Selective legalization: How medical cannabis regulation constitutes markets in Brazil and Colombia.

Pereira P. · The International journal on drug policy · 2026

**Background & Methods** This is a qualitative policy review examining medical cannabis regulatory frameworks through document analysis and structured comparison of Brazil and Colombia from 2014 to August 1, 2026. The study analyzes how selective legalization redraws legal boundaries by recognizing specific cannabis uses, products, and activities while maintaining prohibitions on others. **Key Findings** • Colombia established an earlier authorization sequence for cultivation, processing, and foreign trade, creating an internationally oriented production market with broader legal recognition of commercial activities. Brazil, by contrast, expanded individual-import and pharmacy-product routes while domestic cultivation lacked a general administrative authorization route during the study period, resulting in reliance on foreign products and cannabis-derived inputs alongside judicially protected domestic production. • Medical cannabis reforms with similar stated purposes established markedly different scopes of legal recognition and institutional routes for implementation, demonstrating that legal reforms do not uniformly translate into equivalent market structures or economic opportunities across jurisdictions. • Effective market participation and configuration cannot be predicted from legal recognition alone; institutional capacity, administrative routes, and unequal access to regulatory pathways significantly shape which actors can participate in legalized medical cannabis activities. **Dosage & Administration** Not reported. **Safety & Adverse Effects** Not reported. **Evidence Quality** This review is limited by its qualitative policy analysis design without primary data collection or clinical outcomes assessment. The structured comparison between two Latin American countries provides contextual institutional analysis but has limited generalizability to other regulatory frameworks. The study addresses policy architecture rather than clinical efficacy or safety endpoints. As a document-based policy review published in 2026, evidence quality reflects regulatory and legal analysis rather than experimental or observational clinical evidence. The cutoff date of August 1, 2026, may not capture subsequent regulatory developments. This work contributes to understanding how selective legalization creates differential market structures but does not evaluate patient outcomes or therapeutic effectiveness of medical cannabis interventions.

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