy man in Kathmandu smokes a chillum, a traditional clay pipe, on March 6, the eve of a festival honoring the god Shiva.Prkash Mathema /AFP/Getty Images
A Hindu holy man in Kathmandu smokes a chillum, a traditional clay pipe, on March 6, the eve of a festival honoring the god Shiva.Prkash Mathema /AFP/Getty Images
Shiva is one chill deity.
He's one of the three major gods in the Hindu religion. And he has a penchant for pot.
"Shiva loves marijuana. So we come to share Shiva's prasad [offerings] with everyone else," explains a 60-year-old holy man who gives his name as Radhe Baba.
It's the eve of the festival of Shiva Ratri, or "The Night of Shiva" — March 7 this year. The celebration marks the day Shiva saved the universe from darkness and married the goddess Parvati.
Groups of dreadlocked Hindu ascetics sit around small smoky fires puffing on clay pipes at Pashupati, one of Nepal's holiest Hindu temples, in the capital city of Kathmandu. Hundreds of holy men (and some women) have traveled from around Nepal and India for the festival. They spend the days before the holiday alternately praying and lounging to prepare to commune with Shiva.
And they also smoke hashish. Marijuana smoke mingles with the bonfires. Both are symbols of religious devotion. Shiva, it's believed, used marijuana both to relax and to focus better for meditation.
It's scenes like this that made Kathmandu famous among hippies. Indeed a few days before Shiva Ratri, Pashupati had the vibe of a relaxed music festival. It's a little more like Bonnaroo by the time over a million devotees have arrived for the big day.
"That [smoking marijuana] makes us forget everything and we communicate with Shiva," 50-year-old Madhan Lal Baba says, sitting next to Radhe.
The two have traveled with a group of holy men from Benares, India, and said that the Indian government even gave them some money to make the trip. As ascetics, they've renounced possessions and survive off stipends from the temples and alms from devotees.
The marijuana helps stave off worldly desires, they say. Sharing the "prasad" – in this case, the weed — shows their love for Shiva, Madhan Lal explains.
"Baba, do you have prasad?" a visitor asks a seated holy man.
"Sit, smoke, relax," the holy man responds, gesturing to the stone temple steps next to him and packing a conical clay pipe, called a chillum, with hashish. The holy man smears ashes on the visitor's forehead with his thumb as a blessing and offers a puff on the pipe, for which the man hands him some rupees.
Though the temple authorities insist they are cracking down on the drug use, marijuana consumption is considered acceptable on the day of the holiday. "The police don't say anything because it's Shiva Ratri, and we're giving [marijuana] to Shiva followers," Madhan Lal says. But not everyone indulges. Many of the pilgrims simply visit the temple to make offerings and pray.
Devotees also light bonfires to warm Shiva and signify the end of winter. Fire is holy in Hinduism. But touching the fire with unclean things is thought to pollute it. So the holy men cup their hands around the base of their pipes and suck the smoke through. This prevents their lips from polluting it.
"Fire represents God," Ram Das Bairagi explains. "We do [bonfires] for Shiva, to call him. Maybe he will see the fire." Bairagi, an ascetic who lives at Pashupati temple year-round, has wrapped his long dreadlocks in a leopard print scarf, representing the animal skin Shiva wears. His body is white from ashes, taken from the cremation sites at the temple.
"These are ashes of cremated bodies. They represent homeless people, animals, mentally disabled people," says another man who'd spread ashes on his body. He gives his name as Dandi Baba. Wearing the ashes allows these different entities to attend the wedding of Shiva and Parvati, he explains.
According to legend, Shiva Ratri is the night when Shiva married his bride and experienced the beauty of love and pleasure of sex for the first time. Though Shiva is associated with sex and creation, many of his most devout followers remain celibate.
"My life is fully dedicated to Shiva. I have no wife, no family. The first thing I knew was Shiva," says 72-year-old Dandi Baba.
"God is such a mysterious thing, but you have to follow it because it's inside you," he adds. "We don't follow money or day-to-day things. They're not important; you don't need those things. The only thing humans need is to share love with each other and share our culture."
And then he passes the pipe.
He's one of the three major gods in the Hindu religion. And he has a penchant for pot.
