Translated by Leslie Castillo Navia
While I write, the last debate forum regarding marijuana uses is being held in the Palace of Mines. These forums were convened by the federal government, and Peña Nieto anticipated their conclusions before they even began: during his presidency, marijuana would not be regulated for personal use. Today, the outcome of the anticlimactic forums will be revealed: a small monstrosity that will not go beyond allowing the import of pharmaceutical derivatives of cannabis and modifying the table of tolerated thresholds for personal use [currently a person can possess 5 grams, .18 oz] in order to increase the exhorbitant price for users of psychoactive substances. At least that is the governmental intention, supported by the caucus of the PRI [Party of the Institutional Revolution] in Congress, although not all its members share the moralizing myopia of the President of the Republic.
Nevertheless, the process of change in drug policy has begun, and important beachheads have been established which make the advancement of a sensible and comprehensive regulation of cannabis foreseeable in the short term. The Supreme Court ruling which declared the absolute prohibition of marijuana as unconstitutional has opened the doors to legislative reform that addresses the medical, therapeutic, scientific, and personal uses of cannabis, although without a doubt the process will be obstructed by reluctance of the majority coalition and presidential opposition to taking an enormous step in the rectification of an incorrect strategy which has caused much harm over the past century and has not reached any of its objectives.
Some days ago, the magazine Harper's published an article by Dan Baum in which statements made by John Ehrlichman in an interview with Baum in 1994 were made public. Ehrlichman was Nixon's advisor in the White House until he ended up in jail for the Watergate scandal. His statements had been excluded from the published version at that time. With pragmatic impudence, Ehrlichman declared that Nixon decreed the War on Drugs because he needed a pretext to harass and persecute his political enemies: the opponents to the Vietnam War and the defendents of black civil rights. Since they could not prohibit blacks or protesters, they launched a war strategy in which they identified blacks with heroin consumption and hippies with that of marijuana. As such, they had an excuse to persecute annoying activists, not for their causes but for their supposed consumptions.
This account is only an example of the nonsense on which drug policy has been based during the last century. The only beneficiaries have been specialists in clandestine markets that have become rich with the control of the commerce of prohibited substances. The victims have been the users (who have been converted into criminals by committing crimes without victims and without violence), the discarded families, the broken communities, and the States themselves, which have paid extremely high costs in resources and efficacy without a single positive result.
The absolute prohibition of marijuana has been especially absurd due to its low relative danger with respect to other substances, including alcohol. Therefore, its regulation can be the first step in modifying the way in which States have approached the subject of psychoactive substances and their potential health and social risks. For a long time, different groups of academics, intellectuals, scientists, and activists have pushed the need to create a new regulatory framework that allows for a reduction in the black market, takes business away from organized crime, stops criminalizing consumers and better protects their health, and raises the age of initial consumption through prevention measures among minors--something which dealers today who fail to ask for a client's voter ID don't do.
The regulatory model, the bases of which Catalina Pérez Correa and I proposed in an article published this month in Nexos magazine, does not try to create a competitive market based on publicity and brands. Rather, it creates a market strongly controlled by the State, with a specialized regulatory body and a state company in charge of buying all products, classifying them, labeling them, and distributing them both through points of sale for personal consumption and therapeutic clinics and pharmacists. At the same time, it removes marijuana from the penal code, with the exception of what is related to minors.
The regulation design has been captured in an initiative by the General Law for Cannabis Regulation [see for details of proposed government regulatory structure], prepared by a large group, with participation from academics from the Drug Policy Program at CIDE [Center for Research and Development] and Georgetown University, Mexico United Against Crime drug policy specialists, and activists and politicians involved in the issue. It has been filed in the Senate by Roberto Gil Zuarth [National Action Party, PAN]. It is a comprehensive regulation project which goes above and beyond the separation between the personal and therapeutic uses of marijuana.
It is not the only initiative on the table. A group of Senators of the PRD [Party of the Democratic Revolution] has also proposed their own project, adding to those of Senator Cristina Díaz of the PRI [Party of Institutional Revolution], on medicinal and pharmaceutical uses. Congress already has enough material to discuss, and there are plenty of arguments. Meanwhile, the Government dedicated the last few months to forums where they sent quacks to talk nonsense as an excuse to argue against those opposed to marijuana prohibition. Subterfuges to justify stubbornness. 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