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| Secretary of Government Relations Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong at third National Forum on the Use of Marijuana in Coahuila Photo: Cuartoscuro |
Translated by Leslie Castillo Navia
At the end of the third forum in the debate on marijuana convened by the government, Secretary of Government Relations Osorio Chong made a promising new declaration of a change in drug policy. He affirmed that the poorly-named ‘War on Drugs’ was started based on an incorrect assessment and a poorly-designed strategy which led to an unprecedented chain of violence.
MV Note: In November 2015, the First Chamber of the Mexican Supreme Court of Justice granted an amparo, injunction, to four persons who had applied, as a test case, to the Federal Commission for Protection Against Health Risks (COFEPRIS) for permits to grow marijuana for their personal consumption. The court ordered COFEPRIS to issue the permits on the grounds that prohibition of such violated the constitutional right to the free development of personality.
For the decision to be generally applicable, the First Chamber needs to resolve consecutively four other similar amparos, also with four favorable votes. COFEPRIS recently announced that it has received over 200 more requests for permits since last December and that it will reject them, which will lead to more appeals to the Supreme Court. This led the government to organize a national debate on marijuana, to conclude by the end of March. Congress has also held hearings on the issue. In announcing the debate, Peña Nieto stated he is opposed to eliminating the prohibition against the legal growing and selling of marijuana.The Secretart's remark was directed against the government of Felipe Calderón, who was quick to respond with his own hollow pretexts. According to the former president, State action was not what caused the exponential growth of violence and its disproportionate trail of deaths and disappearances. However, neither Calderón nor his government could provide a plausible explanation of why the homicide rate grew to the same levels as that of twenty years prior, precisely when the strategy “so that drugs don’t reach your children” was started—a strategy which Calderón crowed about tirelessly during the first three years of his presidency.
The only explanation given by Calderon's civil servants, primarily the sinister Genaro García Luna [Secretary of Public Security, i.e. federal police], was that the violence was between the drug cartels themselves who fought for territorial control to the extent that the State persecuted them. Therefore, the violence certainly had been a reaction to the strategy, like it or not.
Although some studies, such as those of the Colombian economist Daniel Mejia, have tried to relate the epidemic of violence in Mexico with exogenous factors such as changes in Colombian cocaine cartels [MV Note: Because of U.S. shutting down Caribbean drug routes, the Colombian cartels allied with Mexican cartels to move cocaine through their territory], most of the academic research available does establish a causal relationship between Calderon’s government policy and the spiral of violence from which the country has not been able to escape.
It is worth asking Osorio Chong why he has maintained the same policy, with minor changes, if it was designed based on an incorrect assessment and has thus been based on an incorrect strategy, because until now Peña Nieto’s government has just done more of the same.
Osorio is also correct when he says that it is necessary to distinguish between damage caused by drugs and that caused by incorrect drug policy. Indeed, after one hundred years of prohibition and more than forty years of declared war, it has become clear that the damage caused by the use of security forces by the State and the criminal justice system as central mechanisms in the anti-drug strategy is worse than that caused by any substance itself. This is not only because of the violence that has been generated, but also because of its harmful effects on the health and rights of the consumers, the persecuted, the stigmatized, and those exposed to high-risk practices of drug consumption due to the secrecy involved.
Do Osorio Chong’s statements mean that the Mexican government has learned its lesson and that a drug policy will now definitely be put in place which is based on evidence and harm-reduction strategies, does not criminalize users, regulates different substances according to their relative danger, and takes business away from offenders? That would require a serious count of the damages which, in Calderón’s defense, did not start in the previous government but rather are a product of several decades of prohibition administered in the traditional manner of the Party of the Institutional Revolution, with repeated negotiation with criminal groups. This guaranteed the gangs of specialists in clandestine markets an initial accumulation of wealth with which they could gather weapons and recruit forces in order to challenge the State, not only in the market of restricted substances but also in territorial control and other predatory crimes.
If Osorio is consistent with his statements, then he should be taking serious steps in the comprehensive review of drug policy in order to propose a new model capable of effectively shrinking the black market for substances, which also has effective control of risks associated with psychoactive substance consumption.
However, beyond the speeches, what has been seen is a fumbling attitude which doesn’t even dare to fully enter into a sensible regulation of marijuana. At most, what this government seems willing to move forward with is a tepid legalization of pharmaceuticals derived from cannabis and a review of the General Health Law’s thresholds which establish possession with the intention of consumption [Mexican law currently allows personal possession of 5 grams, or .2 ounces of marijuana. There is discussion of raising this to 28 grams, or 1 ounce].
Despite the consensus in favor of comprehensive regulation of marijuana, if the current government stays as is, the result of the forums, which were announced by the President from the beginning with his prohibitionist declarations, will be anticlimactic. Spanish original
*Jorge Javier Romero Vadillo is a political scientist, professor and researcher in the Department of Politics and Culture at the Autonomous Metropolitan University, Xochimilco Campus. He holds a masters in Political Science from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and a doctorate from the Faculty of Political Science and Sociology at the University Complutense of Madrid. He is a regular contributing columnist for Sinembargo. @Giorgioromero