"Shiva loves marijuana. So we come to share Shiva's prasad [offerings] with everyone else," explains a 60-year-old holy man who gives his name as Radhe Baba.
It's the eve of the festival of Shiva Ratri, or "The Night of Shiva" — March 7 this year. The celebration marks the day Shiva saved the universe from darkness and married the goddess Parvati.
Groups of dreadlocked Hindu ascetics sit around small smoky fires puffing on clay pipes at Pashupati, one of Nepal's holiest Hindu temples, in the capital city of Kathmandu. Hundreds of holy men (and some women) have traveled from around Nepal and India for the festival. They spend the days before the holiday alternately praying and lounging to prepare to commune with Shiva.
And they also smoke hashish. Marijuana smoke mingles with the bonfires. Both are symbols of religious devotion. Shiva, it's believed, used marijuana both to relax and to focus better for meditation.
It's scenes like this that made Kathmandu famous among hippies. Indeed a few days before Shiva Ratri, Pashupati had the vibe of a relaxed music festival. It's a little more like Bonnaroo by the time over a million devotees have arrived for the big day.
"That [smoking marijuana] makes us forget everything and we communicate with Shiva," 50-year-old Madhan Lal Baba says, sitting next to Radhe.
The two have traveled with a group of holy men from Benares, India, and said that the Indian government even gave them some money to make the trip. As ascetics, they've renounced possessions and survive off stipends from the temples and alms from devotees.
The marijuana helps stave off worldly desires, they say. Sharing the "prasad" – in this case, the weed — shows their love for Shiva, Madhan Lal explains.
"Baba, do you have prasad?" a visitor asks a seated holy man.
"Sit, smoke, relax," the holy man responds, gesturing to the stone temple steps next to him and packing a conical clay pipe, called a chillum, with hashish. The holy man smears ashes on the visitor's forehead with his thumb as a blessing and offers a puff on the pipe, for which the man hands him some rupees.
Though the temple authorities insist they are cracking down on the drug use, marijuana consumption is considered acceptable on the day of the holiday. "The police don't say anything because it's Shiva Ratri, and we're giving [marijuana] to Shiva followers," Madhan Lal says. But not everyone indulges. Many of the pilgrims simply visit the temple to make offerings and pray.
Devotees also light bonfires to warm Shiva and signify the end of winter. Fire is holy in Hinduism. But touching the fire with unclean things is thought to pollute it. So the holy men cup their hands around the base of their pipes and suck the smoke through. This prevents their lips from polluting it.
"Fire represents God," Ram Das Bairagi explains. "We do [bonfires] for Shiva, to call him. Maybe he will see the fire." Bairagi, an ascetic who lives at Pashupati temple year-round, has wrapped his long dreadlocks in a leopard print scarf, representing the animal skin Shiva wears. His body is white from ashes, taken from the cremation sites at the temple.
"These are ashes of cremated bodies. They represent homeless people, animals, mentally disabled people," says another man who'd spread ashes on his body. He gives his name as Dandi Baba. Wearing the ashes allows these different entities to attend the wedding of Shiva and Parvati, he explains.
According to legend, Shiva Ratri is the night when Shiva married his bride and experienced the beauty of love and pleasure of sex for the first time. Though Shiva is associated with sex and creation, many of his most devout followers remain celibate.
"My life is fully dedicated to Shiva. I have no wife, no family. The first thing I knew was Shiva," says 72-year-old Dandi Baba.
"God is such a mysterious thing, but you have to follow it because it's inside you," he adds. "We don't follow money or day-to-day things. They're not important; you don't need those things. The only thing humans need is to share love with each other and share our culture."
And then he passes the pipe.
Thursday, 2 January 2014
Marijuana shoppers flock to Colorado for first legal recreational sales
'This is going to be a turning point in the drug war,' says one customer at a cannabis dispensary, 'a beginning of the peace'
The debut of the world's first legal recreational marijuana got off to a smooth and celebratory start with stores across Colorado selling joints, buds and other pot-infused products to customers from across the United States.
Throngs lined up from before dawn on Wednesday to be among the first to buy legal recreational marijuana at about three-dozen licensed stores, with cheers erupting when doors opened at 8am local time.
