Brazil will be the latest Latin American country to adopt cannabis decriminalization reforms after the country’s Supreme Court voted Tuesday to decriminalize the possession of cannabis for personal use, the Associated Press reports.
The court still needs to set possession limits for what would be considered “personal use” and establish when the reforms will take effect. Additionally, selling cannabis will remain a crime under the ruling.
The ruling should clarify a 2006 federal law that sought to reduce prison populations by shifting penalties for low-level drug possession toward alternative punishments such as community service. That law, however, was too vague for law enforcement to differentiate between personal use and drug trafficking and did not reduce the prison population as planned, the report said.
Ilona Szabó, president of the Brazillian think tank Igarapé Institute, suggested that most people arrested in Brazil on drug trafficking charges are carrying small quantities that could be intended only for personal use.
“The majority of pre-trial detainees and those convicted of drug trafficking in Brazil are first-time offenders, who carried small amounts of illicit substance with them, caught in routine police operations, unarmed and with no evidence of any relationship with organized crime.” — Szabó, via the AP
After the ruling, Brazil Senate president Rodrigo Pacheco told reporters that it shouldn’t be up to the Supreme Court to enact significant cannabis reforms: “There is an appropriate path for this discussion to move forward and that is the legislative process,” he said in the report. “It is something that, obviously, arouses broad discussion and it is a subject of preoccupation for Congress.”
The 11-person Supreme Court started deliberations on the cannabis decriminalization issue in 2015.
Medical cannabis is legal in Brazil but it is heavily restricted.
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