Drugs and Prison in Uruguay: The Case of Alicia Castilla

Uruguay recently announced its intention to create a regulated market for marijuana. In support of this initiative, the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) and the Transnational Institute (TNI) created a video to show the human cost of the war on drugs in Uruguay.

In this short clip, Alicia Castilla talks about her experience when, at 66 years of age, she was put in jail for three months in Uruguay for cultivating marijuana she used for her personal consumption and research. In her testimony, she talks about her time in the Canelones prison and her experience with the Uruguayan justice system.

In Uruguay, the consumption of drugs, including marijuana, is not punishable with jail time. Even so, the cultivation of marijuana for personal consumption is a crime. According to the TNI-WOLA study “Systems Overload: Drug Laws and Prisons in Latin America,” which cites statistics from the Uruguayan National Drug Board, in 79 percent of the marijuana seizures between 2006 and 2009 the police discovered 100 grams or less of marijuana.

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