Jamaica to reform marijuana laws decriminalizing religious use

Jamaica’s government on Thursday announced a major rethinking of its marijuana laws, including plans to partly decriminalize small amounts of marijuana and to allow possession for religious, scientific and medical purposes. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/13/world/americas/jamaica-government-aims-to-relax-marijuana-laws.html?ref=world  Justice Minister Mark Golding said the cabinet was backing a proposal to make possession of no more than two ounces of marijuana a petty offense that would result in a fine but not an arrest. The proposed changes “are not intended to promote or give a stamp of approval” to the use of the drug for recreational purposes, Mr. Golding said, but to provide “a more enlightened approach to dealing with possession of small quantities.” The current law prohibiting marijuana remains in effect for now, but lawmakers are likely to amend it.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: