Malta Becomes First E.U. Country to Legalize Marijuana

Malta on Tuesday became the first country in the European Union to agree to formally legalize the use and growing of marijuana for recreational purposes, the latest sign of a more liberal approach to the substance being taken in the bloc in recent years.

“It’s groundbreaking,” Owen Bonnici, the Maltese minister for equality, research and innovation who introduced the bill, said in a phone interview. The new law would end the criminalization of people for smoking marijuana and reduce criminal trafficking of the substance, he said.

“Malta can be a model for harm reduction,” he added.

The law, passed by Parliament and awaiting only the president’s signature, which is considered a formality, to come into effect, allows people to carry up to seven grams of marijuana, grow up to four plants in their apartments and keep up to 50 grams of dried cannabis at home.

Similar forms of decriminalization exist in other European countries, such as the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain, but in those cases, possession of small amount of cannabis can still be a civil offense and coffee shops or cannabis social clubs are “tolerated” or only de facto allowed by court decisions.

“Malta has formally legislated what exists in other European countries in a weird gray area,” said Steve Rolles, an analyst at Transform Drug Policy Foundation, an advocacy group in Britain. [Read more at The New York Times]