Rio de Janeiro.-Brazil has decriminalized marijuana for personal use, making the nation of 203 million the largest to take such a step and the latest sign of growing global acceptance of the drug.
Brazil’s Supreme Court has ruled that Brazilians could possess up to 40 grams of cannabis (roughly enough for 80 joints) without facing penalties, a decision that would take effect within days and remain in place for the next 18 months.
The court asked Congress and Brazilian health authorities to then set the permanent amount of marijuana that citizens could possess.
Thousands of Brazilians are serving prison sentences for possessing amounts of marijuana below the new threshold, legal analysts said.
It is unclear how the decision would affect those sentences.
Many are black men, who account for 61% of drug trafficking prosecutions but 27% of the population.
Studies have shown that thousands of black Brazilians have been convicted in situations that have resulted in lesser or no charges against whites.
Brazil has long taken a tough criminal approach to drugs, so its decision to effectively allow citizens to smoke marijuana is part of a notable shift in public opinion and drug policy over the past two decades.
More than 20 countries have decriminalized or legalized recreational use of marijuana, most of them in Europe and America.
Many more countries have decriminalized marijuana, meaning they have abolished criminal penalties for possession of small amounts of the drug, although it remains technically illegal and authorities still pursue dealers.
In many cases, the changes have been part of a broader political shift to treat drug use as a health problem rather than a criminal act.
In the United States, marijuana remains illegal at the federal level, but states can now set their own policies.
Voters in Colorado and Washington first approved recreational marijuana use in 2012; now, more than half of Americans live in states where marijuana is legal.
According to Gallup, seventy percent of Americans now believe marijuana should be legal, up from 31 percent in 2000.
Although the country now has a more lenient federal marijuana policy than the United States, far fewer Brazilians than Americans are in favor of the drug.
Less than a third of Brazilians said they supported decriminalizing marijuana, according to a March survey of 2,000 people by Datafolha, a Brazilian pollster.
Still, liberalization of drug policies has led to changing attitudes in many parts of the world, according to Angela Me, head of research at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
“The perception of the risk of cannabis has decreased and this is reflected in the data on the percentage of young people who believe that cannabis is harmful,” he said.
“There has been a huge drop in both North America and Europe.”
Brazil’s Supreme Court has decriminalized marijuana after nearly a decade of deliberations over a 2009 court case.
That case centered on a 55-year-old man who was caught with 3 grams of marijuana while in prison on a separate charge in Sao Paulo.
He was sentenced to two months of community service, but his lawyer appealed, arguing that punishing drug users violated Brazil’s constitution.
Since 2015, the Supreme Court has delayed ruling on the case because the justices disagreed on how to distinguish between users and dealers, which drugs should be decriminalized and who should be in charge of setting drug policy.
The court reached a majority on Tuesday and finalized its decision on Wednesday.
In the ruling, Supreme Court President Luis Roberto Barroso said the decision does not condone marijuana use but rather acknowledges failed drug policies that have led to the mass incarceration of poor young people, pushing many of them into organized crime.
“At no point are we legalizing or saying that drug use is a positive thing,” he said.
“The strategies we have adopted are not working.”
In 2006, the Brazilian Congress passed a law that aimed to increase penalties for drug traffickers and reduce them for consumers.
The law required milder forms of punishment for drug users, such as community service.
However, the law was vague about what constituted a dealer, and critics say police and prosecutors have used it to jail more drug users.
Ten years after the law was passed, the percentage of prisoners detained on drug charges rose from 9% to 28%, according to Human Rights Watch.
Studies have shown that black men have been disproportionately affected.
A study of drug cases between 2010 and 2020 in São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, showed that police classified 31,000 Black Brazilians as dealers in situations where white people were treated as consumers, according to the Insper Education and Research Institute, a Brazilian university.
“Skin color matters when it comes to how drug laws are applied,” said Cristiano Maronna, director of Justa, a research group that investigates the Brazilian justice system.
“The darker your skin,” he said, the greater the chances of being charged with “trafficking, even in small amounts.”
In its decision, the Supreme Court sought to clarify the threshold between possession and trafficking.
The court said people could still be charged with trafficking if they are found with other items commonly used in drug dealing, such as a scale.
Maronna said that despite the new policy, Brazil still has some of the toughest drug laws in Latin America, which has helped fill the country’s prisons.
Brazil has the third largest prison population in the world, after the United States and China.
Even before the new marijuana policy was finalized, there were already efforts by Brazilian law enforcement to undo it.
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2024-07-03 02:00:54