Since his time as a deputy, the president of the Republic, Luis Lacalle Pou, asked to treat the issue of addictions as a national policyHe, without party colors, to reach “consensus”. This was what he made known in various parliamentary sessions in which he participated as well as in one of his columns published on the Montevideo Portal website: “¿¿Many (addicts) more will have to happen for us to agree and address this issue with ideas, programs and sufficient funding? If we are unable to do so, it would be a national disgrace. Let’s put hypocrisy and demagogy aside or we are in the oven, “he wrote.
More than 11 years later, the issue continues to spin on his political agenda, now as ruler. A project presented by two legislators of the coalition and approved by the ruling party in Deputies about Advance Directive for Addiction Addiction and the criticism of the head of the National Secretariat of Drugs, Daniel Radío, to that text they put the issue of drug use back on the table.
Yes OK Radio said he felt supported by the president, after pro-government deputies summoned him to discuss his rejection of the bill, This has remained on the margins of the subject and in silence. But, for several years, the president has expressed himself on these issues.
In addition to being one of the first to propose the legalization of self-cultivation of marijuana, The street also presented a project for the compulsory hospitalization of minors addicted to pasta base, a step beyond the one now presented by the ruling party legislators.
The initiative, presented by deputies Nibia Reisch (Colorado Party) and Silvana Pérez Bonavita (Cabildo Abierto), allows people with drug addiction to give their consent in advance to be admitted in the middle of a crisis.
As a legislator, Lacalle he insisted on working on drugs with “responsible treatment” from Parliament. Asked “political will” to agree on the problem and hoped that it would be approached from a conceptual logic in which minors addicted to pasta were compulsively hospitalized.
“This issue deserves in this Chamber (by Deputies), and surely in other legislative instances, a responsible treatment, without demagoguery or hypocrisy, as there has often been; for some in society it is taboo and for others it is a pain whose cry is very We rarely listen, “said the then deputy.
“A boy sick of base paste, when he has a peak of lucidity, a moment of lucidity, asks to be admitted. A week, when he is a little better, he leaves and He falls on the same corner where he started using that drug. Then, this cannot be subject to the will of the addict, simply because he does not have it, because he lost it, because that patient cannot be subject to an outpatient process“, he deepened.
Lacalle Pou showed his dissatisfaction when in 2007 the Broad Front, under the presidency of Tabaré Vázquez, approved a Rendition of Accounts with an expense of US $ 500 million that did not include a program of attention to prisoners convicted of committing crimes to obtain their drugs. as the National Party intended. The opposition at that time proposed to allocate US $ 4 million (less than 1% of the expenditure) in the treatment of addicts, but the proposal was not followed.
This was recalled by the legislator, in a session on April 7, 2010, as recorded in the stenographic version to which he agreed The Observer:
“Unfortunately, at that time we were unable to achieve that goal. … I think the time has come for us to agree on this issue, and for this we need political will, listening to the technicians, and also money, a lot of money. And how Governing is choosing, deciding, managing. From my point of view, we must first make the decision about whether all of us here are going to sustain that the money we have should be spent on treating those addicted to base paste. Here a legislator from the opposition can come, as in my case, present a bill and allocate money so that the ministers of the branch apply it and then, immediately, hold it accountable. I think this is one of the issues on whichIf we do not agree, we do not deserve to be representing the public. And I start at home. If to reach an agreement the first thing to do is modify the bills, if they go in the same direction, here you have an outstretched hand. “
During that day, Lacalle defined the matter as a “pandemic”, rather than a “disease”. “Let him raise his hand who, being anguished, sad, only once, has not slept a little more, has not had an extra drink, a sleeping pill or has entered addictions. I do not raise my hand. Madam President, I am the first to say that I do not raise my hand, and in that sense it seems to me that we have to be sincere. We must listen to people who are crying out for a solution. The Mothers of the Plaza are an organized group. But there are tens of thousands of mothers who cannot organize because they do not have time, they do not have money and they live far from where these groups meet, “he said in that instance.
Later, referred to the eventual legalization of the marijuana market, that until then had not been approved in Uruguay. He said that while he was not in favor of legalizing trade, he was in favor of self-cultivation, which led him to introduce a bill on cannabis harvesting and personal use.
“It is incredible that it has not been thought that if drug use is legalized, it should provide a legitimate means of obtaining it. The speaker does not believe that the marijuana trade should be legalized, for an international market issue. The drug trafficking business has our country as a stopover, not as a final recipient: neither primary nor final. Thus, If the trade is legalized, the only thing we are doing is converting our country into a free trade zone for marijuana; and as long as the drug is here, it is not prosecutable. So, we have two ways: either we prohibit the consumption of narcotics or we do an evaluation of each one of them and see what is done. Personally, I join the self-cultivation of marijuana; I said it in the electoral campaign and I support it, “he said.
At the time of voting on law 19,172, which enables the State to regulate the production and sale of marijuana, the current president objected, as suggested in that session, although he accompanied the articles related to self-cultivation.