“It's a historical event. Everyone should be here,” said Darren Austin, 44, who drove from Georgia and joined a festive crowd gathered in falling snow outside Denver's 3-D Cannabis store. “This is going to be a turning point in the drug war. A beginning of the peace.”
His son Tyler, 21, held a sign saying “It's about time”. Like his father, he painted his face green. “I'm going to move to Colorado. Seriously,” said Darren.
Behind them waited Savannah Edwards, 21, a substitute teacher who drove overnight from Lubbock, Texas. “I'm here not so much for the marijuana as the history.” Just as people reminisced about Woodstock, she would be telling this story half a century from now, she said. “I've never been to a dispensary before. I don't even know what I'll buy.”
Colorado became the first jurisdiction in the world – beating Washington state and Uruguay by several months – to legalise recreational cannabis sales. Voters approved the measure in a ballot initiative in the November 2012 general election – a landmark challenge to decades of “drug war” dogma which could herald a shift as radical as the end of alcohol prohibition in 1933.
JD Leadam, 24, a bioplastics producer from Los Angeles, flew in just for the day. “This is the first time in the whole of the world that the process is completely legal. It's something that I can tell my kids about.”
After Washington, Alaska may follow suit later this year, with activists then targeting Arizona, California, Nevada and Maine, said Mason Tvert, director of communications for the Marijuana Policy Project. “Making marijuana legal for adults is not an experiment. Prohibition was the experiment and the results were abysmal,” he told a press conference.
Activists, customers and media gathered at the 3D Cannabis store for the first ceremonial sale. "It's 8am. I'm going to do it," said Toni Fox, the owner.
The first customer was Sean Azzariti, an Iraq war veteran who featured in pro-legalisation campaign ads. He bought an eighth of an ounce of an Indica strain called Bubba Kush and some marijuana-infused truffles. Total price, $59.74, including 21.22% sales tax.
State regulations insist every marijuana plant must be tracked from seed to sale but about 400,000 of the 2m tags sent in the post did not reach all stores in time. Authorities allowed licensed stores to sell regardless. The Denver Post called the glitch disappointing.
The three dozen stores that sold recreational pot on Wednesday will multiply in coming weeks. Regulators have issued 348 recreational pot licences: 136 for retail stores, 178 for cultivation, 31 for infused edibles and other spin-off products, and three for testing.
Cynthia Johnston, 69, bought two pre-rolled joints ($10 each) and an eighth of an ounce of Sour Diesel. “I've been working towards this moment since 1979,” she grinned. “Now, where can I smoke?”
Not in public spaces and not, according to notices which sprouted overnight, in many hotels. Pot must be consumed in private and cannot be transported over state lines, putting some restraints on the expected pot tourism boom.
Fears of joint-toking throngs in the street did not materialise by midday. Police said crowds were orderly and respectful. Denver City councilman Albus Brooks hailed their diversity and peacefulness.
As the first customers left the stores clutching their purchases jokes rippled across Twitter. “Curious if there has been a spike in Funyuns, Doritos and Taco Bell sales across Colorado today?” asked one.
Friday, 13 December 2013
Heroic Uruguay deserves a Nobel peace prize for legalising cannabis
The war on the war on drugs is the only war that matters. Uruguay's stance puts the UN and the US to shame
'Uruguay will legalise not only cannabis consumption but, crucially, its production and sale.' Illustration by Satoshi Kambayashi
I used to think the United Nations was a harmless talking shop, with tax-free jobs for otherwise unemployed bureaucrats. I now realise it is a force for evil. Its response to a truly significant attempt to combat a global menace – Uruguay's new drug regime – has been to declare that it "violates international law".
To see the tide turn on drugs is like trying to detect a glacier move. But moving it is. Wednesday's statute was introduced by the Uruguayan president, José Mujica, "to free future generations from this plague". The plague was not drugs as such but the "war" on them, which leaves the world's youth at the mercy of criminal traffickers and random imprisonment. Mujica declares himself a reluctant legaliser but one determined "to take users away from clandestine business. We don't defend marijuana or any other addiction, but worse than any drug is trafficking."
