Nobody doubts that cigarettes are poison. Who could doubt that it threatens life? We all know it. We've known it for a while and we suffer from it. And yet, we smoke. You often find doctors who smoke and ask their patients not to smoke. We contract diseases that would be avoidable.
[In Uruguay] there are more than 100,000 people, most of them young people, who smoke a joint here and there, and they're chasing this adventure of buying something from drug trafficking. ... This whole world is clandestine, although the stench can be seen and felt in many places.
I'm an old man. I've committed the sin and vice of smoking. And I've had an occasional drink as well. I'm not innocent, even though I'm the president.
I never smoked a marijuana joint, but I've come to notice that I need to rejuvenate my neurons and realize what the life of young people is like.
The consumption is already happening — it's around every corner, and it comes from a clandestine market that by nature has ferocious rules. It's a monopoly of mobsters. And the numbers are frightening.
This law being attempted is a regulation. It's not 'anything goes.' It's to regulate something that already exists and that's in front of our noses, right there at the door of the schools, on the street corners. It attempts to snatch this market from the underground, identify it and expose it to daylight.
Most high school graduates in this country have tried marijuana. It's like a youthful adventure, a rite of passage. Have we forgotten these things? ... the government understands that we have to fight the battle there, and not leave our kids alone in the underground; not encourage this mystery, the attraction that young people have to try what's prohibited. Because human beings are complicated bugs; marijuana is a dangerous addiction, like any other addiction, it's not good.
We would like the majority of the population to understand this battle, to join us, precisely because we need the help of our people .... Because we have the whole world showing us this. In no part of the world has repression brought results. We want to stop this on the frontier where drug addiction begins. It's not easy, because we don't have a prescription. It's not simple — we realize we're making an experiment on the vanguard of the entire world.
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Uruguayan President Jose Mujica took to the radio to address his citizens on August 1, 2013, the day after landmark pot legislation passed in one of the two Uruguayan houses.
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