Brazil decriminalized the personal use of marijuana on Wednesday, making the country of 203 million people 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 can possess up to 40 grams of marijuana – roughly enough for 80 joints – without penalty, a decision that will take effect within days and remain in force for the next 18 months.
The court asked Brazil’s Congress and health authorities to determine the amount of cannabis citizens can permanently possess. Selling cannabis remains a criminal offense.
Legal analysts say thousands of Brazilians are serving prison terms for possessing amounts of marijuana below the new threshold. It’s unclear how the decision will affect those convictions.
Many of them are black men, who make up 61% of drug trafficking prosecutions but 27% of the population. Studies show that thousands of black Brazilians have been convicted, while white people have had fewer or no charges.
Brazil has long had a harsh criminal approach to drugs, so its decision to effectively allow citizens to smoke marijuana is part of a significant shift in public opinion and public policy toward drugs over the past two decades. More than 20 countries have now decriminalized or legalized the recreational use of cannabis, most of them in Europe and the Americas.
Mexico will legalize cannabis in 2021; Luxembourg did so last year; and Germany in April.
Canada and Uruguay have allowed licensed sales of marijuana for years. More countries have decriminalized marijuana, meaning they have abolished criminal penalties for possession of small amounts, although it is still technically illegal and authorities are still targeting traffickers.
In many cases, these changes are part of a broader policy shift toward treating drug use as a health problem rather than a crime.
In the United States, marijuana remains illegal at the federal level, but states can now set their own policies. Since Colorado and Washington state voters first approved marijuana for recreational use in 2012, more than half of Americans live in states where marijuana is legal.
According to Gallup, 70% of Americans now believe marijuana should be legal, compared with 31% in 2000.
Brazil has had the opposite experience. While the country now has more liberal federal marijuana policies than the United States, far fewer Brazilians support the drug than Americans.
A March survey of 2,000 people by Brazilian pollster Datafolha showed that less than a third of Brazilians support legalizing marijuana.
Still, liberalization of drug policy has led to changing attitudes in many parts of the world, said Angela May, research director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
“Perceptions of the risks of cannabis have declined, as can be seen in data on the proportion of young people who believe cannabis is harmful,” she said. “Both North America and Europe have seen significant declines.”
Brazil’s Supreme Court decriminalized marijuana after nearly a decade of deliberations in a 2009 court case. The case centers on a 55-year-old man who was arrested in São Paulo jail with 3 grams of marijuana. He was sentenced to two months of community service, but his lawyers appealed that punishing drug users violated Brazil’s constitution.
The Supreme Court has delayed ruling on the case since 2015 as justices disagree on how to distinguish drug users from dealers, which drugs should be legalized and who should be responsible for setting drug policy. The court received a majority vote on Tuesday and issued a final decision on Wednesday.
Chief Justice Luis Roberto Barroso said in the ruling that the ruling did not condone marijuana use but acknowledged failed drug policies that have led to the mass incarceration of poor youth, leaving many of them trapped in Organized crime.
“We will never decriminalize drug use or say drug use is a positive thing,” he said. “The strategies we adopted are not working.”
In 2006, Brazil’s Congress passed a law aimed at toughening penalties for drug dealers and easing penalties for drug users.
The law requires milder forms of punishment for drug users, such as community service. However, the law is vague about what constitutes a trafficker, and critics say police and prosecutors use the law to send more drug users to prison.
Ten years after the law was passed, the proportion of prisoners detained on drug charges rose from 9 percent to 28 percent, according to Human Rights Watch.
Studies show that black men are disproportionately affected. A study of drug cases in Brazil’s largest city, São Paulo, from 2010 to 2020 showed that while white people were seen as drug users, police labeled 31,000 black Brazilians as traffickers, according to the Insper Institute of Education and Research at the University of Brazil. .
“Skin color matters when it comes to the application of anti-drug laws,” said Cristiano Maronna, director of Justa, a research group that investigates Brazil’s justice system. “The darker your skin,” he said, the more likely you are to be charged with “trafficking, even in small quantities.”
In its ruling, the Supreme Court aimed to clarify the line between possession and trafficking. The court said people could still be charged with trafficking if they find other items commonly used in drug sales, such as scales.
Despite the new policies, Brazil still has some of the toughest drug laws in Latin America, which has led to overcrowding in the country’s prisons, Mr. Marona said. Brazil has the third largest prison population in the world, behind the United States and China.
Even before the new cannabis policy was finalized, there were already efforts to reverse it in Brazil. Conservatives in Brazil’s Congress are pushing for a bill to amend the constitution to criminalize marijuana possession.
Congressional leaders say the issue should be left to Congress, and most lawmakers oppose decriminalization.