Uruguay will legalise not only cannabis consumption but, crucially, its production and sale. Users must be over 18 and registered Uruguayans. While small quantities can be grown privately, firms will produce cannabis under state licence and prices will be set to undercut traffickers. The country does not have a problem on the scale of Colombia or Mexico – just 10% of adults admit to using cannabis – and stresses that the measure is experimental.
This measured approach is still way in advance even of American states such as Colorado and Washington, which have legalised recreational as well as medical cannabis consumption, but not production. While the Uruguayan law does not cover other drugs, by depriving traffickers of an estimated 90% of their market, the hope is both to undermine the bulk of the criminal market and to diminish the gateway effect of traffickers pushing harder drugs.
Mujica's courage should not be underrated. His is a gently old-fashioned country, and two-thirds of those polled oppose the move, though this is up from 3% a decade ago. In addition some pro-legalisation lobbies object to his de facto nationalisation. An open question is whether a state cartel will be as effective as a regulated free market. But the drugs chief, Julio Calzada, is blunt: "For 50 years, we have tried to tackle the drug problem with only one tool – penalisation – and that has failed. As a result, we now have more consumers, bigger criminal organisations, money laundering, arms trafficking and collateral damage."
The response of the UN's International Narcotics Control Board has been to incant futile bromides. The move, says its chief Raymond Yans, would "endanger young people and contribute to the earlier onset of addiction". It would also be in breach of a "universally agreed and internationally endorsed treaty". Yet the UN admits that half a century of attempted suppression has led to 162m cannabis users worldwide, or 4% of the total adult population .
The 78-year-old Mujica notes the irony that many of his South American contemporaries agree with him, but only after leaving office. They include Brazil's Fernando Cardoso, Mexico's Ernesto Zedillo and Colombia's César Gaviria, all of whom have now called for the decriminalisation of the drug market so that they can begin to regulate a trade whose feuding operators are killing thousands of people each year. Thevalue of the drugs trade is second only to the trade in arms. Yet the US resists decriminalisation so it can continue to fight cocaine and opium production in Latin America and Afghanistan, to avoid confronting the real enemy: a domestic consumption that is out of control.
For all this, the futility of suppression is leading to laws crumbling across the west.Twenty US states have legalised medical cannabis. California this year narrowly rejected taxing consumption (turning down an estimated $1.3bn in annual revenue) and may yet relent. Drug use is accepted across most of Latin America and, de facto, Europe. Even in Britain, where possession can be punished by five years in prison, just 0.2% of cases prosecuted result in such a sentence. The most intensive drug users are said to be in the state's own jails. The law has effectively collapsed.
The difficulty now is to resolve the inconsistency of enforcers "turning a blind eye" to consumption while leaving supply (and thus marketing) untaxed and unregulated in the hands of drug traffickers. This is little short of a state subsidy to organised crime. Indulgence may save the police and the courts from the cost of enforcement, but it leaves every high street open to massive cross-jeopardy, from cannabis to hard drug use.
Ending this inconsistency requires action from legislators. Yet they remain seized by a lethal mix of taboo, tribalism and fear of the media. British policy on all intoxicants and narcotics (from booze to benzodiazepines) is chaotic and dangerous. The government on Thursday admitted its inability to control "legal highs", new ones being invented every week. It is running round back-street laboratories waving bans and arrest warrants like the Keystone Cops.
The catastrophe of death and anarchy that failed drug suppression has brought to Mexico and to other narco-states makes the west's obsessive war on terror seem like a footling sideshow. The road out of this darkness is now being charted not in the old world but in the new, whose heroic legislators deserve to be awarded a Nobel peace prize. It is they who have taken on the challenge of fighting the one world war that really matters – the war on the war on drugs. It is significant that the bravest countries are also the smallest. Thank heavens for small states.
Thursday, 12 December 2013
Reclassifying ketamine is more fiddling while the crack pipe burns
Why can't we talk about our history of intoxication? Photograph: guardian.co.uk
Tis the season to be off your head, legally and in a ladylike manner. At the moment there is a lot of focus on the harm that us people (ie, women) do to ourselves with our: "Yay, it's wine o'clock." Or, as the Sun explains: "So many mums open the wine once the kids are in bed. The cork rarely goes back in the bottle."
