This month marks six years since Uruguay launched legal recreational sales in the country, and newly released data illuminates how successful the cannabis program has been. 

The South American country’s Institute for Regulation and Control of Cannabis released the figures, which were detailed by Forbes.

Cannabis pharmacies in Uruguay “have sold 10,693,210 grams of marijuana between July 19, 2017, and July 19, 2023,” according to the news outlet.

“Currently, 61,509 registered individuals are eligible to access pharmacies for marijuana purchases. Moreover, there are three companies producing cannabis, and the sale of marijuana is authorized in 37 pharmacies distributed across ten departments throughout the country,” Forbes reported. “Moreover, there are presently 14,592 registered users for domestic cultivation and 10,486 members of cannabis clubs across 306 clubs.”

Uruguay made history nearly ten years ago, when it became the first country to legalize all stages of the cannabis process –– growing, sale and smoking –– in December of 2013.

Reuters at the time called it “a pioneering social experiment that will be closely watched by other nations debating drug liberalization.”

In fact, Uruguay had decriminalized possession of cannabis all the way back in 1974. But cultivation and sales of pot were not made legal until the passage of the 2013 law, which was framed as a bid to stymie the power of drug traffickers in the country. 

As Reuters explained at the time, although other “countries have decriminalized marijuana possession and the Netherlands allows its sale in coffee shops,” Uruguay became “the first nation to legalize the whole chain from growing the plant to buying and selling its leaves.”

Legal marijuana sales began in July of 2017, when the new law made “pharmacists into dealers,” as The New York Times put it. 

But as the Times explained back then, the new cannabis law’s implementation was not all hunky dory. The law had been “contentious for many Uruguayans,” noting that the “thorniest part of it — establishing a system for the state-controlled production and sale of marijuana — took years to work out.”

“Government officials worried that allowing a cannabis scene like the one in Amsterdam would make Uruguay a pariah among neighboring countries wary about legalization. So they developed an onerous registration process and ruled out marketing the country as a mecca for pot tourism. Under the law, only Uruguayan citizens and legal permanent residents are allowed to purchase or grow pot,” the Times reported then.

A report in 2020 found that legalization had not led to a spike in cannabis consumption among teenagers in Uruguay. 

The study, published in the International Journal of Drug Policy, found that there was “no evidence of an impact on cannabis use or the perceived risk of use” among youth in the country.

“Our findings provide some support for the thesis that Uruguay’s state regulatory approach to cannabis supply may minimize the impact of legalization on adolescent cannabis use,” the study said. “At the same time, our study period represents a period of transition: pharmacy access, by far the most popular means of access, was not available until the summer of 2017. Additional study will be important to assess the longer-term impacts of the fully implemented legalization regime on substance use outcomes.”

The study, which was billed as the “first empirical evidence on [the law’s] impacts on adolescent use of cannabis and related risks,” likewise found that there was not “an increase in student perception of cannabis availability” following legalization.

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Law enforcement officials in Uruguay last week said they busted an international drug ring that had a gnarly way of smuggling its contraband: inside surfboards. 

The BBC reports that Uruguayan police have arrested three Italians with the “help from counter-narcotics police in Spain, Portugal and Italy.” 

“Sniffer dogs had alerted officers in Uruguay to six surfboards containing a total of 50kg (110lb) of cocaine,” according to the outlet. “Police allowed one board to be dispatched in order to track down those receiving it.”

More from the BBC:

“The dogs alerted their handlers to the suspicious package on 23 May. Officers said the boards were uncharacteristically heavy and when they passed them through a scanner, they spotted hidden packages inside. A photo supplied by Uruguay’s interior ministry shows white powder spilling from one of the boards after it had been cut open. Two Italian nationals were arrested by police in Portugal as they went to pick up the cocaine-filled surfboard which police had allowed through. A third Italian citizen, who police say dispatched the drugs from Uruguay to Europe, was detained in Italy.”

A report earlier this year from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) found that cocaine production has surged to record highs.

The report said that while drug markets were disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, “the most recent data suggests this slump has had little impact on longer-term trends.”

“The global supply of cocaine is at record levels. Almost 2,000 tons was produced in 2020, continuing a dramatic uptick in manufacture that began in 2014, when the total was less than half of today’s levels,” according to the UN report.

The report said that the cocaine “surge is partly a result of an expansion in coca bush cultivation, which doubled between 2013 and 2017, hit a peak in 2018, and rose sharply again in 2021.”

“But it is also due to improvements in the process of conversion from coca bush to cocaine hydrochloride. In parallel, there has been a continuing growth in demand, with most regions showing steadily rising numbers of users over the past decade. Although these increases can be partly explained by population growth, there is also a rising prevalence of cocaine use. Interceptions by law enforcement have also been on the rise, at a higher speed than production, meaning that interdiction has contained the growth of the global amount of cocaine available for consumption,” according to the report.

The BBC reported that drug traffickers “are increasingly using Uruguay, which borders Brazil and Argentina, as a transit country to ship drugs from drug-producing parts of South America to Europe.”

Earlier this year, authorities in New Zealand seized more than $300 million worth of cocaine afloat in the Pacific Ocean, calling it a “major financial blow” to traffickers.

According to New Zealand Police Commissioner Andrew Coster, it was “one of the single biggest seizures of illegal drugs by authorities in this country.”

“There is no doubt this discovery lands a major financial blow right from the South American producers through to the distributors of this product,” Coster said. “While this disrupts the syndicate’s operations, we remain vigilant given the lengths we know these groups will go to circumvent coming to law enforcement’s attention.”

New Zealand Customs Service Acting Comptroller Bill Perry said the bust was “a huge illustration of what lengths organi[z]ed crime will go to with their global drug trafficking operations and shows that we are not exempt from major organi[z]ed criminal drug smuggling efforts in this part of the world.”

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With Amsterdam cutting back on cannabis cafes, these countries may soon become must-visits for rolling stoners.

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