Colombia’s President Tells Trump To Legalize Marijuana To Combat Illicit Drug Trade
Colombia Cannabis Exports: Petro’s Blunt Answer to a Bloody, Failed Drug War
Colombia cannabis exports. That’s the pitch from President Gustavo Petro to President Donald Trump: ditch prohibition, regulate adult-use marijuana, and open the gates to international cannabis trade. No more shadowboxing with cartels on the high seas while funerals stack up in the Andes. Petro’s message cuts clean like a chef’s knife—pragmatic, unsentimental, and born from a half-century of body counts. He says the United States consumes while Colombia bleeds, and the math is obscene: hundreds of thousands dead over a market that refuses to die. Replace the theater with policy. Shift the profits from jungle labs to tax coffers. Make cannabis a commodity, not a curse. This is marijuana policy reform with an export label, a test of whether the global drug war can be unwound without unraveling the fragile fabric of two continents.
Petro’s argument isn’t a romantic ode to legal highs. It’s a ledger entry. Legal cannabis exports could turn a criminal economy into a lawful one, with customs forms and barcodes instead of rifles. He even frames it as a trade realignment: remove tariffs on Colombian agriculture, then greenlight regulated cannabis—treat it like coffee, flowers, or emeralds. International treaties aren’t a dead end, he notes; the United Nations already shifted cannabis out of its harshest medical classification, a rescheduling that cracks open the door for modern, science-based regulation. You can hear the subtext: if Washington wants fewer bullets and boats, build a market that starves the cartels. Legal cannabis revenue, compliance standards, lab testing, age checks—everything that turns vice into a managed industry instead of an endless war. The Michigan cannabis market learned this lesson at state level; Colombia wants to run it at scale, across borders, with paperwork and pride.
Trump, unsurprisingly, punched back. He branded Petro an “illegal drug leader,” and the Treasury’s sanctions office drew a bead on the Colombian president and his circle. Meanwhile, U.S. forces keep smashing speedboats in international waters—extrajudicial fireworks pitched as policy. It’s a spectacle that makes for cable-news adrenaline, but it cornered the military in a logic trap even insiders flagged. If your strategy requires bullets where courts and treaties should be, maybe the strategy is the problem. One scathing assessment of this posture lands the point with a sledgehammer in Trump’s ‘Stupid’ Drug War Killings Put Military In Untenable Position, Former GOP Attorney General Of Idaho Says (Op-Ed). Petro counters with a wonkier brief: strengthen prevention and treatment at home, study prohibition with rigor, and build a smarter treaty to hunt narco capital instead of kids with rifles. The point isn’t moral purity. It’s effectiveness.
Context matters. Colombia’s Congress already cracked the seal on national cannabis legalization, inching a bill forward as Petro pushes to cut the illicit market’s oxygen. He’s said plainly that keeping marijuana illegal props up the very violence everyone claims to hate—and he has floated amnesty for people locked up over weed. Meanwhile, he’s walked New York streets, breathing in the skunky legality of a country that once evangelized prohibition. This whiplash is where geopolitics meets street-level reality. At the same time in the U.S., the legal landscape is melting, refreezing, and melting again: a federal prohibition case is heading toward a pivotal test, covered in Cannabis industry case challenging prohibition hits Supreme Court (Newsletter: October 27, 2025). Reform isn’t linear. In some corners, advocates get sidelined—see the grassroots alarm in South Dakota Medical Marijuana Advocates Alarmed After Lawmakers Give Prohibitionists A Platform. In others, even psychedelics reform faces a stress test, like the access fight detailed in Oregon Officials Seek To Dismiss Psilocybin Access Lawsuit From Homebound Patients. The throughline: laws are catching up to lived reality in fits and starts, and the market—legal and illicit—never waits.
So here we are, staring down a choice dressed up as a feud. Keep swinging at boats and pretending the ocean will stop being wet. Or test a controlled market that might turn an enemy into an exporter with receipts and standards. Legal cannabis exports won’t fix everything. There will be rough edges: compliance headaches, border politics, trade disputes, equity demands, and the eternal temptation to tax the thing until the illicit market smirks and survives. But we know the alternative. We’ve watched it for decades. Petro’s proposal is less a provocation than a dare to acknowledge the obvious: people will use cannabis; the question is who gets paid and who gets buried. If you care about outcomes—violence down, revenues up, transparency on the ledger—this is the experiment you run, not the one you cancel. And if you’re ready to engage with the plant on its merits, from policy to personal experience, take the next step and explore our curated selection here: https://thcaorder.com/shop/.
