Ironically, around 4:20pm (eastern) today, the phones lit up at NORML with numerous newswire services and major media outlets contacting the organization about a bill in Uruguay that appears to be on greased tracks to pass in the legislature and signed into law by President Jose Mujica as the government itself is proffering the reform legislation.

If Uruguay moves forward, the country will become the first since the signing of the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs in 1961 that has moved forward with a tax-n-regulate policy for non-medical access to cannabis products. The country previously decriminalized cannabis possession in the 1970s.

Two other immediate positive consequences are likely for Uruguay with legalized cannabis:

1) Tourism! Like worldwide tourism!! I’m already looking in Uruguay for good fly fishing areas on Google Maps and buffing up on my Espanol…move over Amsterdam and Jamaica.

2.) Scientific and medical research regarding the remarkable therapeutic qualities of cannabis, along with unfettered research and commercialization of industrial hemp, can find a home in a country where the country’s leaders have the foresight to embrace the myriad of cannabis commerce, rather than waste valuable taxpayers’ dollars on trying to enforce feckless and unenforceable Cannabis Prohibition laws in otherwise freedom-loving, free market-oriented countries.

President ‘Choom Gang‘ Obama, the next time the long festering public policy matter of Cannabis Prohibition is raised in your presence, rather than uncomfortably laugh it off as an unserious policy unworthy of both your attention and wont to reform, consider contacting Uruguay President Jose Mujica.

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