Mario Cerdas, a 53-year-old lawyer, who is in pre-trial detention for growing plants for self-consumption purposes, states that the public prosecutor’s accusatory piece against him does not accuse him of selling cannabis as publicly said.
In this case he also claims to feel “pretty lonely”.
He said so, in an exclusive interview with MCN where he claims that, with his case, the Public Prosecutor’s Office seeks to set a precedent for cannabis cultivation.
“In this I have felt quite alone because if you start to observe yourself in some countries like Argentina, there were even movements by women’s groups who wanted to insist on cultivation for children who had different pathologies, but in Costa Rica has lacked the accompaniment of organizations to fight more for the right that we all have in health.”
This is the second time the Public Prosecutor’s Office has accused him of violating psychotropic law. For these same acts, the prosecution had acquitted him in 2018, because Chamber III stated on that occasion that there was no evidence against him to verify that his crop was for trafficking purposes.
On this occasion, he is accused of non-commercial distribution. However, the director of the Judicial Investigation Agency (OIJ), Walter Espinoza, declared it so at a press conference.
“I think he was malicious on the part of some of Alajuela’s judicial agents to give the statements. Because the statement he made to me with the Public Prosecutor’s Office does not correspond to what the accusatory piece says.”
The lawyer is in favor of the action of the crop to be used by people who require it for therapeutic uses or those who want to benefit from its nutritional and non-commercial properties.
“That they have never in fact liked in the same motivations or arguments that they give when the matter was brought for consideration by Room III is coincidentally that they consider that if the antecedent of mine was allowed then they would lose criminal action against the cultivation of the cannabis plant.”
Read the full interview: https://bit.ly/37dhm6K
Listen to the audio: https://spoti.fi/34YZUjP
in Costa Rica. 
