Release's submission to the Mexican Supreme Court for the successful Amparo cannabis appeal

The brief higlighted Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which guarantees the right to privacy, including 'bodily integrity', and its applicability to the right to possess for one's own use and consume psychoactive substances without undue intereference and criminalization by the state. Following this principle, other states including Italy and Germany have concluded that the harms rising ffroom cannabis are of a trivial nature, they have applied the principle to decriminalize the cultivation for personal use and consumption of cannabis.

Furthemore although the main goal of a prohibitionist model is to deter and limit drug use, it has been demonstrated that prohibition fails to achieve this aim and has no impact on the prevalence of drug use.

The brief underlined the success of cannabis social clubs or 'close-circuit consumption' in Spain in protecting public health, undercutting the criminal market and freeing cannabis users from state criminalization and its proven harms.

Click here to read the full article and download the brief.

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Thumbnail: Flickr CC Martin D