In late March 2024, officers of the Santa Cruz provincial police’s investigations division searched a house in the Bicentenario neighbourhood of Río Gallegos for evidence in a weapons case.[1][2] On a black armchair in the living room they found an open briefcase holding a clear plastic bag of marijuana.[1][2] The provincial narcotics division and Gendarmería Nacional’s criminalistics unit confirmed 145 grams.[1][2]

The man, identified only as L.S.L., a 35-year-old construction worker, admitted in his statement that he was a cannabis user.[1][2] His defence argued the drug was for personal use, but Judge Mario Gabriel Reynaldi held that the quantity could not be considered small, the condition the law requires to reduce the penalty.[1][2]

The provincial courts had already given him three years’ suspended prison for misuse of firearms and carrying a firearm without authorisation.[1][2] Because the facts were contemporaneous and separated only by jurisdiction, prosecutors and the public defence agreed to unify the sentences in a single three-year suspended term, which the Federal Oral Court of Santa Cruz approved.[1][2] At his own request, the court ordered him to pay one million pesos in five monthly instalments of 200,000 pesos to the neonatal ward of the Río Gallegos regional hospital, to keep his residence, commit no new offences and avoid alcohol and drug abuse.[1][2]