President Jose Mujica said the country will not become a pot-smoker's paradise like Colorado as Uruguay finally releases its rules for the legal marijuana market it is launching this year, detailing how the government plans to get very involved in every aspect of the business, according to the Associated Press.
"It's a complete fiction what they do in Colorado" in terms of controlling the sale and use of legal marijuana, Mujica said in an Associated Press interview.
Colorado licenses sellers and producers but allows any adult to buy up to 28 grams at a time, and then go down the street and buy 28 grams more, but in Uruguay, consumers must be licensed and each purchase will be tracked to ensure they buy no more than 10 grams a week, according to the AP.
The state will sell five different strains, containing a maximum level of 15 percent THC, the substance that gets consumers high, according to the AP. Each bag will be bar-coded, radio-frequency tagged, and registered in a genetic database that will enable authorities to trace its origin and determine its legality.
The rules limit licensed growers to six plants per household and while people who buy in pharmacies will be identified by fingerprint readers to preserve their anonymity, every user's pot consumption will be tracked in a government database, the AP reported. Police can test for illegal weed wherever they encounter it and arrest anyone with pot that lacks the proper genetic markers, the rules say.
In two weeks, the government will take applications from businesses hoping to become one of a handful of growers supplying marijuana to the state and by early December, a network of pharmacies will be ready to supply the weed to registered consumers at less than a dollar a gram, presidential spokesman Diego Canepa said late Friday, according to the AP.
The pot will come in packages warning of health risks, and smoking will be prohibited everywhere but private homes and open-air locations and motorists will be subject to testing by police to make sure they're not driving under the influence, the AP reported.
Mujica and his ministers plan to sign the regulations on Monday, and they'll take effect on Tuesday, according to the AP.
"No addiction is good. We aren't going to promote smokefests, bohemianism, all this stuff they try to pass off as innocuous when it isn't. They'll label us elderly reactionaries. But this isn't a policy that seeks to expand marijuana consumption. What it aims to do is keep it all within reason, and not allow it to become an illness," Mujica said, the AP reported.
