Mexico's President Enrique Peña Nieto proposes legalising medical marijuana Thursday April 21,2016

Mexico's president Enrique Peña Nieto has announced plans to introduced laws to legalise medical marijuana and increase the quantity anyone can carry and consume for recreational purposes from five grams to 28 grams.

His plan would also free some prisoners convicted of possessing small amounts of marijuana.


The proposed laws, he said on Thursday April 21,2016, would stop “criminalising consumption” and also authorise the use of medicines made from a base of marijuana and or its active ingredients.

It follows his announcement earlier this week at the UN General Assembly Special Session on drugs, UNgass, in which Peña Nieto called for more prevention, partial decriminalization and a public health approach.

Although Mexico – along with Colombia and Guatemala – had lobbied the UN to bring forward the special session from its original date of 2018, Peña Nieto had originally planned to skip the meeting.
He made a U-turn under criticism at home. Mexico, which sees enormous shipments of drugs smuggled through its territory to the US, has been hit hard by violence stemming from a 10-year crackdown on drug cartels and organised crime that has claimed more than 100,000 lives

Medical marijuana made national news in Mexico last summer after the parents of an eight-year-old named Graciela Elizalde won the right to use a medicine containing cannabinoids to treat Lennox-Gastaut syndrome, a condition causing hundreds of daily epileptic seizures.

In November 2015, the supreme court also granted injunctions to four individuals seeking permission to cultivate and consume marijuna for recreational reasons  – a move that activists believe paves the way to broader decriminalisation.