Abstract
Why did Uruguay become the first country in the world to legalise marijuana in 2013? Based on extensive original research and unprecedented review of secondary sources, the article assesses alternative explanatory accounts through a unique combination of process tracing and counterfactual analysis. By tracing cannabis reform in Uruguay both as it was and was not but could have been in the absence of hypothesised explanatory factors, the article assesses the role of these factors in the causal story. Specifically, the article shows how and why political will and social mobilisation influenced both the reform process and outcome. In doing so, the article cuts through the haze of rival explanations to present the clearest picture of drug policy reform in Uruguay to date.
Highlights
Latin America is marred by shockingly high levels of crime, violence, and homicide rates (Bergman, 2018; Duran-Martinez, 2017; Yashar, 2018)
While others were highly active and engaged in the reform process, trying to increase public support for cannabis reform and drafting a reform bill that represented a compromise that could command a majority of votes in parliament, the President for the most part took a back seat: “Mujica did not intervene, he limited himself to supervise” (Müller and Draper, 2017: 220)
To establish the weight of and relationships between different explanatory factors, I made a series of analytical moves
Summary
Latin America is marred by shockingly high levels of crime, violence, and homicide rates (Bergman, 2018; Duran-Martinez, 2017; Yashar, 2018). A high-level actor intimately involved with the reform process mentioned that “the success of Uruguay’s marijuana legalisation has many fathers.” The article proposes a two-p ronged paternity test as the main analytical strategy: process tracing and counterfactual analysis.
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