I think the advice that I would give to the Latin American countries generally, and to every other country in the world in terms of how to proceed with legalization, begins by saying, Americans, generally speaking, are not welcome in terms of giving advice. But my advice in that regard is don’t repeat our mistakes. A few years ago, I had the honor of being invited to speak to the committee of the Mexican Congress.

This was particularly an honor and a thrill at this time because no one in Mexico was thinking about legalizing marijuana. And fortunately, that has changed very quickly. But my advice, describe the mistakes that have been made. Ironically, it is correcting the lies that the Dutch justice minister had told them about the Dutch system. Welcome to Provisionals World. People lie about their own countries.

We’ve talked previously about the Canadian police lying about the Canadian menace to the U.S. because of B.C. bud. The justice ministers invited him to Mexico and lied about his own country because his loyalty is to prohibition. You can find a lot of that in America. The key point of that really is the great thing about not being the first one, you can look back and look at the mistakes other people have made.

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And certainly in the case of the United States, you can look at states that have done a terrible job of legalization and others that have done a very good job with legalization, relatively speaking. And in each of these cases, you can look and see what is working. Colorado, I think, has done a much better job, for example, than California. You know, you can find good things in all these variations of things because of different social and fiscal situations.

So the leaders of these countries are now looking at the United States. We will also recall Columbia’s experience with the drug war has been only comparable to Mexico in terms of the devastating impact they have seen, the damage the drug war has done. Colombia is really a fairly advanced country. They have a very good medical system, so doctors down there are looking at how to use medical cannabis in their practices and so on.

All of these things offer real advantages, which if in turn we can get the American medical establishment to stop preaching “reefer madness” and look and see how they can integrate cannabis into their practices.

This is something where we can learn from our neighbors who have learned from us or more precisely, from our mistakes.

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