Intended and unintended effects of cannabis regulation in Uruguay 

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by Rosario Queirolo, Lorena Repetto, Joaquín Alonso, Eliana Álvarez, Belén Sotto and Mafalda Pardal


Based on a qualitative design, our article recently published in Policy & Politics analyses the intended and unintended effects of the regulation of cannabis in Uruguay over the last ten years, and identifies the distance between its design and implementation. 

The results are grouped into four key points: 

1-      The access mechanisms (homegrowing, cannabis social clubs (CSCs) and pharmacies) and the mandatory registry, designed for preventing the increase in cannabis consumption, had the unintended effect of excluding various types of users from the legal market. Examples include:  

  • lower socioeconomic level users who cannot afford expensive memberships to CSCs or buying at a pharmacy; 
  • those who live further away from urban areas where legal selling points are primarily located 
  • younger users, who do not always meet the formal requirements for registration.  

Thus, the regulation has pushed many cannabis users to seek supply via the illicit and grey markets. 

2-      The controlled prices in pharmacies, designed for competing with illicit market prices, provided little incentive to new pharmacies to join the dispensation system, due to the low profit margin, resulting in limited coverage across the country. 

3-      CSCs, designed with a harm reduction goal, have encountered several difficulties in the implementation phase. First, the limited number of members allowed affects the cost of membership, making them too expensive and inaccessible for a large portion of users. Additionally, the activities that CSCs organise are restricted and only for members. Therefore, the harm reduction objective has not been achieved, and CSCs resemble more the dispensaries in US states and Canada than CSCs in other parts of the world. 

4-      Finally, the emergence and growth of a grey market that illegally commercialises and distributes legal cannabis has varied implications for the cannabis regulation policy, depending on whether these activities are closer to the legal or illicit markets. 

 The regulation of cannabis in Uruguay has been steadily advancing in its implementation, resulting in sustained growth of the legal market with an increasing number of registered users. However, as was expected, the illicit market has not disappeared and, probably, the most challenging issue to deal with is the emergence and growth of a grey market and the exclusion of users from lower socio-economic backgrounds (the more vulnerable ones) from the legal system.  

This important research shows how, ten years after Uruguay legalised cannabis, the country’s experience provides valuable insights regarding the implementation of such a policy. Uruguay’s regulation of cannabis represented an innovative policy based on a state-controlled model that to date has yielded both expected and unexpected effects.  

You can read the original research in  Policy & Politics  at:
Queirolo, R., Repetto, L., Alonso, J., Álvarez, E., Sotto, B., Pardal, M., & Kilmer, B. (2024). Intended and unintended effects of cannabis regulation in Uruguay. Policy & Politics (published online ahead of print 2024) from https://doi.org/10.1332/03055736Y2024D000000051

If you enjoyed this blog post, you may also be interested to read:
Kamkhaji, J. C., & Vecchi, G. (2024). Policy and organisational learning in judicial reform: evidence from Italy. Policy & Politics, 52(4), 606-624 from https://doi.org/10.1332/03055736Y2023D000000019

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