Uruguay's Mujica is the Grumpy Old Man of Global Marijuana Legalization

Uruguay will formally unveil the regulations for its legal marijuana commerce next week, although the broad outlines are already known. The stuff will be genetically tracked from seed to sale and beyond, it'll see for less than a buck a gram, and registered consumers will only be able to buy 40 grams a month.

It's not exactly a free-for-all. Instead, it's a tightly regulated effort to break the black market in marijuana in the country, where it's never been a crime to smoke pot. And it's most definitely not about creating a pothead utopia, as Uruguayan President Mujica showed in an interview yesterday with the Associated Press.

In that interview, Mujica, a former leftist guerrilla who spent years in prison during the time of military dictatorship in the 1970s, made clear that he's no hipster.

"We don't go along with the idea that marijuana is benign, poetic and surrounded by virtues. No addiction is good," he said. "We aren't going to promote smoke fests, 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."

Well, with all due respect, Mr. Mujica, you sound like an elderly reactionary. This is a guy who has never smoked pot, and it shows. Referring to marijuana use as an addiction puts him in the company of mad scientists like NIDA head Dr. Nora Volkow and the professional prohibitionists of Project SAM, and spouting platitudes like "no addiction is good" manages to conflate being physically addicted to things like heroin and prescription opiates to habitually puffing a pot pipe or having a cup of coffee first thing every morning.

Mujica also took some gratuitous pot shots at Colorado's legalization regime and at medical marijuana in the US. Uruguay's system will be superior to Colorado's, he said, because Colorado doesn't track pot after it is purchased.

The AP quoted Mujica as saying "it's a complete fiction what they do in Colorado," which seems to be his way of claiming that legalization there is out of control because it doesn't track individual purchasers. Well, I find it kind of creepy to think the government is keeping track of my consumption habits (like with, say, a prescription monitoring database—oops, never mind), and I have to wonder why Mujica isn't pushing for something similar for alcohol purchases in his country.

And, Mujica said, the medical marijuana laws in US states are based on "hypocrisy" because they allow people with "fake illnesses" to obtain marijuana. Well, he has something of a point there, but only to a degree. California is by far the most wide open medical marijuana state, and people do take advantage of the loosely-written law to obtain and use medical marijuana without fear of arrest.

California can remedy that by recognizing reality and just getting on with legalization, as it will almost certainly do in 2016. But the other medical marijuana states are much more restrictive, and, perversely, the more public support grows for medical marijuana, the tighter the restrictions seem to be.

So, why is Mujica being such a grumpy old man about marijuana legalization? After all, he's the guy who pushed it through in Uruguay. I think there are a couple of things going on.

First, he's a square. He's a straight, old leftist, a former revolutionary, with no experience with marijuana and no connections to the cannabis culture. He really sees this as a public health and public security problem, not as a step toward human liberation. In that sense, he's your grandpa.

But he's also moving forward with legalization in the face of strong public opposition to it in Uruguay.  In a poll last week, nearly two-thirds remained opposed to the new law, although 51% said it was better to give it a chance than to kill it at birth. I suspect many of Mujica's comments were made with that domestic audience in mind. In that sense, he's a smart politician.

And grumpy old man he may be; he's still the guy who is leading the first country to break with global pot prohibition. Adelante, companero.