Brazil & Southern Cone - December 2013 (ISSN 1741-4431)

From 10 December Uruguay has a law that regulates, under state control, the cultivation and sale of cannabis. It was pushed through congress on the strength of the ruling Frente Amplio’s majority and, should the opposition win the elections in August 2014, it will be repealed. Well aware that the majority of the public opposes the law, the current administration is already conceding the possibility that, if it is proven not to work, it could change course on this matter.

The law obtained final approval from the senate in a 16-13 vote. According to pollsters Cifra, 61% of the public opposes the law, only five percentage points less than a year ago despite the government’s efforts to persuade them of its benefits. That the government went ahead regardless may reflect the fact that disapproval of the law was highest among the opposition Partido Nacional (Blancos) and Partido Colorados, and approval was highest among Frente Amplio followers.

Still, the government has opened the door, if not to repeal the law at least to amend it if it proves not to work. Julio Calzada, head of the Junta Nacional de Drogas (JND, the antidrugs agency), said a day before the bill received final approval, “This is an experiment in the purest and most sincere form because when one seeks alternatives one must necessarily experiment. Anything else would be dogmatism. We don’t want to fall into the same mistakes as those who tell us that the solution lies with what we have been doing so far, even when the results tell us systematically the contrary.”

Calzada has said that since 2001 the number of Uruguayans using cannabis has increased by 120%. This is hard to verify because reliable historic series are not available (Uruguay has not provided figures beyond 2006 for the OAS’s Cicad database). Using his own snapshot for the current situation, about 75,000 Uruguayans use cannabis at least once a month. This is equivalent to 2.9% of the population above the age of 14 — a low level in Latin America.

Seizures of cannabis plants and leaves (often used as an indicator of the size of the consumer market, but also an indicator of the efficiency of the antidrugs effort) have been erratic, with similar peaks in 2007 and 2011, and falls of up to two-thirds in between.

Prevalence of cannabis use would be one of the indicators of the new law’s effectiveness, but this will require hard, reliable data — and time for the new cultivation and commercialisation system to work (certainly unlikely before next year’s elections).

The crime factor

Another measure of effectiveness would be the neutralisation of the criminal impact of illegal trafficking. The government has suggested that the rate of intentional homicides is an indicator — on the strength of the assumption that one dominant motive, labelled ‘settlement of accounts’, reflects the growing violence attributable to drug traffickers.

Statistics show a peak of intentional homicide cases averaging just over 18 cases a month in 2008-10, one-year slump to just under 17, and a second peak of more than 22 in 2012. In the first half of this year there were 147 cases, a monthly average of 24.5 — a rise of 73% of the first half of 2012 which the authorities are finding it hard to explain.

As a gauge of the cannabis law’s effectiveness, this will first have to be persuasively connected to illegal drug trafficking. It is worth mentioning that in 2012 Uruguay’s intentional homicide rate was 8.1 per 100,000, below ‘epidemic’ level and one of the lowest in the Americas.