From what I've heard about the levels of police corruption and institutional incompetence in Brazil, i'll make a prediction based on what I've seen happen in Me

From what I've heard about the levels of police corruption and institutional incompetence in Brazil, i'll make a prediction based on what I've seen happen in Mexico (with similarly corrupt police and similarly inept institutions). The government decriminalizes the substance in some specified way, public platitudes are made about this widely known legal change, and police, on the streets, interacting with random people, continue to arrest them flagrantly for possession of any amount of marijuana out of sheer corrupt inertia until their victims cough up a bribe to avoid the tedious and sometimes dangerous process of being in custody and under blatantly false or at least ambiguously glued-up criminal charges. And so it goes, crap without end, Amen. Mexico didn't just decriminalize it either, the country's supreme court outright, definitively legalized recreational consumption and possession of marijuana in 2021, but because of a blend of dishonest law enforcement, state-level legal inertia and lack of clearly defined regulatory follow-through, and extremely ambiguous enforcement procedures, people, to this day, regularly get arrested and charged with possession, even of very small amounts. My main point: a media-friendly formal announcement of a certain new legal freedom in many countries (particularly developing countries with shitty, half-functional institutions) often widely fails to show meaningful improvements on the ground for years afterward.