Over past three years, Colombia \u2014 once a name practically synonymous with drug war dystopia \u2014 has retreated from the brink, de-escalating its generations-long crisis with more tolerant policies. A peace process was opened with the guerillas, and in December 2015 medical marijuana was legalized by presidential decree.<\/p>\n
This opened a legal cannabis sector, with Canadian investors especially foreseeing massive exports from a tropical country with a year-round growing season and a legendary reputation for high-quality marijuana.<\/p>\n
What had once meant violence and stigma for Colombia is now coming to mean prosperity and prestige. This agenda is moving apace.<\/p>\n
Vancouver-based\u00a0International Cannabis Corp<\/a>\u00a0announced in a Nov. 15\u00a0press release<\/a>\u00a0that its new cultivation facility outside Bogot\u00e1 had successfully completed its\u00a0Colombian Agricultural Institute<\/a>\u00a0inspection, and is ready to begin producing. The 13-hectare site of \u201coptimal agricultural land\u201d is located in Funza, the heart of the Bogot\u00e1 savanna, and is operating under a pre-paid 10-year lease. International Cannabis Corp anticipates turning the site into a Colombian Cannabis Park, forecasted to produce between 25,000 and 40,000 kilograms of dried cannabis flower per year. Once \u201cfully optimized,\u201d ICC\u2019s Colombian assets are projected to generate up to 500,000 kilograms of dried flower annually.<\/p>\n Yet all this is unfolding amid a sense of fast retrogression since the inauguration in August of President Iv\u00e1n Duque, who is reviving the hardline policies from before the period of de-escalation under two terms of his predecessor Juan Manuel Santos.<\/p>\n On Oct. 1, Duque followed through on his\u00a0pledge to overturn<\/a>\u00a0Colombia\u2019s decriminalization policy,\u00a0which had been in place since 1994. That year, a ruling of the country\u2019s Supreme Court established the right to a \u201cpersonal dose\u201d even of illegal substances. This was later quantified by the judiciary as 20 grams of cannabis or one gram of cocaine or coca paste. But Duque announced that penalties would be re-imposed and illegal drugs even in these small quantities confiscated.<\/p>\n Duque\u2019s Decree 1844 instructs the National Police (which controls all police forces in Colombia) to begin confiscating and destroying the \u201cpersonal dose,\u201d and issuing fines of 208,000 pesos \u2014 about $65, a substantial sum for Colombia\u2019s poor. Those suspected of holding the erstwhile \u201cpersonal dose\u201d for dealing purposes (a determination left entirely to the discretion of the officer) may be arrested. \u00a0The Bogot\u00e1 weekly\u00a0Semana<\/a>\u00a0wrote that with the issuance of Decree 1844, Duque had declared a new \u201cwar\u201d on drugs.<\/p>\n In just the nine days after issuance of the decree, police forces issued over 8,000 tickets, made over 700 arrests, and confiscated more than seven metric tons of illegal drugs (mostly cannabis). The official statistics released by Duque\u2019s new\u00a0Integral Strategy Against Narco-trafficking<\/a>\u00a0were reported by\u00a0El Colombiano<\/a>\u00a0newspaper.<\/p>\n On just the first day of the new policy, police in Barranquilla issued 55 tickets, confiscating 126 grams of cannabis and 75 grams of coca paste, according to the local\u00a0El Heraldo<\/a>.<\/p>\n Hearteningly, voices from within Colombia\u2019s judiciary have dissented from Duque\u2019s crackdown. The chief justice of the\u00a0Supreme Court<\/a>\u2018s penal chamber, Luis Antonio Hern\u00e1ndez, told\u00a0Semana<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cjudges are not going to start sending drug consumers to prison like criminals.\u201d He added that \u201clegalizing marijuana would solve half the problems with drug consumption.\u201d<\/p>\n Duque immediately\u00a0struck back<\/a>, saying that his return to low-level street busts was \u201cnot a\u00a0whim,\u201d and that the judiciary should be \u201chumble\u201d when discussing his policies.<\/p>\n There was an unsettling sense of\u00a0deja vu\u00a0<\/i>for the bad old days of Washington-directed drug war militarization in Colombia when, just days before issuing his decree, Duque\u00a0met with<\/a>\u00a0Donald Trump on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meeting in New York. Duque, of course, approved of the \u201cGlobal Call<\/a>\u201d to renew the drug war that Trump unveiled as the General Assembly convened.<\/p>\n And \u00a0Trump returned the praise in his\u00a0comments<\/a>\u00a0at their joint press conference, gushing that Duque is \u201cvery, very powerful against drugs and drug trafficking\u2026 [O]ne of the reasons I was so happy to see the president\u2019s victory [was] because of his strong stance on drugs.\u201d But Trump added: \u201cNow, if he comes through, we think he\u2019s the greatest. If he doesn\u2019t come through, he\u2019s just another president of Colombia.