Drug Policies and Anti-Prohibitionist Legal Reforms of Marijuana: An Analysis of the Uruguayan, Canadian and Brazilian Models, in Comparative Perspective

Over the past ten years, there has been a paradigm shift in the control of illicit drugs, especially with regard to marijuana. In this sense, this research aims to analyze, from a comparative perspective, the legal reforms and anti-prohibitionist approaches related to marijuana in Uruguay, Canada and Brazil. Several countries around the world have already recognized the failure of the prohibitionist model and have begun to develop public policies on drugs that move away from criminalization, removing the state response from the criminal sphere, with approaches focused on public health and the preservation of the dignity and individual freedom of users. Examples of these policies include harm reduction initiatives, decriminalization of drug users, and market regulation. Thus, based on the idea that local changes can encourage global transformations, this research seeks to investigate the particularities and impacts of anti-prohibitionist legal reforms in relation to marijuana in Uruguay, Canada and Brazil, from a comparative approach. To this end, based on the analysis of official data, the impacts observed in different areas, mainly in the area of public security, after the legal reforms and the adoption of anti-prohibitionist policies in relation to marijuana, in the three countries studied, will be determined. The expected results of this research aim to demonstrate the impacts already noticeable since the implementation of these reforms. Above all, the aim is to gather significant data on violence and consumption rates, especially in Uruguay, which legalized marijuana a decade ago, and in Canada, which adopted a similar regulatory policy in 2018. Regarding Brazil, the aim is to identify the changes observed in the behavior of key public security actors and in incarceration rates, following the Supreme Court's decision that decriminalized the possession of up to 40 grams of marijuana for personal use in June 2024.