The president of Colombia says U.S. President Donald Trump should replace the policy of marijuana prohibition with a regulatory framework allowing for adult use and international cannabis exports.
In an post on X last week, Colombian President Gustavo Petro addressed broader drug policy issues amid a broader feud between the two leaders over the Trump administration’s military strikes against boats alleged to be trafficking narcotics.
“Colombia actually provides the money and the deaths in the struggle, while the U.S. provides the consumption,” Petro said, according to a translation. “Consumption in the U.S. and the growing consumption in Europe are responsible for 300,000 murders in Colombia and a million deaths in Latin America.”
But he also said he proposed to Trump “the opposite” of what the administration is currently doing—by removing tariffs on Colombian agriculture goods and legalizing the “export of cannabis” like “any good,” for example. Petro said that reform could be justified by the United Nations’s decision to reschedule cannabis under international treaties to which both countries are parties.
Trump should also “strengthen the policy of prevention of consumption in the U.S.” and “scientifically study whether prohibition is necessary, or rather responsible and state-regulated consumption build a more effective treaty for the pursuit of narcos’ capital and assets in the world,” the Colombian president said, as High Times first reported.
Trump last week called Petro an “illegal drug leader” and the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned the Colombian president, members of his family and his advisors for alleged involvement in drug trafficking.
This comes months after Colombian lawmakers gave initial approval to a bill that would nationally legalize marijuana—with a House committee in August taking the first step in an extensive legislative process to enact the reform.
Petro has consistently supported legalizing cannabis—and he’s put pressure on legislators to advance the issue. 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.
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.”
In 2022, Petro delivered a speech at a meeting of the UN, urging member nations to fundamentally change their approaches to drug policy and disband with prohibition.
He’s also talked about the prospects of legalizing marijuana in Colombia as one means of reducing the influence of the illicit market. And he has signaled that the policy change should be followed by releasing people who are currently in prison over cannabis.
Trump, for his part, has not embraced federal legalization, though he said in late August that a decision on a pending marijuana rescheduling proposal would come within weeks. Much of his drug policy actions of late have focused on cartels, with controversial extrajudicial attacks on boats in international waters that were allegedly transporting drugs to the U.S.
Image element courtesy of Bryan Pocius.
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