Mexico may soon enter an elite club composed of Holland, Portugal, Uruguay and Colorado, Oregon and Washington state: It’s on the verge of excluding marijuana from the destructive war on drugs.
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On Wednesday, the Mexican Supreme court made a step towards legalizing Marijuana in the country, when a vote by the court’s criminal chamber declared that individuals should have the right to grow marijuana for personal use.
The ruling doesn’t strike down the country’s strict drug laws, which put thousands of people in jail every year on charges of consumption and possession.
The push to legalize weed in Mexico has gathered steam in recent months after the federal government, which opposes legalization, agreed to allow an 8-year-old girl suffering from a debilitating form of epilepsy to use a marijuana-based medicine to treat her condition.
Mike Vigil, a former DEA agent who worked in Mexico for 13 years, joined The Takeaway to discuss the importance of the court ruling.
Advocates of marijuana in Mexico say that pot should be legalized on two grounds.
The leftist Democratic Revolution Party said that its youth wing was preparing 32 legal petitions to file in courts in the country’s 31 states and the capital.
There is no mystery that Mexico struggles with drug problems.
Still, the Supreme Court’s new position on marijuana could improve Mexico’s security situation somewhat, Duncan Wood, director of the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute, said in an interview with Quartz.
The case was brought by four members of Mexicans United for Responsible and Tolerant Consumption (the acronym SMART in Spanish), a group set up specifically to challenge laws on this issue in Mexico.
“Appeals are going to rain down”, he said, estimating that the process could take between one and two years. Still, the cartel’s real money comes from illegal drugs, not from peddling knock-off hip hop CDs or from trying to squeeze a few extra pesos out of impoverished migrants looking to hire a coyote to help them across the US border. It will, however, eventually bring down marijuana prices, which over time will damage the cartels’ business.
In Mexico City’s tough-as-nails Tepito neighbourhood, one of the capital’s major drug distribution hubs, 5 grams of cannabis sells for 40 pesos ($2.37), Lara said. Those drug conventions, however, allow member states are a certain amount of flexibility in how they implement drug regulations.
“I don’t think there’s any sense that if we take marijuana away from them, that will incentivise them to move into other areas”, said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance. All the water pours out.
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While legalization across more states in the USA would make life more hard for cartels, John Walsh, a senior associate for the Washington Office on Latin America, noted that it would merely shift plans.
