At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Anand Ram­lo­gan said the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship Gov­ern­ment wel­comes a healthy de­bate on the need to le­galise mar­i­jua­na.His com­ment was made in the wake of a call by Chief Jus­tice Ivor Archie for the drug to be de­crim­i­nalise.Say­ing the CJ was clear­ly think­ing out­side of the box, the AG said there were very pow­er­ful ar­gu­ments for and against the pro­pos­al.He said while there were med­ical ben­e­fits for us­ing mar­i­jua­na, there can be med­ical and so­cial prob­lems if it was abused.

Ram­lo­gan said some peo­ple ar­gued that "easy ac­cess with a le­gal stamp of ap­proval could lead youths to in­crease their us­age of mar­i­jua­na."The min­is­ter said the le­gal ben­e­fits were "well doc­u­ment­ed and should not be ig­nored for those who fell in­to that cat­e­go­ry of pa­tients."He said al­co­hol and cig­a­rettes were le­gal com­modi­ties and have not re­sult­ed in any dra­mat­ic in­crease in us­age was de­bat­able.

Ram­lo­gan said "eas­i­er ac­cess, which will come if some­thing is le­galised, can ar­guably en­cour­age per­sons to dou­ble-dip." How­ev­er, he added, it would not be so­cia­ble ac­cept­able to see some­one hav­ing an al­co­holic bev­er­age and smok­ing mar­i­jua­na in a bar.He said the CJ had a valid point when he spoke about the cost ben­e­fit analy­sis to de­crim­i­nal­is­ing the use of mar­i­jua­na.

He said de­crim­i­nal­is­ing its use al­so would free up and would re­move the stig­ma for many youths of hav­ing an un­nec­es­sary crim­i­nal record. Ram­lo­gan said there were, how­ev­er, prac­ti­cal chal­lenges to the pro­posed mea­sure. He said the Gov­ern­ment "will fa­cil­i­tate the de­bate."