Ganga Domingos, a senior official with Peru’s Ministry of Culture, said officials had collected around 350,000 signatures from the public in support of the bill, but it had still to be passed by the legislature.

Calls for legalization have been growing louder since December 2013, when the country’s Supreme Court ruled that Peruvian drug legislation is unconstitutional.

“The court’s ruling is not the final word on marijuana prohibition in Peru,” Ganga told Reuters.

However, the case has renewed interest in marijuana, according to John Ross, a historian with the Interdisciplinary Center for Colombia in Bogota.

“The country is finally ready to look at the history of marijuana decriminalization, which we haven’t seen for 15 years,” he said.

According to Ross, the fact that the current legal market is dominated by the criminal underground is one of the reasons it’s being ignored.

“The police can’t fight the drug wars when they can’t get a share of the criminal profits,” he said. “The profits are now going through the criminal underworld.”

Peru decriminalized the possession of small amounts of marijuana or other small amounts of drugs in 2001 and has since made marijuana available in pharmacies, cafes and other retail outlets.

However, Peru’s former president Rafael Correa, who was known as a strong anti-narcotics supporter, is now believed by some to be working to revive a 2012 push to criminalize cannabis.

Peru legalized the production, distribution and retailing of marijuana in a 2001 bill but stopped short of regulating or licensing it, a move that critics dubbed the “corridor of death”.

The country’s attorney general’s office last month submitted a proposal to amend the decriminalization bill to remove the language banning pot shops and pharmacies.

The new proposal would put the government in charge of establishing a national framework to regulate what retailers and suppliers are allowed on the streets, according to Ganga, who argued that the law was unconstitutional.

Meanwhile, in neighboring Brazil, a bill before the Senate would criminalize the possession of marijuana.

The bill would make possession punishable by a fine of up to five hundred or one year in prison.

However, experts say the current system of marijuana prohibition in Brazil remains ineffective at reducing drug-related deaths.