Colombia looks to become the world’s supplier of legal marijuana
MEDELLIN, Colombia Tens of thousands of Colombians died in the U.S.-backed war on drugs. But after an official about-face on marijuana, Colombia is looking to exchange gun-toting traffickers for corporate backers in a bid to become the Saudi Arabia of legal pot.
The new industry is budding here on the outskirts of Medellin, where Pablo Escobar moved marijuana in the 1970s before becoming the King of Cocaine. Fifteen years after his death in a last stand with the law, cannabis plants are blooming in the emerald hills beyond the city, this time with the governments blessing.
You are looking at history, beamed Camilo Ospina, the lab-coat-wearing chief innovation officer for PharmaCielo Colombia Holdings, gesturing like a showman before a sprawling greenhouse of pungent cannabis plants. His company is one of a fast-rising number of corporations seeking to leverage the made in Colombia label in a new age of legalization.
Our advantage is that the Colombian brand already has a mystique, he said. We want to intensify that, so that the Colombian cannabis you already know the Punto Rojo, the Colombian Gold is the cannabis you want to buy.
Colombia is still a hotbed of illegal drugs: A report last year from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency showed Colombia as the source of 92 percent of cocaine seized on U.S. soil. And after 18 years and $10 billion spent on Plan Colombia, the U.S.-funded effort to counter cartels and coca farmers, cocaine production here is at all-time highs.
Yet when it comes to marijuana, Colombia is taking a new tack: If you cant beat em, regulate em.
In 2016, the country passed a landmark law legalizing medical marijuana for both domestic use and export, laying the groundwork for the new industry. The government started handing out the first licenses to grow, process and export medicinal cannabis in September, approving 33 companies so far. Legal growers such as Canadian-owned PharmaCielo are now raising test crops for upcoming product lines, with the first commercial sales and exports slated for the coming weeks and months.
Related:How the Americas are leading the way to a new weed world order
Becoming the worlds supplier of legal cannabis wont be easy. The biggest potential market, the United States, remains closed off, with even states that have legalized use banning cannabis imports. Yet a growing group of other countries, including Germany, Peru, Italy and Croatia, are seen as fast-developing export markets for medical marijuana.
Canada and the Netherlands, on the cutting edge of the legal pot business, have started to meet that demand, with several companies already exporting domestically cultivated crops.
But Colombia, officials here say, is the logical place for the industrys future.
With a climate well suited to the surprisingly fragile cannabis plant, the country supplied most of the illicit marijuana consumed in the United States during the 1970s and 80s a dubious crown it later lost to Mexico. As more countries approve some form of legalization, Colombia is bent on recapturing its global dominance, albeit through export licenses and customs procedures instead of clandestine shipments in the night.
It amounts to a sea change in thinking. Rather than part of the problem, marijuana is being viewed as one solution to Colombias struggle against illicit narcotics particularly coca leaf, the building block of cocaine. Perhaps it is time, authorities say, for coca farmers to start seeing legal marijuana as a potentially lucrative substitute crop.
The message is, go the legal route with marijuana, said Andrs Lpez Velasco, head of Colombias National Narcotics Fund, the government agency overseeing legal cannabis. You can keep your know-how, your knowledge of how to cultivate. But do it legally.
Not everyone is convinced.
Some local authorities in the regions where companies are poised to start growing commercial marijuana remain cautious. They fear cultivation of stronger strains popular with recreational users, which are also permitted under the rules issued in September, may undermine the image of the budding pot industry as purely pharmaceutical.
Other critics insist the government is sending a negative signal to children, while rekindling the image of Colombia as the worlds factory for controlled substances.
By saying it can be commercially grown and has a medicinal use, we are telling our children not only that marijuana is not bad but that its actually good for your health, said Rafael Nieto, a former vice justice minister and conservative politician. Im sorry, I just dont believe that.
Nevertheless, here in the foothills of the Andes, Colombia is seeding the future of a new or rather, old industry.
In 1986, Colombia decriminalized small-scale growth for personal use, allowing the cultivation of up to 20 plants. President Juan Manuel Santos pressed for medicinal legalization on a ...