One might ask why women's lives are so stressful that self-medication is needed, and why alcohol is such an astonishingly cheap way to get wasted. Legally.
I stress legal because the news that government advisers want ketamine reclassified from a class C to B drug is more fiddling while the crack pipe burns. The drug wasn't banned until 2006, but someone who gets caught with it will now face up to five years in prison instead of two. A heavy price, one feels, for the person who wants to anaesthetise themselves of an evening. Send them to prison where drugs are the currency? It's almost as if government advisers don't live in the real world.
Sure, the long-term effects of ketamine (bladder damage) are not nice and I have never doubted that it is dangerous. When I was 16, two boys I knew broke into a veterinary surgery and injected it. The dose was for horses, not humans. They both died stupid, stupid deaths.
Reclassifying it might mean a few students may now think twice. But those who will be thinking really hard are the manufacturers who will design a legal substance that guarantees the effects of ketamine and can be sold online. For this is how prohibition works hand in hand with capitalism and organised crime. Recently, we have all experienced contact highs – cooking up meth (Breaking Bad), cheering on Nigella (coke), Paul Flowers (a vile cocktail of everything and ill- considered banking). We watch Russell Brand's abstinence monologues that do indeed break the barriers of space and time.
There is no joined-up drugs policy. It is rare that I say a good word about George Osborne but, as I have said in the past, I don't care if he took cocaine. Because I don't. And to be fair to Nick Clegg – maybe I really am out of my mind – he admits that in the war on drugs, drugs won, acknowledging that many senior police officers want decriminalisation. Addiction, Clegg declared recently, is a health issue, not a criminal justice one.
Facts remain a dangerous substance in this debate, as Professor David Nutt knows. In 2009, he said that illegal drugs should be classified according to the harm, both social and individual, they cause. Alcohol would certainly have a high classification. Booze and tobacco, he said, were more harmful than LSD, cannabis and ecstasy. So he had to be got rid of, as few politicians ever seem to be able to expand their minds enough to consider actual evidenced-based policy-making.
Decriminalising certain drugs would inevitably mean misuse. But the unsayable thing is that many of us use drugs, legal and illegal, at certain stages in our lives. And enjoy them.
Instead, however, we hand over the trade to organised crime, which is why Mexico is in the state it is now, upping its poppy production massively. We have spent 10 years trying to bomb or bribe away the only cash crop the Afghans can grow (the opium poppy). What do we want them to sell? Cabbages? This year is a record one for the crop, produced mainly in Helmand, so that has really worked.
You may be the sort of person who does not want to drink or take drugs. You may not wish to expand your mind, or lose it. You may not want to connect the handing-out of mood-altering SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) with kids smoking skunk and mums' little wine clubs. You may think it's no longer cool to neck any pills other than statins. You may want to move to Uruguay, which has just legalised marijuana, though I can't think of anything worse than being in Montevideo with a load of gap yahs. It's not my drug of choice, as I like things that make you want to talk.
I would like the real drug conversation, not the gurning, coked-up, aren't-we-amazing one. Not the one where Tulisa is a threat to civilisation. Why can't we talk about our history of intoxication, personal and political? Those who make the laws that would make me a criminal are not coherent in their logic. They are cowards, afraid of a media that is neither clean nor sober. Drugs, legal and illegal, are a fact of life. Even life-enhancing. There will be casualties of drugs but there are casualties of not facing reality. Both need to be managed. Honestly, I really cannot snort another line of this hypocrisy.
Friday, 2 August 2013
Uruguay - the first country to create a legal market for drugs
Uruguay has taken a momentous step towards becoming the first country in the world to create a legal, national market for cannabis after the lower chamber of its Congress voted in favour of the groundbreaking plan.
The Bill would allow consumers to either grow up to six plants at home or buy up to 40g per month of the soft drug – produced by the government – from licensed chemists for recreational or medical use. Previously, although possession of small amounts for personal consumption was not criminalised in the small South American nation, growing and selling it was against the law.
The Bill passed by 50 votes to 46 shortly before midnight on Wednesday after a 14-hour debate as pro-legalisation activists crowded the balconies above the legislature floor.
