Mexico’s president-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador said last week he would not interfere with the Supreme Court’s decision to end cannabis prohibition, the Latin America News Dispatch reports.
Last Wednesday, Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled that cannabis prohibition is unconstitutional; it was the court’s fifth such ruling and the last step for determining jurisprudence in favor of cannabis reforms.
Obrador, commonly known by his initials AMLO, said that lawmakers should honor the Supreme Court’s decision during a brief televised interview.
The decision sets Mexico up to become the next nation to fully legalize adult-use cannabis. However, the responsibility for moving forward now lies with lawmakers, who must take the court’s decision one step further and establish regulations to create a federal cannabis industry — hopefully sometime during the 2019 legislative session.
Following his landslide victory in July, members of AMLO’s transition team hinted that decriminalizing cannabis was on the president-elect’s agenda.
Mexico legalized medical cannabis in 2017.
If Mexico were to successfully legalize adult-use cannabis, the United States would be flanked on both sides by federally legal cannabis jurisdictions, as Canada’s landmark legalization bill took effect last month.
Meanwhile, in the U.S., eight states have established rules for an adult-use marketplace; Vermont and Washington D.C. have legalized cannabis cultivation and possession, but not sales; and two more states are voting today on the issue of adult-use cannabis legalization.