10 Grams Now Legal!

Weed smokers across the country can exhale a marijuana-tinged sigh of relief tonight, following the decriminalization of ten grams of cannabis on Thursday.  Governor General Sir Colville Young has assented to the passage of that piece of law after the bill was initially tabled in the House of Representatives back in August.  Just last week, the Senate met to debate the proposed legislation and a majority of those upper parliamentarians voted in favor of its approval.  Despite belated concerns from the church, if you are a consumer of marijuana you can now possess up to ten grams at home or on your person and smoke freely in the confines of your private quarters.  That’s according to Attorney General Michael Peyrefitte, who also says that it is still very much a crime to grow and retail marijuana.  We’ll get to his response to the church’s objections a little later, but first the AG outlines the scope of the new law.

Michael Peyrefitte

Michael Peyrefitte, Attorney General

“Well as you know, the Senate met last week and voted to affirm what the House of Representatives had passed, saying that the decriminalization of ten grams or less of marijuana.  So this week the National Assembly sent the papers to me for verification that all was in order, I signed off on it as Attorney General and then it went to the Governor General, telling the Governor General that everything is in order and I advised the Governor General to assent and he so assented yesterday.  So the document has been assented to and the law has been officially passed.  It will go for mass printing tomorrow at Print Belize and then from there we’ll go for distribution in the gazette, the next issue of the gazette.  But the law is here, if you’re an adult and you have in your possession ten grams of marijuana or less, you are within the law and it’s totally legal.  You can be anywhere with those ten grams or less, except on school property.  And so we are asking people, we passed the law to try and give people a break to say that if marijuana is your drug of choice, we’re going to make a small portion of it legal.  But like any other drug, please enjoy it responsibly and know that we want to keep it, like any other legal drug, away from children.  You are not allowed to smoke it in public.  So you have your ten grams or less and you want to go home tonight and watch the game or do whatever you do at home or in your yard, whatever, you are free to smoke your marijuana tonight.”