Ave "maria".../ Holanda, Uruguay, Colorado

"Perhaps 
the stricter government control

favoured by Uruguay

is the model to watch."

Rebecca Coombes, 

BMJ magazine editor

Ver

Currently the majority of the world’s cannabis users, who number between 119 million and 224 million, are supplied by unregulated criminal markets. The health and social harms associated with this illegal trade motivated Uruguay in 2013 to become the first country to legalise and regulate the production and sale of cannabis for non-medical use. Its government said, “As things stand today, drug dealers try to push harder drugs on teenagers who go to them for cannabis. This law will change that and prevent cannabis from at least being a step to more potent drugs.”

“For most jurisdictions cannabis offers a blank canvas,” says Steve Rolles, senior policy analyst for Transform, a UK based think tank on drug policy. “It provides an opportunity to learn from past errors and replace criminal markets with regulatory models that are built on principles of public health and wellbeing from the outset, without a large scale legal commercial industry resisting reform.” (...)

Uruguay model

Public health advocates, however, favour the Uruguay model because it is far more restrictive than that in Colorado and Washington. The government has a state monopoly at wholesale level, and licensed firms produce cannabis—limited to around five strains with upper limits on potency—which is then sold in authorised pharmacies. Non-medical use is also rationed to no more than 40 g a month per user. Advertising is banned, as is smoking in smoke-free areas. In addition to state licensed cultivation, the government allows limited home production of up to six plants, and it permits cannabis clubs, which can plant a maximum of 99 plants. All purchasers are registered by a new state agency called the Institute of Regulation and Control of Cannabis.

Drug harms in the UK: a multicriteria decision analysis

David J Nutt, Leslie A King, Lawrence D Phillips, on behalf of the Independent Scientifi c Committee on Drugs (Ver)

Drugs ordered by their overall harm scores

Ver también:
Are we entering a new era of cannabis regulation? An overview of current cannabis production regimes 

Uruguay: Ay...! / Hay marihuana en las farmacias?

La marihuana sale del armario / Mario Vargas Llosa