PM Calls Proposed Marijuana Legalization Looney Tunes

The proposed legalization of marijuana by Opposition Leader John Briceño has elicited responses from all corners.  Government has come out strongly against the idea, blasting Briceño for suggesting that a legitimate marijuana industry can and ought to be established in Belize.  Not only did Cabinet pan the thought, today Prime Minister Barrow said such a move would be detrimental to the country’s relationship with the United States.  He described the controversial proposal as a quite strange.

Dean Barrow

Prime Minister Dean Barrow

“This latest googly of his has to be one of the most fantastical ever, to propose legalizing marijuana in Belize; especially for an export market is patently bizarre.  Indeed, it is downright dangerous since it would certainly provoke one response I can immediately think of that would surely destroy us.  So we pour scorn on the notion.  Now I need to make clear that this has nothing to do with any kind of moral calculus.  While I don’t know enough, either from research or experience about marijuana, my instinctive feeling is that it can be no more harmful than liquor.  But in any event, I repeat, morality is not the basis for G.O.B.’s position.  Rather, it is the question of how on earth we could legalize and for export when the weed is still illegal in all of our neighboring countries and especially in the federal United States of America.  If we grew weed legally in Belize, the cartels who are now clandestinely landing planes and using us as a base for the transshipment to the U.S. would come in and take over production in Belize.  They would continue to illegally penetrate the U.S. but from a legal production platform in Belize.  What do you think the U.S. would say and do about that?  Even now, when marijuana and all psychotropic drugs are illegal in Belize, the U.S. annually excoriates us for not being successful enough in stamping out such drugs in Belize because some of those drugs continue to find their way into their U.S. market.  Notwithstanding all that, Belize would, if the Leader of the Opposition were ever to be charged, provoke the Americans by legitimizing and providing a beachhead for further penetration into the U.S. of drugs originating in Belize.  If that ever happens, goodbye correspondent banking, goodbye financial system, goodbye trade, goodbye lifeblood.”