\u201d Amid uneasy laughter, he quickly appended: \u201cBut I think he\u2019s going to come through. I really do.\u201d<\/p>\n Duque has also followed through on his\u00a0pledge to resume spraying<\/a>\u00a0of the herbicide glyphosate\u00a0on illegal crops, which had been suspended due to health concerns in 2015. This is overwhelmingly aimed at coca leaf, but cannabis is a target of the eradication campaigns as well. The new \u201cfumigation\u201d program (this time carried out by drone rather than bush-plane, which supposedly allows for more accurate targeting)\u00a0commenced<\/a>\u00a0in mid-October in the Bajo Cauca region of Antioquia department.<\/p>\n Duque says he intends to reduce by 70 percent the 170,000 hectares of Colombian territory currently planted with illegal crops over the source of his four-year term. Noting the pressure from Washington for an aggressive eradication campaign,\u00a0Semana<\/a>\u00a0commented that U.S.-Colombia relations have been \u201cre-narco-tized.\u201d<\/p>\n But the spraying is meeting with resistance from many of Colombia\u2019s departmental governors. \u201cTo fumigate is not the solution,\u201d Caquet\u00e1\u2019s Gov. \u00c1lvaro Pacheco\u00a0protested<\/a>, calling instead for social investment to wean rural communities off illegal crops. Nari\u00f1o\u2019s Gov. Camilo Romero\u00a0asserted<\/a>\u00a0that by failing to take adequate measures to protect the health of those on the ground, the new fumigation program violates last year\u2019s ruling of the Constitutional Court\u00a0that allowed spraying to resume.<\/p>\n Actual physical resistance to forced eradication by the impacted\u00a0campesino<\/i>\u00a0communities is apparently being met with pre-emptive terror. Nov. 12 saw the latest mysterious slaying of a local leader of the\u00a0National Coordinator of Coca, Opium and Marijuana Producers<\/a>\u00a0(COCCAM<\/a>). H\u00e9ctor Fabio Almairo was\u00a0assassinated<\/a>\u00a0by unknown gunmen on a motorcycle (a standard method for Colombian\u00a0sicarios<\/i>) in his home pueblo of La Macarena, in Meta department. He had been leading protests to demand restitution from the government for eradicated coca and cannabis crops.<\/p>\n Late September also saw\u00a0protests<\/a>\u00a0in San Jos\u00e9 del Fragua village, in Caquet\u00e1 department, with hundreds of local\u00a0campesinos<\/i>, including women and children, blocking roads to keep out National Police eradication teams. The protesters charged that forced eradication violates the peace accords with the FARC rebels, which mandates that communities must be consulted and consent to all drug crop eradication.<\/p>\n Some are holding out hope that the tide of history is against Duque, and his retrogression will prove temporary. The\u00a0International Drug Policy Consortium<\/a>\u2018s\u00a0recent report<\/a>\u00a0assailing the global drug war as an expensive failure was co-authored by the Colombian human rights attorney Isabel Pereira Arana. Her organization\u00a0Dejusticia<\/a>\u00a0has long documented rights abuses associated with drug enforcement in Colombia.<\/p>\n Discussing Duque\u2019s new hardline posture in an interview with\u00a0El Espectador<\/a>, Pereira Arana said: \u201cIt is encouraging that a country like Canada\u2026 has started to undertake the regulation of recreational cannabis. I believe many nations will follow this example, because we are seeing that to waste so much money on prohibiting a consumption that is much less risky than alcohol makes no sense, and that this money can be invested in health or education.\u201d<\/p>\n TELL US,<\/b>\u00a0what changes in cannabis have you seen where you live?<\/p>\n The post Colombia Returns to Hardline Policies Even as Legal Cannabis Booms<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Over past three years, Colombia \u2014 once a name practically synonymous with drug war dystopia \u2014 has retreated from the brink, de-escalating its generations-long crisis with more tolerant policies. A peace process was opened with the guerillas, and in December 2015 medical marijuana was legalized by presidential decree. This openedContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":190,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,917,6519,6520,95,624,6521,2108,6325,6522,6523,6524,81,97],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30687"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/190"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30687"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30687\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30688,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30687\/revisions\/30688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Adios to the \u2018Personal Dose\u2019<\/h4>\n
Judiciary Dissents, Trump Approves<\/h4>\n
Glyphosate Spraying Back On<\/h4>\n
Will Colombia follow Canada?<\/h4>\n
\n
\nRead More: Colombia Returns to Hardline Policies Even as Legal Cannabis Booms<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"