The Senate on Wednesday gave final
approval to a decree that overhauls Italy's drugs laws and
reclassifies marijuana as a soft rather than a hard drug.
The decree passed a confidence vote with 155 Senators in
favour and 105 against.
The new law also effectively removes jail time as a
sentence for small-time dealers, offering community service and
other options in its place.
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 hard 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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