Caye Caulker to Vote on Cannabis Legalization Next Month

In just one month, Caye Caulker Village will hold a referendum to decide on whether cannabis should be legalized on the island. This all started with a community petition pushing for a taxable cannabis industry. It’s gutsy, but far from unanimous. So, how does the government plan to handle this? We asked Prime Minister John Briceño, and he admitted the situation exposes gaps in Belize’s referendum laws. He says those rules will need serious review to prevent similar issues in the future.

 

Prime Minister John Briceño

“What that has shown us is that there is some weaknesses in the referendum act. That it is allowing, or even because of the definition of hot well referendum is not properly defined by by geographic area, like a district or by a constituency area. It’s not been defined. So now. we have a village in effect saying that they want to have a referendum and legally we could not have stopped it. So we are going to the National Assembly next week to make some amendments to ensure that those things can happen. Because then, any village could call for referendum for whatever it is that they want. And we want to make sure that we don’t do that one. But secondly also that to ensure that if they want to have a referendum, it has to be something specifically just for them that does not have ally national implications. For instance, if Caye Caulker  would want to have a referendum to limit the number of golf carts, it is something that should be done, it should be a law. But when you issue of something like the cannabis, it’s something that has national implications. So then we need to be able to define those nuances as to when you could have a referendum, a national, or just a local referendum.”