Laberintos de prohibición y regulación (2021)

Cover of the first edition, Editorial Dejusticia, 2021.

Cover of the first edition, Editorial Dejusticia, 2021.

Laberintos de prohibición y regulación

Los grises de la marihuana en Colombia

Publication

Author	Luis Felipe Cruz Olivera and Isabel Pereira Arana
Publisher	Editorial Dejusticia
Place	Bogotá
Published	2021
Pages	200
Language	Spanish
Series	Colección Dejusticia

Coverage

Subjects	Cannabis policy, Drug policy, Medical cannabis, Cannabis markets, Colombia, Northern Cauca
Relevance	A study of Colombia's illegal, grey and legal marijuana markets from 2016 to 2019, with fieldwork in northern Cauca that gathers growers' accounts of when marijuana reached the area, the native varieties the police name there and their displacement by creepy.

Access

ISBN	978-958-5597-98-3
Open access	Read free

Laberintos de prohibición y regulación: los grises de la marihuana en Colombia (Labyrinths of prohibition and regulation: the grey areas of marijuana in Colombia) is a 2021 study of the marijuana markets of Colombia by Luis Felipe Cruz Olivera and Isabel Pereira Arana, researchers in the drug-policy programme of the Bogotá research organisation Dejusticia, which published it in its Colección Dejusticia in November 2021. The book is free to download under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.

The authors divide the country's cannabis economy into illegal, grey and legal markets. They argue that a regulated market should recognise the history of prohibition, the harm and stigma it caused, and the people of the grey market: those who trade in marijuana without legal formalities but take no part in organised crime.

Authors

Luis Felipe Cruz Olivera studied law and sociology at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. His research covers the armed conflict and its relation to drug trafficking, living conditions where coca is grown, and the effects of drug policy on coca-growing communities; at the time of publication he was a researcher in Dejusticia's drug-policy programme. Isabel Pereira Arana studied political science at the Universidad de los Andes and holds a master's degree in development studies from the Graduate Institute in Geneva. She coordinated the drug-policy programme. Her earlier publications include Voces desde el cocal and Los caminos del dolor.

Background

The research was carried out between 2017 and 2019 within the Colectivo de Estudios de Drogas y Derecho, a network of researchers in 11 Latin American countries who documented the region's marijuana markets and the moves towards regulation in each country. A preliminary version was the Colombian contribution to the collective's book Cannabis en Latinoamérica: la ola verde y los retos hacia la regulación. The Open Society Foundations' Latin America programme funded that chapter.

The authors made two field trips. At the ExpoMedeWeed fair in Medellín in November 2017 they catalogued the brands and businesses on show and interviewed entrepreneurs and activists. In Northern Cauca they joined a "cannabis tour" through Caloto, Corinto and Toribío. There they interviewed farmers, Indigenous people and officials about legal and illegal growing and about the obstacles growers met in entering the new medical market. All interviewees' names were changed. The figures come from the National Police's anti-narcotics research centre (Ciena) and crime observatory, the Observatorio de Drogas de Colombia, the police register of corrective measures (obtained by a right-of-petition request), the ministries of Justice and Health and the International Narcotics Control Board, covering roughly 2016 to 2019. The northern Cauca material is limited to the period from 2015 to May 2019.

Argument

The book sets out to describe Colombia's markets on the eve of wider regulation, with medical use already regulated. It asks whether regulation will be driven by national and foreign cannabis companies, who the actors of each market are and how they deal with one another, and how a market for non-medical use could be regulated with regard to human rights, public health and the inclusion of communities harmed by the war on drugs.

The authors trace the legal market for medical and scientific use to Law 30 of 1986, which provided for it, and to its creation in December 2015, followed by a law of 2016 (Law 1787 of 2016) that set new terms for it. The main criticism of this framework, in their account, is that it shuts out rural growers and the people who had long made cannabis products: once a regulation exists, the ambiguous spaces in which those producers worked disappear and the legal means to seize their goods and prosecute them become clearer. The grey market, the zone between a violent criminal illegality and an exclusionary legality, is in their view the starting point for a regulation that puts public health before the market.

Cannabis history and the Cauca crop

The second chapter gives a history of marijuana in Colombia and of its legal prohibition, from the ban of 1920 to the court and government decisions of 2018, including the bonanza marimbera of the 1970s, for which it draws on Lina Britto's work. The authors state that before the boom there was therapeutic use of the plant in some Indigenous communities of the Cauca Department, and that ointments and pain remedies made from marijuana were known in the south-west before commercial growing began around 1970. A grower they interviewed in Corinto described his grandparents macerating marijuana in a cane spirit to treat pain. The authors speculate that the colonial cultivation of hemp in the region lies behind this use.

For northern Cauca the chapter gives two accounts of when marijuana reached the area, both placing it around 1980. A seed and supplies dealer in Toribío said it came first to the hamlet of La Quebradiza in Corinto, brought by a businessman from Antioquia, and later to El Naranjo in Toribío. He said that the "native varieties" came from Santa Marta by way of Medellín, among them one called Corinto Gold. A journalist's interview with the governor of the López Adentro reserve credited members of the M-19 guerrilla with bringing the seed in the early 1980s. The authors add that the Nasa people of the area regard marijuana as an introduced plant with healing powers, grown mostly for income; coca is to them an ancestral plant.

The third chapter describes the illegal market. A National Police classification of 2016, which the book reproduces, groups cominera, corinto, mango biche and punto rojo as native varieties adapted to the Cauca climate, harvested after seven to eight months, against the creepy lines, which fetched far higher prices and could be harvested more often. A grower interviewed in Toribío said that the native varieties had almost died out because their pollen spoiled the seedless creepy crops. A note to the second chapter quotes a grower who called creepy a generic name for seedless indica plants grown from cuttings and not a variety. The grower named patimorada as the commonest of them.

Contents

After the acknowledgments and the introduction, "El laberinto de la marihuana", the book has six chapters:

1. La marihuana y sus palabras: mercados, leyes, criminalidad y transformación
2. La marihuana en Colombia: historia, ilegalidad y consumo
3. Un negocio en perpetuo boom: el mercado de marihuana en Colombia
4. Mercados grises de marihuana: las oportunidades de la regulación
5. Limpiando a María: abrir el mercado para la marihuana medicinal en Colombia
6. Conclusiones y recomendaciones

Four annexes follow the references: a description of the fieldwork with a table of the people interviewed, the types of stand at ExpoMedeWeed 2017, the evolution of Colombia's anti-cannabis laws, and drug-seizure figures.

See also

• Corinto (appellation) – one of the municipalities of the fieldwork
• Creepy (cannabis) – the cuttings-grown marijuana the third chapter describes
• Marijuana Boom (2020) – the history of the 1970s boom the second chapter draws on
• Northern Cauca – the growing area of the fieldwork
• Punto rojo – one of the native varieties named in the police classification
• Toribío (appellation) – one of the municipalities of the fieldwork