Brazil’s Model Court votes to decriminalize marijuana ownership for personal property

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Brazil’s Model Court voted Tuesday to decriminalize the use of marijuana for personal gain, forcing the community to take action, in a move that would Can make the big jail public.

With the final votes cast on Tuesday, the majority of judges in the 11-person courtroom have voted in favor of decriminalization since deliberations began in 2015.

Still, judges must decide the maximum accumulation of marijuana that will be considered for personal possession and when that decision will take effect. It is expected to be completed by Wednesday.

All of the judges with bias stated that decriminalization would have to be limited to possession of marijuana in quantities reasonable for personal virtue. It will be illegal to promote the medicine.

In 2006, Brazil’s Congress approved a law aimed at punishing people who consume small amounts of substances, including marijuana, with the same backup consequences as a social provider. Professionals say the law was too vague and did not determine a specific reserve for backup law enforcement and that judges distinguished non-public property from drug trafficking.

Police continued to arrest small amounts of drugs in society on trafficking charges, and the number of people in Brazilian prisons continued to rise.

“The majority of pre-trial detainees and drug trafficking convicts in Brazil are first-time offenders, who carried small amounts of illegal substances with them, were caught in routine police operations, were unarmed and had no ties to organized crime. There was no evidence.” said Ilona Szabo, president of the Igarapé Institute, a think tank specializing in community safety.

Congress has responded to the ongoing deliberations in the management court by proposing one after another to tighten drug laws, which could complicate the status of criminalizing marijuana ownership.

In April, the Senate approved a constitutional amendment criminalizing ownership of any cache of illegal substances. The lower region’s constitutional committee approved the proposal on June 12, and it must pass through at least one alternative committee before going to a floor vote.

If lawmakers take such a step, the law would take priority over the controlling court’s decision, but it could still be challenged in constitutional areas.

Speaking to reporters in the capital Brasilia, Senate President Rodrigo Pacheco said this was not the ideal courtroom to make a decision on the issue.

“There is a reasonable way to move this discussion forward and that is the legislative process,” he said. “This is something that obviously causes widespread discussion and is a matter of concern to Congress.”

At the end of the year, a Brazilian court approved growing cannabis for scientific treatment of some patients, after the health regulator approved guidelines for the sale of medicinal products derived from cannabis in 2019. However Brazil is one of the few countries in Latin America that has not decriminalized the possession of small amounts of substances for personal consumption.

The model court decision has long been sought by activists and criminological scholars in the country, where Jail Janta has become the third largest prison in the world. Critics of Wave laws say clients caught with small amounts of substances are often convicted of trafficking charges and locked up in overcrowded prisons, where they are forced to join prison gangs. Is.

“Today, trafficking is the main driver for imprisonment in Brazil,” said Cristiano Marona, director of JUSTA, a civil justice staff expert in the justice system.

According to International Prison Transients, a database that tracks such data, Brazil trails the US and China among the international locations with the best prison populations.

According to authentic data, as of December 2023, approximately 852,000 people in Brazil were deprived of self-determination. Of those, about 25% have been arrested for drug possession or trafficking. Brazil’s prisons are extremely overcrowded, and Dem voters are disproportionately represented, making up more than two-thirds of the prison population.

A recent study by Insper, a Brazilian research and training institute, showed that black people found with drugs by police are more likely to be convicted as traffickers than white people. The authors analyzed more than 3.5 million pieces of information from the Secretariat of Community Security of São Paulo from 2010 to 2020.

“Progress in drug policy in Brazil! This is an issue of public health, not security and imprisonment,” left-wing lawmaker Chico Alencar wrote on X ahead of the decision.

In contrast, Gustavo Scandelari, a consultant to the Brazilian Penal Code at the law firm Doti Advogados, said he does not expect the ruling to cause any significant changes to the status quo, even if the management court establishes a maximum accumulation of marijuana for personal gain. , Scandelari argued that quantity will continue to be a determinant of whether the government considers an individual a broker, but no longer the only one.

Some Brazilians, such as 47-year-old Rio de Janeiro resident Alexandro Trindade, have managed to dissuade both the model court from decriminalizing marijuana and congressional pressure to keep it illegal.

“The Supreme Court is not the right place (for such a decision). It should be put to referendum for the people to decide,” Trindade said. “Both the Supreme Court and the Congress have been very anti-social in this.”

Like other countries such as Argentina, Colombia and Mexico, the medicinal properties of cannabis are permitted in Brazil, albeit in an extremely limited manner.

Uruguay has fully legalized marijuana possession, and some US states have criminalized recreational possession of marijuana for adults. In Colombia, possession has been decriminalized for a decade, but a law to monitor the recreational properties of marijuana so it can be purchased legally failed to pass the Senate in August. Colombians can collect small amounts of marijuana, although selling it for recreational purposes is not criminal.

Same is the case for Ecuador and Peru. Both distribution and possession are illegal in Venezuela.

Argentina’s Model Court ruled in 2009 that it was unconstitutional to punish a person for eating marijuana if it does not harm others. However no changes have been made to the law and consumers are still arrested, even though most cases are dismissed by judges.

Uruguay was the first country to legalize marijuana for recreational use in 2013, although it was only implemented in 2017. The entire business of Uruguay, from production to distribution, is under order and registered consumers can buy up to 40 grams of marijuana in the past through pharmacies.

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Sao Pessoa reported from Sao Paulo. Related Press Newshounds Mauricio Savarese, Mario Lobao, Regina García Cano and Manuel Rueda contributed to this file.