Geneva mulls changing law on growing and selling marijuana

Growing and selling marijuana may soon become legal in once staid Geneva, a year after Switzerland decriminalised possession of the drug.

Authorities are considering a radical liberalisation of drug laws in the Swiss canton in a bid to undermine the black market in cannabis.

Swiss children and teenagers top the European table for experimenting with the drug, according to a 2013 Unicef report that found that the more liberal a country’s drug laws, the less likely its children were to try marijuana.

“We are agreed about going forward with this. Repression has failed as a policy,” Geneva’s Health Minister Mauro Poggia told Swiss newspaper Le Temps. “But that does not stop us thinking about going down other avenues.”

Geneva’s cross-party Advisory Commission on Addiction urged the government to seek approval for the reforms from federal health authorities. It called for a trial legalisation to be rolled in the coming months.

But the right-wing Swiss People’s Party (UDC) – the largest in the federal parliament – have vowed to resist any relaxing of the marijuana ban.

While a spokeswoman for Switzerland’s Federal Office of Public Health didn’t say if it would sign off on the proposal, she noted they are looking at “new ways to tackle the issue”.

Federal lawmakers have already effectively decriminalised the drug. Since October 2013 anyone caught with under 10 grams of cannabis faces an on-the-spot fine of 100 Swiss Francs (HK$770), rather than a criminal record.