The president of Peru signed a bill on Thursday legalizing medical marijuana across the country, a historic move that came a few weeks after the Peruvian Congress voted to approve it.

The legalization allows possession, sale, and transport of cannabis for medical purposes, but it’s still illegal to cultivate the plant. The government will develop a list of official importers or growers who are authorized to supply the nation’s new medical marijuana patients, who will be given prescriptions for conditions like Parkinson’s, cancer, epilepsy or other chronic or terminal illnesses.

Peru is the latest Latin American nation to legalize marijuana in some form, but where else is cannabis legal?

The Peruvian Congress has approved a bill that authorises the medicinal and therapeutic use of cannabis and its derivatives in the country.

The proposal received 67 votes against five as three abstained in a full legislative on Thursday, allowing the bill to be enacted by the executive without going through the second voting session as required by law.

The bill will legalise the medicinal use of marijuana and its derivatives, such as cannabis oil, to alleviate the symptoms of diseases such as cancer, epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease, Efe news reported.

Congressman Alberto de Belaunde, who was the advocate of the proposal, said that once the bill is promulgated the government will have 60 days to work on the regulations.

Peru has taken its first steps towards the legalisation of medical marijuana after it approved a bill that would allow the production and importation of the plant for therapeutic purposes.

The Congressional Committee on National Defense signed off on the legislation amid public outcry over a police raid on a makeshift cannabis lab run by mothers hoping to soothe the symptoms of their sick children.

Congressman Alberto de Belaunde saidö “The Commission on Defense has unanimously decided to propose the law that decriminalizes the medicinal use of cannabis”.

The bill will now go to full congress for a debate and final vote on the matter.

Peru’s president has proposed legalising medicinal marijuana after two women found that cannabis oil helped their seriously ill children.

dental technician and mother of four, Ana Alvarez lives in a flat in Lima that she has converted into a cannabis laboratory. It is, she says, for the love of her son that she has become one of Peru’s leading advocates for liberalising drug laws in the conservative country.

Her mission started out as a desperate search for something to alleviate her son Anthony’s multiple daily seizures. Alvarez ended up turning part of her home into an improvised lab and informal medical practice where patients can be prescribed marijuana derivatives as a palliative for terminal illness, cancer or multiple sclerosis. 

Ana Alvarez, a working mother of two in Lima, never imagined being on the frontlines of a fight for marijuana in conservative Peru.

But a police raid on a makeshift cannabis lab that she and other women started to soothe the symptoms of their sick children has roused support for medical marijuana, prompting President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski to propose legalizing it in the latest pivot away from decades-old restrictions on drug use in Latin America.

Alvarez said cannabis oil is the only drug that helped contain her epileptic and schizophrenic son's seizures and psychotic episodes. She and other women in similar situations formed the group Searching for Hope to seek legal backing as they honed techniques for producing the drug.

Attitudes in Latin America are shifting away from supporting prohibitionist policies, but they are far from consensus and the policy implications are unclear.

Sentiments in Latin America in favor of outlawing marijuana appear to be undergoing shifts in some countries, according to researchers in Chile and the UK.

A study published the International Journal of Drug Policy found that, in some parts of the region, more than 40% of respondents supported legalizing the drug, while in other, more conservative areas, support remained minimal.

Peru's government says it will present to the opposition-dominated legislature a plan to legalize the medical use of marijuana "for the treatment of serious and terminal illnesses."

President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski's administration said Wednesday the plan was developed after police raided a house in a Lima neighborhood where a group of parents grew marijuana to make oil for treating their children suffering from epilepsy and other diseases.

US

The hardline drug policies adopted during the 1980s in the “war on drugs”, including mandatory minimum sentences for some drug-related crimes, has led to extremely high levels of incarceration in the country. The US has more than 2 million people in its jails – the second highest rate of incarceration per capita in the world – about half of whom were convicted of drugs-related crimes.