Uruguay’s Senate, where the ruling left-wing coalition has a larger majority, is now expected to approve the measure. President José Mujica, an octogenarian former armed rebel – who has previously overseen the passing of measures to allow abortion and gay marriage – backs the move.
Proponents of the Bill argue marijuana use is already prevalent in Uruguay and that by bringing consumers out of the shadows the government will be better able to regulate their behaviour, drive a wedge between them and peddlers of harder, more dangerous drugs, and tax cannabis sales.
They also believe that it closes the loophole that outlaws growing or buying cannabis while turning a legal blind eye to its consumption. Currently, judges in Uruguay have discretion to decide whether an undefined small quantity of the drug is for personal use or not.
Campaigners for an end to prohibition were quick to claim the vote as a landmark in the international push for drug policy reform. “Sometimes small countries do great things,” said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the New York-based Drug Policy Alliance, whose board includes entrepreneur Richard Branson, but also the late President Ronald Reagan’s former Secretary of State, George Shultz.
“Uruguay’s bold move does more than follow in the footsteps of Colorado and Washington,” added Mr Nadelmann, referring to the two Western US states that recently also permitted recreational cannabis use. “It provides a model for legally regulating marijuana that other countries, and US states, will want to consider.”
Hannah Hetzer, the Drug Policy Alliance’s Americas coordinator, who is based in Montevideo, added: “At the heart of the Uruguayan marijuana regulation Bill is a focus on improving public health and public safety. Instead of closing their eyes to the problem of drug abuse and drug trafficking, Uruguay is taking an important step towards responsible regulation of an existing reality.”
Nevertheless, the measure has divided Uruguay and in the run-up to the vote few dared predict its outcome, with the 99-member house almost split down the middle. All 49 opposition deputies had agreed to vote against the measure en bloc, while the 50 members of President Mujica’s ruling coalition were due to back it.
One of the government deputies, Darío Pérez, a doctor by training, had warned that cannabis is a gateway drug to harder substances and feared that fully legalising it would trigger a mushrooming of Uruguay’s already serious problems with crack and other cheaper, highly addictive cocaine derivatives.
In the most keenly awaited speech of the debate, Mr Pérez attacked the Bill but said he would vote in line with the coalition whip, although he could not have made his displeasure clearer. “Marijuana is manure,” he told the chamber. “With or without this law, it is the enemy of the student and of the worker.”
Mr Pérez was also unhappy with what he saw as a broken promise by Mr Mujica not to foist the law on a society that was not yet ready for it, citing a recent survey by pollsters Cifra that found 63 per cent of Uruguayans opposed cannabis legalisation while 23 per cent backed it.
Last December, the president had temporarily placed the measure on the back burner to give advocates a chance to rally public opinion. “The majority has to come in the streets,” he said then. “The people need to understand that with bullets and baton blows, putting people in jail, the only thing we are doing is gifting a market to the narco-traffickers.”
But those arguments failed to convince Gerardo Amarilla, a deputy for the conservative opposition National Party, who told the chamber: “We are playing with fire. Maybe we think that this is a way to change reality. Unfortunately, we are discovering a worse reality.”
Official studies from Uruguay’s National Drugs Board have found that of the country’s population of 3.4 million, around 184,000 people have smoked cannabis in the last year. Of that number, 18,400 are daily consumers. But independent researchers believe that may be a serious underestimate. The Association of Cannabis Studies has claimed there are 200,000 regular users in Uruguay.
One thing that no one disputes is that Uruguay has a serious and growing problem with harder drugs, principally cocaine and its highly addictive derivatives flooding into the Southern Cone and Brazil, mainly from Peru and Bolivia. That, in turn, has fuelled a crime wave as addicts seek to fund their cravings. Breaking the link between them and cannabis users is one of the government’s principal justifications for marijuana legalisation.
Under the measure, registered users will be able to buy cannabis from the nation’s chemists, cultivate plants at home and form cannabis clubs of 15 to 45 members to collectively grow up to 99 plants. Although the high would depend on the strength of the cannabis, which can vary significantly, the 40g per month limit would allow a user to potentially smoke several joints every day. To prevent cannabis tourism, such as that which has developed in Amsterdam, only Uruguayan nationals will be able to register as cannabis purchasers or growers.
