Pubdate: Mon, 02 Sep 2013
Source: Republican & Herald (PA)
Copyright: 2013 Associated Press
Contact:  http://republicanherald.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1047
Author: Leonardo Haberkorn, Associated Press

REGULATE POT? URUGUAY'S BEEN THERE, WITH WHISKY

MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay (AP) - The government of Uruguay makes Scotch 
whisky. It also makes and sells rum, vodka and cognac, and has done 
so for nearly a century. Many people consider this sideline of the 
state to be an historical accident - a wasteful and even eccentric 
contradiction.

But President Jose Mujica said Uruguay's long experience at the 
center of the nation's liquor business makes it more than capable of 
dominating another substance: marijuana.

Final Senate approval of Uruguay's marijuana law is expected by late 
September, and the government plans to license growers, sellers and 
users as quickly as possible thereafter to protect them from criminal 
drug traffickers, ruling party Sen. Lucia Topolansky, who is also 
Uruguay's first lady, told The Associated Press in an interview.

The law specifically creates a legal marijuana monopoly, making the 
government alone responsible for importing, producing, obtaining, 
storing, commercializing and distributing a drug still considered 
illegal around the world.

A state entity will license producers and control marijuana's 
distribution and sale through the same neighborhood pharmacies that 
sell prescription medicines and toothpaste. Purchases by licensed 
users will be limited to 1.4 ounces a month. Pot-growing cooperatives 
will be encouraged, using government-approved seeds, and people 
registered with the state will be able to grow up to six plants at 
home for personal use, as long as they harvest no more than 17 ounces a year.

The project passed the House by just one vote, and while the ruling 
Broad Front coalition has an easier majority in the Senate, Mujica 
has been campaigning actively for its passage, reminding Uruguayans 
that their government has been controlling the market for addictive 
substances ever since the beginning of the 20th century, when 
President Jose Batlle y Ordonez wanted the state to monopolize 
alcohol production.

"Don Jose Batlle y Ordonez had courage," Mujica said in one of his 
folksy nationwide radio talks, which sound much like the "fireside 
chats" that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt used to broadcast to 
Americans. "The state grabbed it and made a monopoly of alcohol, 
because it couldn't stop the booze, and he said "at least don't 
poison the people - the booze should be good."

Batlle y Ordonez was ahead of his time in promoting social change in 
Latin America, from the separation of church and state to the 
eight-hour workday and maternity leave. And he had several goals for 
alcohol: He wanted the whisky to generate government revenues and 
guarantee a profit stream for farmers, funding the production of a 
national fuel so that Uruguay's cars and trucks wouldn't need 
imported gasoline.

Uruguay wasn't alone in that fight: In 1925, Henry Ford was promoting 
alcohol as the fuel of the future, and it was being blended with 
gasoline from France to the Philippines. But like many other 
countries, Uruguay never achieved this energy independence. Oil 
companies won an intense global campaign to focus on fossil fuels, a 
trend that held until Brazil started using alcohol blends in the 1980s.

Batlle y Ordonez died in 1929 without seeing his dreams realized, but 
his spirit as a statesman inspired Uruguay's congress two years later 
to create Ancap, a state fuel and hard-liquor monopoly that still 
refines imported oil and distills liquor at side-by-side plants in 
Montevideo today.

Ancap's whisky sales peaked at 88,000 gallons a year in 1970, but 
then it began bleeding money. In 1996, it lost its monopoly on 
distilled spirits. By 2002, President Jorge Batlle - the grandnephew 
of Batlle y Ordonez - decided to create a new, privately administered 
Ancap subsidiary to manage the state-held company, making it nimble 
enough to cut costs. Now it has 60 employees and generates nearly $1 
million a year in profits, without any state subsidies.

Topolansky agrees that whisky-making is a good model for the marijuana project.

She said they need to do the same with marijuana, which has long been 
legal to use but not to sell in Uruguay - a situation she said puts 
people at the mercy of dangerous criminals.

"Marijuana consumers go to dealers where they sell it mixed with more 
addictive substances, or they sell them something else. It's a 
clandestine world where we can't enter. The state needs to regulate 
this market, like it did before with alcohol," she said.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom