This post is also available in: Português Español

Uruguayan President José Mujica on Tuesday called on professors from the United States to teach in Uruguay and defended his country’s creation of a legal marijuana market. Speaking at American University to an audience comprised mainly of students, Mujica also shared his vision of a world that is becoming more globalized and bilingual.

Mujica, who arrived in Washington Monday and met with President Barack Obama at the White House, expressed concern that many Uruguayan students come to the United States every year to study, but many don’t return. “When our young people come here…they feel a strong cultural impact,” the president said. “So we lose them. They stay.” Mujica said he believes bringing professors to Uruguay might help solve the problem. “I believe it is basic to take and bring intelligence, to spread intelligence, but we also have something to offer and to give.” Uruguay can share its culture and way of life with people who come, Mujica said. “We want professors to come and get to know us. Not because we are better, we are not better, we are different.”

Mujica also shared with the audience his vision of the future and called for them to work to address its challenges. “I think we are coming into different times, tremendously different. The speed of communication, the degree of information. In the next 30 to 40 years, the world will be bilingual,” Mujica said. His remarks echoed comments he made Monday to Obama that even as more people are leaning English, Americans must learn Spanish. There is, however, an “increasing agenda of world problems that no one deals with, and we cannot even organize that agenda,” Mujica said. Even as problems such as climate change call for a coordinated global response, we think at a national level, he said. “We still do not have a system of international respect where we can tolerate one another. We are far from it. Work. You work for it, young people.”

Mujica also briefly touched on the issue of drugs. Drugs are an “economic power,” Mujica said, and there is a simple reason why drug trafficking exists—demand. The FARC in Colombia adapted to that reality, Mujica said, and that is why Uruguay’s recent legalization of marijuana focuses on regulating the cannabis market. Mujica said he is not recommending that people use drugs, but added he wants to take the market out of the hands of drug traffickers. Last week, he signed regulations for the legal cannabis market that allow Uruguayans to purchase up to 10 grams of marijuana per week at a price of approximately 90 cents per gram. Legal marijuana will be sold in pharmacies by the end of the year.

Prior to speaking at American University, Mujica met Tuesday with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry for a discussion “focused on the ways we can expand our cooperation on trade, social inclusion, educational exchanges and global peace and security,” the State Department said in a statement. The department said it supports expanding a program to bring 30 Uruguayan teachers to the United States this year to live and work with U.S. teachers, and will continue supporting Uruguay’s National Agency for Research and Investigation’s incubator for entrepreneurs.

Mujica will be in Washington through Thursday. Today, he is scheduled to meet with officials of the Americas Society and speak to the World Bank.