Summary

In 2013, Uruguay became the first country in the world to legalize the entire cannabis market, from production to distribution and sales. Consuming cannabis had been legal in the country since 1974, and consumption had been increasing before the 2013 legalization.

Still, the history of the regulations concerning cannabis in Uruguay had not been very different from those in most of the countries in the Western world: around 1920, the country had moved to prohibit cannabis following international conventions on the issue and pressure from conservative elements of the nation. Uruguay’s two important departures from the international norm have been Law 14.294 and Law 19.172. Law 14.294, enacted by the military regime in 1974, prohibited the planting, cultivating, and sale of any plant from which a narcotic drug could be extracted—including cannabis—but consumption and possession for personal consumption were not to be prosecuted. Law 19.172 was passed almost forty years later, in 2013, to regulate the entire cannabis market. The current regulations can be understood as a moderate version of legalization because the government is responsible for control of the import, export, cultivation, harvesting, processing, acquisition, storage, sale, and distribution of cannabis.

Today, ten years after the establishment of the legal cannabis market, most users still access cannabis illegally. In other words, despite having the option of accessing cannabis legally, most users choose not to.

National data from 2018 shows that unregistered users do not differ from registered ones in their socio-demographic characteristics, as one might have expected, but they do differ in their consumption patterns: registered cannabis users consume with greater frequency and, possibly as a consequence of this, they also are at greater risk of abusing the drug.