Bogotà, Colombia
CNN
—
It’s the residence of infamous drug trafficker Pablo Escobar, and the origin of legendary Santa Marta Gold – as soon as the most sought-after styles of weed in the United States – named after Colombia’s Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountain vary.
For many, Colombia is synonymous with drug cartels and narco-traffickers. It is one among the largest narcotics producers in the world – final 12 months, the US authorities estimated was producing over a million kilograms of cocaine, the highest in the world and greater than the two closest nations, Peru and Bolivia, mixed. So when the South American country’s new president says he intends to control the use of unlawful substances – or a minimum of a few of them – the world listens.
“It is time to accept that the war on drugs has been a complete failure,” Colombian President Gustavo Petro introduced throughout his inauguration festivities earlier this month, commenting on a invoice his administration just lately introduced to legalize leisure marijuana to Congress.
Colombia’s legislation already permits the manufacturing of hashish for medical purposes, principally to be exported to overseas markets like the United States and Canada, however supporters of the new laws imagine that solely legalizing leisure hashish can push 1000’s of farmers away from drug trafficking and into the authorized commerce.
To today, the Colombian state faces challenges over management of its territory by a wide range of prison actors, from former left-wing guerrillas and paramilitaries to narco-cartels and arranged crime syndicates. Drug trafficking is a robust income for these outlaws, and over the previous 50 years public authorities have pushed a prohibitionist agenda, banning the commerce and consumption of medicine to be able to hit the criminals of their pockets. But the stream of unlawful medicine by no means ceased.
“We will never achieve peace in Colombia until we regulate drug trafficking,” stated Senator Gustavo Bolivar, one among the signatories of the new invoice and an in depth ally of the new president.
“Not even the United States, with all their might and money, could win the war on drugs… Right now, Colombia produces more drugs than when Pablo Escobar was alive, there are more consumers, more farmers. The drug trade is growing despite the money we invest in fighting it, and the thousands of deaths we suffer,” stated Bolivar, who just lately traveled to Colorado for a firsthand have a look at the financial advantages of legalizing weed.
In an interview, Bolivar informed CNN it was hypocritical of the United States to legalize marijuana at residence, and supporting drug wars overseas equivalent to in Colombia, the place Washington sends thousands and thousands of {dollars} yearly to arm and prepare Colombian forces of their battle towards the cartels.
A landmark report from the Truth Commission, an interdisciplinary panel tasked to analyze over 50 years of civil battle in Colombia, discovered that drug trafficking helped prolong the battle regardless of nearly $8 billion in army help from the US to Colombia. At least 260,000 Colombians, the overwhelming majority civilians, had been killed in the violence.
The marketing campaign to legalize weed in Colombia unites left-wing senators like Bolivar with civil society organizations and deep-pocketed overseas traders, and has acquired a lift over the final 12 months from the country’s altering politics, with Petro ascending to the presidency and progressive events now a majority in Colombian congress.
“We saw the legalization of adult-use recreational two, three, or four years down the line… but now we’re hoping for this year,” stated Luis Merchan, a Colombian businessman who’s the CEO of Flora Growth, a Toronto-based firm that’s investing in Colombian marijuana from medical hashish to textile hemp.
The campaigners who’ve demanded this shift for years agree.
“We think now the time is ripe to do it,” says Luis Felipe Ruiz, an investigator at Colombia’s NGO Dejusticia, which helps decriminalizing medicine and has documented the struggle on medicine for years. Drug trafficking is the high explanation for detention in Colombia and, in keeping with the Colombian Justice Ministry, 13% of the country’s detainees are serving a sentence associated to the drug commerce. Ruiz argues that one among the advantages of legalizing marijuana would even be reducing the jail inhabitants in the country.
“There’s a large part of the political world that is ready to have a debate on legalizing marijuana and, frankly, taking away the stigma against cannabis is already a great victory for us,” Ruiz informed CNN.
Those who oppose legalization hail from the conservative proper and imagine the shift would simply make drug abuse simpler. Former President Alvaro Uribe, a political mentor of Petro’s predecessor Ivan Duque and the most important exponent of conservativism in the country, tweeted in 2020 that “recreational marijuana leads to other drugs, alters the neurons, the consumer reaches states of alienation, loses control over his decisions, which is the loss of his freedom,” celebrating when a earlier venture to legalize weed was blocked in Congress.
Historically, marijuana in Colombia is grown by small-scale farmers who can’t afford the pharmaceutical licenses required to provide medical hashish, so that they promote their product to drug cartels.
The invoice introduced to Congress may permit these small-scale farmers, most of them based mostly in chronically underdeveloped rural areas of Colombia, to lastly enter the authorized market.
COCCAM, a confederation of coca, marijuana and poppy growers that works as a lobbying group for illicit farmers, estimates that as much as 3,000 households rely on unlawful marijuana as a most important supply of their earnings, principally in the southwestern division of Cauca. In most instances, these farmers stay in remoted rural areas which might be hours away from the closest paved highway.
Compared to authorized agricultural merchandise like fruit and greens, marijuana and coca leaves don’t spoil for days and promote at a better value per kilogram. They even have the benefit of rising all-year spherical, whereas most vegetation give a harvest just a few months a 12 months.
Because of Colombia’s historic function, legalizing leisure use could be an immense cultural shift – and maybe a supply of satisfaction, Marchan stated.
“It would be not only a source of pride for someone like me for what was frowned upon: I have been in business for a number of decades and when somebody learns that I’m from Colombia you always get the ‘ahh,’ that weird look,” he stated.
Bolivar, the senator, believes the Colombian regulatory system will, ultimately, comply with the identical path by legalizing not solely marijuana however even cocaine – the most profitable supply of earnings for the cartels.
Drafting numbers on an unlawful market is rarely an actual science, but a 2016 study from the Colombian government estimated that drug trafficking – the stream of unlawful medicine, principally cocaine, that’s produced in Colombia and bought in worldwide markets from Europe, to North America, to Asia – was price as much as 3.8% of the Colombian GDP or $7.5 million at the time.
In comparability, unlawful drug consumption – meant as the medicine which might be consumed illegally in Colombia and the place marijuana performs a bigger function – was price 0.75% of the Colombian GDP – $2.18 million.
“Marijuana is small change in the drug business. The big money that the cartels are making, and the lion’s share of the problem, is called cocaine. And people in Colombia and Mexico will continue to die as long as we look at the problem with hypocrisy,” Bolivar informed CNN.
He envisions a community of state-regulated dispensaries the place cocaine may very well be bought beneath medical prescription, and regional agreements throughout different drug producing international locations. The three largest producers of cocaine in the world – Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru – are all at present dominated by ideologically aligned, left-wing leaders. Bolivia has a thriving authorized market of coca byproducts, principally dry leaves which might be chewed by the indigenous inhabitants and already in 2012, the governments of Bolivia and Colombia pushed for a regional re-thinking of drug insurance policies in multilateral conferences.
“We could for example make a small treaty in our countries to modify the 1961 Convention on Narcotic Drugs and plant the first flag of legalization in the world; other countries may follow,” the senator stated.
But earlier than worldwide treaties are rewritten, Colombia may nonetheless have a authorized battle forward of it. As it stands, the Colombian constitution explicitly forbids utilizing narcotic medicine with out medical prescription; so even when Congress handed a legislation legalizing leisure marijuana, it may very well be deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
An enchantment to remove that article has already began by one other lawmaker, Congressman Juan Carlos Losada.
“It’s a two-front battle. Our legalizing bill in Congress, and the appeal by Losada to the constitutional court. Whichever comes first we will support it, because this country needs peace,” stated Bolivar.
