Montevideo, Uruguay -
More than 100 businesses are hoping to compete for the right to grow the marijuana that Uruguay's government will sell in its newly legalised pot market, the country's drug czar said on Thursday.
Drug secretary Julio Calzada told The Associated Press that the government can satisfy demand in the legal pot market it's launching this year by licensing two to six growers to cultivate the plants on plots no larger than five acres.
Successful bidders will have to identify everyone involved in their businesses, document the source of their financing and be cleared by Uruguay's anti-money laundering agency. These controls are needed to keep out organised crime, Calzada said.
“The big worry of the whole world is that those who produce marijuana illegally in Paraguay move in here and produce marijuana covered by Uruguayan law,” he said.
Days earlier, President Jose Mujica said he, too, was worried that drug traffickers would try to move in and influence the campaign to choose his successor in October.
“I'm not sure that the marijuana (apparatus) isn't participating in electoral campaigns,” he told the AP last week. “We are taking on well-financed adversaries and I'm not sure that this isn't happening. I have my doubts.”
Calzada rejected criticism from opponents of the governing Broad Front coalition that the legalisation law did not include a mechanism to tax marijuana in the same way that tobacco and alcohol are taxed.
“It's because it's an unprocessed plant product. Cigarettes and alcoholic drinks are processed,” Calzada said.
“The way to get revenue from marijuana for the control, prevention and treatment of addicts, just like we proposed, is through two non-taxing mechanisms: a fixed licence fee that those who plant will pay and an adjustable levy on the product that the Institute of Cannabis Regulation and Control will change administratively.” -
Sapa-AP