The South American nation of Ecuador is preparing to decriminalize the use of all drugs.

As reported in Global Post, President Rafael Correa’s grouping in congress is driving forward with a landmark bill that would regulate the consumption of outlawed drugs.

The bill would place currently illegal substances such as marijuana and cocaine in the same camp as alcohol.

The draft for a new drug law explains that narcotics use should be managed “not by control, repression and even criminalization, but from the perspective of prevention.”

The changes that would come from passing the bill would include treatment programs and rehabilitation for addicts, as well as the replacement of jail time with small fines.

Those who deal the drugs, on the other hand, would still face jail time. This sentences would however be reduced.

As part of an already ongoing effort to change the way the country deals with its drug problem, Ecuador has freed thousands of convicted drug mules.

Ecuador, as it is situated between the world’s largest cocaine producing countries, Colombia and Peru, has become a major center of drug trafficking.

If the bill passes it would put into practice some of the larger aims of Ecuador’s 2008 constitution which was drawn up by President Correa’s leftist Country Alliance grouping.

Article 364 of the constitution describes drug use as a public health matter rather than one of law and order.

As quoted in the Huffington Post Carlos Velasco, who chairs the Ecuadorean congress’ Commission of the Right to Health and who authored the bill, expressed via Facebook that: "Treating the drug phenomenon in a repressive way, as was done in the 1980s and 1990s when prison was the only destination for the drug consumer, is absurd."

Opposing the bill, Maria Cristina Kronfle of the center-right social Christian grouping believes that relaxing the existing restrictions on drugs would in fact encourage drug consumption.