Marijuana Politics PT 3 – Current Cannabis Climate

Welcome to the third installment of our Marijuana Politics series. We spoke a bit in the past about the origins of prohibition as well as understanding the difference between the federal prohibition and state legalization efforts.

Today, we’ll be talking more about the Global climate of cannabis. Where is it going? What should you know?

Marijuana Politics Globally

As mentioned in the previous installment of this series, the United States was mostly responsible for outsourcing the war on drugs to the rest of the world. Since 1971, the world played ball. They cracked down on all forms of drugs, including marijuana.

This resulted in catastrophic deaths, violence spread throughout the world and millions were incarcerated as a result.

The United States spent billions in places like Colombia, Mexico and the Middle East to maintain the war on drugs. In Mexico alone, under the Merida Initiative, the United States spent more than a billion dollars on equipment, training and so forth.

This resulted in more than 200,000 deaths in Mexico and achieved absolutely nothing in stopping the flow of drugs to the north.

The world started realizing that the war on drugs isn’t working. They also noticed that many states within the United States started legalizing marijuana. This provided the incentive for other countries to start legalizing.

The First Country to Legalize Cannabis

While many other countries were legalizing medical marijuana, there was just one country that completely opted out of the war on marijuana; Uruguay.

Uruguay was the first country in the world to fully legalize cannabis for its citizens. Canada is the second nation poised to legalize cannabis completely this coming July, 2018.

Following Canada’s example, we’ll begin to see many more countries start to legalize. There’s already talks in Mexico for full-scale legalization. The United States recently paved the way for cannabis legalization. While there still is a lot of work to be done within the United States, the trends suggest that cannabis will be legalized within the next five years.

What does a legalized world look like?

As the laws and political climate surrounding cannabis legalization becomes friendlier, we’ll begin to see new means of commerce appear.

Canada is already looking for importers, seeing that the cost of production is expensive in Canada. It would make much more sense for Canada to outsource their growing operations to countries with a cheaper labor force, such as Mexico.

Mexico would be able to provide cheap bulk cannabis deliveries, which would drive down the costs of production and lower the consumer price as well. Canada has already reached out to Jamaica for supply.

Once the United States completely opts out of the war on marijuana, the rest of the world will follow suit. People are understanding that cannabis is not the dangerous scourge the world set it out to be. They are understanding the medical and economic benefits of a legalized cannabis world.

Next week, we’ll be talking about the method the cannabis industry used to change the scope of marijuana politics in the US and the world.

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