Colombian President says cocaine is not “worse than whiskey” and that the cartels can be “easily demolished” if it’s legalized.
On Wednesday during a government meeting lasting several hours, President Gustavo Petro stated that the stigma surrounding cocaine and its criminalization is “because it comes from Latin America, rather than because it’s more dangerous than whiskey.”
He reiterated, “Scientists analyzed it: Cocaine was not worse than whisky.”
Petro said that countries need to take action against illicit traffickers if they want peace. This could be achieved by a fundamental rethinking of prohibition.
He said, according to Politico EU’s translation: “It would be easy to dismantle if the legalization of cocaine around the world.” “It’d be sold like wines.”
🇨🇴Colombian president Gustavo Petro
It’s not that cocaine is worse than whiskey but rather because it’s made in Latin America.
— Update NEWS (@UpdateNews724) February 5, 2025
Petro, amid tensions with the Trump administration regarding the deportation and removal of Colombian migrants from the United States, also made a dig at that country, claiming that fentanyl “kills Americans but is not manufactured in Colombia” and opioids “were created by North American multi-nationals as pharmacy drugs.”
Colombia is the largest producer and exporter of cocaine in the world. The United Nations estimates that 2,600 tonnes of cocaine will be produced by 2023.
Petro has also called for marijuana legalization in the country, and he said in late 2023 that lawmakers who voted to shelve a legalization bill that year only helped to perpetuate illegal drug trafficking and the violence associated with the unregulated trade.
Lawmakers nearly enacted an earlier version of the legalization measure earlier that year, but it also stalled out in the final stage in the Senate last session—making it so supporters had to restart the lengthy legislative process.
At a public hearing in the Senate panel in 2022, Justice Minister Néstor Osuna said that Colombia has been the victim of “a failed war that was designed 50 years ago and, due to absurd prohibitionism, has brought us a lot of blood, armed conflict, mafias and crime.”
After a visit to the U.S. in 2023, the Colombian president recalled smelling the odor of marijuana wafting through the streets of New York City, remarking on the “enormous hypocrisy” of legal cannabis sales now taking place in the nation that launched the global drug war decades ago.
Petro also took a lead role at the Latin American and Caribbean Conference on Drugs in 2023, noting Colombia and Mexico “are the biggest victims of this policy,” likening the drug war to “a genocide.”
Petro made a 2022 speech to the United Nations in which he urged all member countries to fundamentally alter their approach to drug policy, and abolish prohibition.
He’s also talked about the prospects of legalizing marijuana in Colombia as one means of reducing the influence of the illicit market. He also said that those currently in jail for cannabis should be released as soon as the new policy is implemented.
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Dominic Milton Trott. Photo by Dominic Milton Trott.