The Lower House on Wednesday
approved a government decree that reclassifies marijuana as a
soft rather than a hard drug.
The decree passed with 280 in favor, 146 opposed, and two
abstentions, and now passes to the Senate.
Voting in favor was the ruling center-left Democratic Party
(PD) of Premier Matteo Renzi.
But Renzi's coalition partners in the New Center Right
(NCD) have vowed to push for amendments in the Senate.
Led by Interior Minister Angelino Alfano, the NCD believes
that harsh penalties should still be applied to synthetic
marijuana, which it deems more harmful.
"We need to send a strong message to the country, which is
that doing drugs is not normal, and we need to defeat the
culture that says it is, which is causing huge damage to both
young people and adults," said Health Minister Beatrice Lorenzin
of the NCD.
The new law also effectively removes jail time as a
sentence for small-time dealers, offering community service and
other options in its place.
Penalties for personal use are also expected to be
eliminated under the provision.
The measure follows a supreme Court of Cassation decision
in February that threw out as "illegitimate" a 2005 law that
equated the possession of soft drugs to heavy drugs, and was
blamed as a contributing factor to severe overcrowding in
Italian prisons.
Detractors of that law, which was sponsored at the time by
then-right-wing MP Gianfranco Fini and centrist MP Carlo
Giovanardi, argued it violated a 1993 popular referendum in
which a majority of Italians voted to decriminalize drug
possession for personal consumption.
The so-called Fini-Giovanardi law, which had been passed by
ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right government, had been
challenged several times, namely for violating the European
Union legal principle that the punishment must be proportional
to the crime.
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