Brazil’s Superior Court of Justice last Tuesday authorized three patients to cultivate cannabis for medical purposes, a decision that should be applied nationwide in similar cases.
A panel of five judges from the country’s Superior Court of Justice unanimously ruled that the three patients could grow cannabis. The cases in question mainly concerned the extraction of cannabidiol to relieve their pain. Brazilian law currently limits the medical use of cannabis-derived products to imported products.
The Brazilian Ministry of Health has not yet regulated home cultivation of cannabis for medical purposes.
Justice Rogerio Schietti said the Supreme Court panel acted because the government failed to take a position on the matter.
Religion and the far right
“The discourse against this possibility is moralistic. It often has a religious character, based on dogma, false truths, stigmas,” Judge Schietti said. “Let’s put an end to this prejudice, to this moralism which delays the development of this question at the legislative level, and which very often obscures the minds of Brazilian judges. »
Judge Antonio Saldanha said “there is a deliberate retrograde move towards obscurantism” in the Brazilian government’s delay.
President Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right politician facing an uphill battle for re-election in October, said in June 2021 that he disagreed with any permission for Brazilians to grow cannabis at home, regardless of their objective.
Former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the main leader of the left-wing Workers’ Party, is leading all opinion polls to regain the post he held from 2003 to 2010, and favors legalizing the cannabis.
