Mexico Considers Marijuana Legalization After Ballot Wins in US Richard Fausset - The Los Angeles Times
go to original January 5, 2013

A man pretends to smoke a giant marijuana cigar in Mexico City last year during a demonstration calling for legalization of the substance. (Yuri Cortez/AFP/Getty Images)

MEXICO CITY — Forgive the Mexicans for trying to get this straight:

So now the United States, which has spent decades battling Mexican marijuana, is on a legalization bender?

The same United States that long viewed cannabis as a menace, funding crop-poisoning programs, tearing up auto bodies at the border, and deploying sniffer dogs, fiber-optic scopes and backscatter X-ray machines to detect the lowly weed?

The success of legalization initiatives in Colorado and Washington in November has sparked a new conversation in a nation that is one of the world's top marijuana growers: Should Mexico, which has suffered mightily in its war against the deadly drug cartels, follow the Western states' lead?

Mexico's new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, opposes legalization, but he also told CNN recently that the news from Washington and Colorado "could bring us to rethinking the strategy."

Such rethinking has already begun. Shortly after the approval of the U.S. ballot measures, the governor of Colima state, Mario Anguiano, floated the idea of a legalization referendum for his small coastal state. In the Mexican Congress, Fernando Belaunzaran, a lawmaker with the left-wing Democratic Revolution Party, has introduced a national legalization bill. The cartels probably derive 20% to 25% of their drug export revenue from marijuana, and Belaunzaran contends that legalization will eat into profit that allows the cartels to buy the advanced weapons that are the cause of much bloodshed.

"It's a matter of life or death," Belaunzaran said in a recent news conference. "And after 60,000 deceased" — an estimate of the death toll in the six-year war against the cartels — "no one can say that it isn't essential to Mexicans' lives."

Mexico City Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera called for a national legalization forum a month before the Colorado and Washington votes. Since then, a number of prominent Mexican voices have questioned the wisdom of following the strict prohibitionist policies still favored by the U.S. government when many Americans at the state and local levels have rejected those policies at the ballot box.

Read more at The Los Angeles Times

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!