President Luis Lacalle Pou said that Uruguay committed “an error” in passing a law that implicates the State in the commercialization of marijuana, in an interview with the BBC published on Friday.
“I do not believe in states growing and selling marijuana. I believe in people, cannabis clubs or whatever we have, that produce their own marijuana and can have their own marijuana circles. And not the State”, he affirmed. The Uruguayan president in London, speaking on the British network’s Hard Talk program.
The South American country became in 2013 in the first country in the world to legalize the production and sale of marijuana, an initiative considered by the government of then leftist President José Mujica as an experiment to combat drug trafficking.
The Cannabis Regulation Law enables three mechanisms to legally access the drug: self-cultivation in homes, cooperative cultivation in clubs, and the sale of marijuana produced by private companies under state control in pharmacies.
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Currently, about twenty pharmacies sell state cannabis. A 5-gram package costs about 10 dollars, a price that is intended to compete with that offered on the illegal market.
For Lacalle Pou, the State “does not have to be in plantations and selling drugs”; , because production “is not sustainable.”
“In fact, we are putting money in because we have to put some money in monthly, annually,” he added.
“We made a mistake. That’s why I didn’t vote for it. at that moment” when he was a senator, he added the center-right president, who carried out this week an official visit to the United Kingdom and met with Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
“Now we have the system working. so So we can change it, but we can’t change it from one day to the next,” he said.