On November 4th, 2015 the country which has arguably suffered most horrifically from the American policy failure known as the “War on Drugs” took a major step towards legalization of marijuana. The implications of Wednesday’s decision by the Mexican Supreme Court will soon be reverberating in Washington and may even impact the 2016 Presidential election.
The Mexican Supreme Court opened the door to legalizing marijuana on Wednesday, delivering a pointed challenge to the nation’s strict substance abuse laws and adding its weight to the growing debate in Latin America over the costs and consequences of the war against drugs. The vote by the court’s criminal chamber declared that individuals should have the right to grow and distribute marijuana for their personal use. While the ruling does not strike down current drug laws, it lays the groundwork for a wave of legal actions that could ultimately rewrite them, proponents of legalization say.
The Court’s ruling was a victory for both individual rights and common sense:
Absent injury to third parties, the court resolved that, under the constitution, every individual has the right to enjoy life as he or she sees fit, and that secondary legislation — like prohibiting marijuana — cannot curtail that right. The court also ruled that although marijuana may cause some degree of harm to some adult users in large quantities, prohibition is an excessive antidote to that harm.
Nowhere is the utter folly of criminalizing a mildly psychotropic herb which nearly every elected member of the United States Congress smoked as a teenager, which the last three elected Presidents obviously consumed during their college years, and which the wizards of the most profitable business sectors in the country essentially grew up smoking, more apparent than in the country of Mexico, where the casualties of the U.S. policy on drugs are found brutally tortured on roadsides and in unmarked graves. Mexico has suffered over100,000 deaths due to drug-related crime during the past decade.
The decision reflects a changing dynamic in Mexico, where for decades the American-backed antidrug campaign has produced much upheaval but few lasting victories. Today, the flow of drugs to the United States continues, along with the political corruption it fuels in Mexico. The country, dispirited by the ceaseless campaign against traffickers, remains engulfed in violence.
Under Mexico’s legal system, the Court’s ruling applies only to the parties who brought the suit. It must be either affirmed five consecutive times by the Justices in the Court’s criminal chamber, or eight of the Court’s eleven Justices that make up the full court will have to rule in its favor. Public opinion in Mexico is strongly against legalization; however the Justices who ruled in favor of the decision called on the Mexican Congress to debate the policy of punitive prohibition, and the decision has clearly placed the issue squarely in the lap of Mexico’s President, Enrique Pena Nieto. To his credit, Nieto has acknowledged that the issue of legalization “will open a debate about the best regulation to inhibit drug consumption.” The Court’s Justices, however, took a broader view of the entire issue of marijuana consumption, one that cuts to the very core of the issue— holding that personal drug use should not be something subjected to draconian criminal penalties in the first place:
“This court recognized the reach of personal freedom,” Justice Olga Sánchez said in voting in favor of the ruling, noting that the same chamber also legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. “People decide the course of their lives.”
The basis for the Court’s ruling is certain to infuriate the architects of American drug policy who view drug usage not through the lens of personal freedom but rather through the punitive lens of societal “harm.” The Court, however, considered the potential for social harm so innocuous as not to outweigh the right of individuals to make personal decisions about how they wish to live their lives.
This solitary decision will not halt the brutal reign of Mexico’s drug cartels or even curb the ever-expanding levels of drug-related violence that have turned the Mexican states that border the southern border of the U.S. into a horrific, bloody war zone. It could and likely will, however, bring down the price of marijuana which will eventually damage the cartels’ business, of which marijuana comprises about one-fifth of its revenues, or 1.5 Billion U.S. per year. And the traffic in cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and other narcotics will continue unabated. Ultimately, however, the biggest threat to the cartels’ profits is American legislation:
The one thing that could significantly affect the cartels’ marijuana business is legislation in the United States. As marijuana growing for commercial purposes in America expands, demand for Mexican marijuana could eventually dry up.
As pointed out by Jorge Castaneda, Mexico’s former foreign minister, however, much depends on how Washington, and in particular, the Administration’s Drug Enforcement Agency, reacts:
For the country’s always prickly ties with Washington, Mexico’s Supreme Court ruling could cut either way. If hard-liners in the U.S. — the Drug Enforcement Administration and its supporters in Congress — determine the American response, there will be trouble. Washington can insist on Mexico honoring a strict interpretation of United Nations conventions against all drugs, including marijuana. It can pressure Mexico, as it has done in the past, to keep intercepting marijuana shipments to the U.S., uprooting marijuana plantations, searching for tunnels across the border and jailing young people for nonviolent drug offenses. Or, if President Obama as well as the moderates in the State and Justice departments run the show, the decision could serve as a much-needed excuse to rethink prohibition.
As Castaneda explains, this ruling could be the catalyst that finally compels our government to recognize the reality that the “war on drugs,” ill-conceived from the start, has become unmanageable and counterproductive. Unlike the U.S., where 7.5 percent of the populationadmits to using marijuana in the previous month, Mexicans themselves seldom use marijuana. A 2011 survey estimated only 2% of Mexicans had used it the past year. The popularity of marijuana in the United States, however, is an established fact. The glaring disconnect of the U.S. continuing its hard, destructive line towards Mexican enforcement of a product that is now legal for adult recreational use in four U.S. states–and permitted for medicinal use in 23 more—is inescapable. This Court’s decision and its implications for the Latin American drug trade may spark a re-examination, at long last, of the United States’ failed policies.