Uruguay’s move comes as pressure grows across Latin America for a new approach to Washington’s “war on drugs”, which has ravaged the region, seeing hundreds of thousands die in drug-fuelled conflicts from Brazil’s favelas to Mexico’s troubled border cities.
Colombia President Juan Manuel Santos has called for a discussion of the alternatives while his Guatemalan counterpart Otto Pérez Molina has openly advocated legalisation. Meanwhile, Felipe Calderón, President of Mexico from 2006 to 2012, has also called for a look at “market” solutions to the drug trade.
Crucially, all three are conservatives with impeccable records as tough opponents of the drug trade. Mr Pérez Molina is a former army general with a no-nonsense reputation, while Mr Santos served as Defence Minister for his predecessor, the hard-right President Álvaro Uribe. Meanwhile, Mr Calderón was widely criticised during his time in power for the bloodbath unleashed by his full-frontal assault on the drug cartels, a conflict which cost an estimated 60,000 lives during his presidency.
Friday, 22 June 2012
Nationalisation: Uruguay's solution to its drug problem
Law allowing state to sell cannabis could be adopted across Latin America in defiance of US
Simeon Tegel in the Independent
Friday, 22 June 2012
Uruguay – in a bid to curb a narcotics-fuelled violent crimewave across the country – has
unveiled plans to nationalise its cannabis market and become the first government in the
world to sell the soft drug to consumers.
The measure is aimed at both reducing the rising power of drug gangs and the growing
number of users of crack and freebase cocaine in what has traditionally been one of Latin
America's most peaceful nations.
"We want to fight two different things: one is the consumption of drugs and the other is the
trafficking of drugs," said the Defence Minister Eleuterio Fernández Huidobro.
"We believe that the prohibition of certain drugs is creating more problems in society than the
drug itself. Homicides have risen as a result of the settling of accounts [between rival drug
gangs] and this is a clear symptom of the appearance of certain phenomena that did not
exist previously in Uruguay." Under the plans, the government would initially grow cannabis
and sell it to registered users. But once the scheme is up and running, it hopes to cash in
and allow private companies to take over the production of the drug.
Possession of small amounts and consumption of marijuana is currently not illegal in Uruguay
but growing and selling it is. The new bill would seek to put the drug dealers out of business
by making it easier, safer and possibly cheaper for users to buy marijuana from official
dispensaries.
President José Mujica, a former leftwing guerrilla, has now sent a bill to the Uruguayan
congress which is widely expected to approve it. The legislation is part of a larger packet of
measures to tackle law and order issues.
Last night, even opposition lawmakers were tweeting in qualified support. One, Luis Lacalle
Pau, of the centre-right National Party, wrote: "I don't believe it would be a good thing to
continue associating marijuana with money." The measure represents a rejection of the
"stepping stone" argument that cannabis is a gateway drug to more damaging substances. Mr
Fernández Huidobro highlighted the government's expectation that it would actually result in
a fall in the use of harder drugs.
It also marks the latest chapter in the region's gathering rebellion against Washington's "war
on drugs", launched in the 1970s by President Nixon. Many Latin Americans resent being
blamed for producing coca – cocaine's key raw ingredient – when impoverished peasant
farmers are largely responding to demand from the US and Europe.
The costs of prohibition to the region have been huge, with Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador
and Guatemala in particular, seeing tens of thousands die as the drug cartels confront law enforcement and battle each other for control of the main cocaine corridor from the Andes
into the US market.
"An erroneous decision by Nixon has been what has caused all these disasters, declaring a
war that has been won by the narco-traffickers," Mr Fernández Huidobro told the Montevideo
newspaper El País.
In the last 12 months , the Mexican President, Felipe Calderon, has called for "market"
alternatives to prohibition to be considered while Colombia's President, Juan Manuel Santos,
has said he would welcome an international debate about legalisation.
Worryingly for Washington, both presidents come from the right of the political spectrum and
have been staunch supporters of the war on drugs.
Uruguay is thought to have around 150,000 regular consumers of cannabis, roughly 5 per
cent of the population, representing an annual market worth around £50m.
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