Brazil Supreme Court Upholds Right to Home Grow Cannabis

On Tuesday, Brazil became the latest country to rule that sick people can grow cannabis and extract its components into oil to treat chronic pain.

The case is of domestic importance. Currently, the law prohibits domestic cultivation of any kind. Legally dispensed cannabis-based medicines must all be imported, although Brazil is currently struggling with further domestic reforms.

As a result of this decision, the Brazilian Ministry of Health must now issue regulations to regulate this. That’s what the judges wanted. Judge Rogério Schietti said the court acted because of the government’s failure to take a scholarly position on the issue. “The discourse against this possibility is moralistic. It often has a religious character and is based on dogma, false truths and stigmata,” he said. “Let’s stop this prejudice, this moralism that delays the development of this issue in the legislature and often clouds the minds of Brazilian judges.”

What he didn’t add is that this is an issue that worries both legislators and judges, not just in Brazil but in other countries as well. The issue of patient home growing is controversial everywhere. However, it is this law that has advanced cannabis reform of a federal nature in several countries, beginning with Canada.

In Germany, for example, in 2017 patients were deprived of the right to grow their own cannabis by court order almost immediately after the legislature legalized medical use. Insurers’ subsequent failure to cover sick people — with a rejection rate some analysts put at around 50% of all claims — makes such legislative changes imperative as the country considers further reforms.

But Germany is far from the only country simmering with similar legal challenges.

Why Home Grow is considered seditious

One of the biggest opponents of home growing is often the burgeoning “legal” cannabis industry. On the commercial side of the discussion, there are many, including those in the purely medicinal industry, who are strongly opposed to home growing. Their arguments range from a lack of standards to the leakage of such products on the black market and/or the “kids”.

While neither of these situations is ideal, removing the rights of the particularly chronically ill has been the answer in too many jurisdictions.

However, as countries in Europe in particular struggle to implement leisure reform, this is now becoming a relatively safe half-step. See Malta, Italy and Luxembourg. It is also a burning question that at least the leisure reform debate currently taking place in Germany has not yet been answered.

From an industry perspective, however, human rights all too often take a back seat to profits. This is why commercial “rights” trump constitutional ones. For this reason, individuals’ right to grow their own – either for medicinal or recreational purposes – is directly opposed by the so-called “industry lobby”. It’s also why growing plants at home, even for medicinal purposes, remains a criminal offense in many otherwise legalizing countries.

For this reason, it is also the patients and not the industry who have to challenge such laws on a case-by-case basis. This process is not a fun experience. Most people don’t want to go down in history as “cannabis Gandi” for trying to address the ill effects of disease and poverty. Yet that is precisely the situation that any country that refuses patient home growing is now putting its chronically ill population in.

Changing this often brutal reality is long overdue – on an international scale.

Perhaps Germany, the next country to face it on a federal basis, will finally apply the same philosophy to the issue. After all, the last administration told then-President Donald Trump as he tried to capture the market for a German-made vaccine against COVID: “Capitalism has limits”.

In Brazil, the Supreme Court has just affirmed this principle.

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