News Coming From Uruguay

A pretty big percentage of the cannabis users who live in Uruguay have decided not to officially register as “consumers”, which is something each and every pot user should do in order to either smoke, grow or sell cannabis legally in that beautiful little South American nation.

How do I know that? A report was recently published and the numbers indicate that 19% of the Uruguayan cannabis users are not planning to register, and 20% is not even thinking about doing it ever. The reason, of course, seems to be a huge lack of trust: people want to remain anonymous, especially if we consider the fact that smoking pot is not yet considered 100% “ok”by 100% of the population. And this is true within and beyond South America.

According to the law, a citizen should register either as someone who grows his own pot, as a member of a cannabis club or as an individual who buys pot at a pharmacy. This is another problem, because consumers do not live in boxes, and the picture is way more complicated. Therefore, registering would actually cause more than one problem to those who, for instance, buy pot at a pharmacy but also want to grow their own plant and, maybe, belong to a cannabis club – and this is not rare at all.

Fundamentally, the register was created by the government in order to collect data to use for a better set of rules: you need to know the market somehow, if you want to regulate it. If the politicians really want this to work, however, they will have to do much more to get closer to the consumers, offering also a better level of both privacy and security.

So far, looking at the data collected, we can say that the typical Uruguayan user is a young male who lives in Montevideo, a upper-middle class man, with a good wage, a citizen who stands on the left side of the political spectrum and who is not exactly religious. Also, interestingly enough, the numbers show that the public opinion is not very favorable when it comes to cannabis legalization, but the government has not encountered a very strong opposition. Probably, many people think this is all a matter of fighting against organized crime while opening a new market. Still, cannabis is a big social and medical issue, and it should be treated as such. Good quality seeds should be promoted (like those you can buy here http://greenhouseseeds.nl/), and both health and social benefits should be discussed and better understood.

Uruguay remains ahead of the curve. But there is still a lot of work to do!