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Law 19,172 regulates the cannabis market in Uruguay in a comprehensive format, throughout the national jurisdiction and with strong state control. One of its main objectives is to reduce the illegal cannabis market. So far there is little information on whether the regulation had impacted on the illegal market. Experiences with the legalization of tobacco and gambling show that legal markets do not necessarily supplant illegal ones (Spapens, 2014; National Research Council, 2015), or at least not immediately. This project deepens the understanding of the changes in the cannabis market since the introduction of the regulation, under the assumption that this regulatory change has had consequences on both the behavior of consumers and suppliers. To do this, it uses a mixed methods approach that combines information collected with: 1) a survey of frequent cannabis users that makes up the third round of a panel started in 2014, 2) in-depth interviews with key informants, and 3) in-depth interviews with frequent cannabis users. By doing this, we will describe the evolution of consumers networks and suppliers of cannabis, which are the main ways of access and networks for users, who are the suppliers in the cannabis market (in the legal, ilegal and gray ones), and how these have changed before and after the cannabis regulation was implemented. Our hypothesis is that the regulation decreased the illegal market, generated a legal market but also a gray market, and these markets are unevenly distributed among users of different socioeconomic levels. If the implementation of the law does not allow equal access for all consumers, it is highly probable that those with more difficulties to access the legal market, will remain in the illegal one.

Jurisdictions worldwide have implemented policies on the production, distribution and sale of cannabis for recreational and/or medical use. Comparison and evaluation of cannabis policies beyond cannabis legalization is currently cumbersome, as there is a lack of a comprehensive taxonomy to examine cannabis policy changes. Existing taxonomies have either a limited scope (e.g. focus on either recreational or medical use) or have been produced in a single country. We aimed to construct a comprehensive taxonomy of medical and recreational cannabis policies across the world through a scoping review.

The earliest empirical studies on cannabis cultivation focused on large-scale, commercially oriented growers (Weisheit, 1991; Bovenkerk & Hogewind, 2002), or covered rather small samples (Hough et al., 2003). These studies often based their conclusions on police data, and may lead to false perceptions of the prevalence of different types of growers and growing operations and related criminal behaviours (Wilkins & Casswell, 2003), with important consequences for future policy choices. The Global Cannabis Cultivation Research Consortium (GCCRC) is a group of researchers interested in better understanding domestic cannabis cultivation, especially by small-scale growers. In 2011, given the absence of any significant international comparative research, the GCCRC developed the (semi-)standardized International Cannabis Cultivation Questionnaire (ICCQ 1.0) designed to facilitate international comparisons of small-scale cultivation. However, the cannabis policy landscape has changed since 2011, with medical and recreational schemes moving forward in multiple countries. We therefore have many questions about how these new policy settings may be influencing home cannabis growers. In response to the shifting policy landscape, the GCCRC launched their second global cannabis cultivation questionnaire in 2021. The overall aims are twofold; (1) to describe various aspects of small-scale domestic cannabis cultivation; and (2) to conduct comparative analysis of cannabis cultivation across countries and with the original dataset from 2012.

This study seeks to understand the biases people have regarding residency-based stereotyping in evaluating drug-crime related potential suspects. The study uses a conjoint analysis to identify biases in two distinct populations. Two online surveys to (a) residents of Montevideo city, in Uruguay; and (b) the Montevideo Police trainees at the National Police School. The research question asks whether residency in crime hot spots in the city increases the likelihood of being stereotyped as a suspect of drug related crime.