Uruguayan President Jose Mujica is no stranger to revolution. As a leader of the Tupamaros guerrilla group in the 1960s and 1970s, he orchestrated an armed uprising against financial institutions and the Uruguayan government — attacks that included political kidnappings and assassinations. He was captured in 1972, escaped twice and eventually spent 14 years in prison, including more than a decade in solitary confinement. Now, he finds himself heading a new rebellion, leading Uruguay on the path to become the world’s first country to legalize marijuana.

Late Tuesday, Uruguay’s Senate took an historic step and voted to approve a measure championed by Mujica that regulates the production, distribution and sale of marijuana for adults. In doing so, the tiny nation of 3.3 million adds momentum to the movement building in Latin America — and in U.S., where Colorado and Washington state have already done so — to legalize the recreational use of marijuana.

“It’s a wonderful sequel to what Washington and Colorado did last year, and it’s going to stir up a new level of debate and discussion,” said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance. “In the same way that Colorado and Washington had an impact on public opinion, I think the step Uruguay is taking can have an analogous impact in the regional and, to some extent, international context.”

A growing list of Latin American leaders has called for alternatives to the blood-soaked war on drugs initiated by the United States 40 years ago and buttressed by the United Nations. That prohibitionist model, they say, has been a spectacular failure. Focused almost exclusively on stemming supply, it has done little to reduce global drug consumption and nothing to stop the violence associated with drug trafficking.

The Uruguayan measure will allow registered users to buy up to 40 grams of cannabis per month from licensed pharmacies. It would also permit domestic cultivation of up to six plants, much like the Colorado law. And residents would be allowed to join marijuana social clubs, which could cultivate and distribute enough marijuana — limited to 99 plants — to meet their needs, a model widely used in Spain. The law, additionally, would permit the government to produce pot for scientific and medicinal studies. And to dissuade pot tourism, only Uruguayan residents will be permitted to buy cannabis. It’s all an effort to treat the use of the drug as a public-health issue instead of a criminal one.

Mujica says the law will snatch the black market from drug traffickers, the drug war’s biggest profiteers. To do so, the government would sell higher-quality marijuana at a lower price: $1 per gram, as opposed to the $1.40 per gram for black-market marijuana that comes primarily from Paraguay. By doing do, Uruguay would tap into the marijuana black market, estimated at $40 million a year, and drastically reduce the $80 million the state spends annually to combat drugs.

“It’s an instrument to diminish the economic gains made by the black market,” Julio Calzada, general secretary of Uruguay’s National Drug Committee, told Al Jazeera America. “If we can remove the profit the black market makes from marijuana sales, we’re going to substantially decrease the black market and its violence.”