Mexico Debates Legalizing Marijuana: "Radical Prohibition Strategies Have Never Worked"

[Turborama]

Run time: 02:56 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0QiIGoL-Gc   Posted on YouTube: August 13, 2010 By YouTube Member: AlJazeeraEnglish Views on YouTube: 301   Posted on DU: August 14, 2010 By DU Member: Turborama Views on DU: 861

 
A heated debate is under way among senior officials in Mexico over whether the government should legalise the use and sale of marijuana.

The discussion comes as violence from competing drug cartels in the country continues to spiral out of control, claiming thousands of lives every year.

Felipe Calderon, Mexico's president, has said he is firmly against the legalisation, arguing that it would only create "millions" of more drug addicts.

But Vicente Fox, the country's former president and a member of Calderon's conservative National Action Party, has urged the government to legalise drugs in order to "break the economic structure that allows gangs to generate huge profits in their trade, which feeds corruption and increases their areas of power".

"We should consider legalising the production, distribution and sale of drugs" because "radical prohibition strategies have never worked," he explained.

Al Jazeera English's Franc Contreras reports from Mexico City, the capital.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2010/08/2010813181318203668.html

[Gman]

1. I all likelihood, Fox probably stands to make mega-bucks if that happens

[Warpy]

2. They're using the same BS argument that the drug warriors use here

that everybody would run out and start doing legalized drugs. That just isn't the case. The black market pipeline is wide open now and anyone who wants the stuff can usually get it pretty quickly.

In any case, long experience both as a nurse and as a patient have taught me that people who are given the most powerful narcotics we have will take them for about 3 days, then they don't ever want to see them again. Most people prefer being sober, and they'll use these things only for as long as they need to.

A study in Boston back in the early 80s followed 10,800 patients given narcotics in the hospital. Guess how many new addictions resulted.

C'mon, guess.

Four.

That's right, out of nearly 11,000 people given narcotics, only four liked them enough to go looking for them when they got home.

I think any country can deal with those odds.

Prohibition has not worked, is not working, will not work. It's time to try something else.

[cliffordu]

3. Excellent post. Excellent.

:applause:

[BakedAtAMileHigh]

7. Wrong: Prohibition has done exactly what it was supposed to do.

While I absolutely agree with your overall opinion, your historical analysis for the reason and purpose of the War on Plant Users lacks one vital piece of understanding: the war has NOT been a mistake or a failure.

The purpose of the War on Some Drugs is to funnel money to law enforcement industries, private prisons and "treatment" centers. The purpose is to use an archaic and outdated law to incarcerate as many poor and minority citizens as possible, for reasons of both racist population control and profit. The purpose was and is to shift economic and industry attention away from renewable, clean sources of fuel and textiles toward much more dangerous, precious and profitable fossil fuels.

Too many people still think the War on Plant Users is based solely on ignorance and that if we just educate enough people the madness will cease. This is far from the truth: we face not ONLY ignorance but a vast, well-funded army of profiteers who have no problem with sending the 50% of the US population who admits to using cannabis at least once to prison.

These fascist profiteers include police, judges, "addiction experts", private prison corporations, Big Pharma, Big Oil, and the drug cartels.

We have our work cut out for us: these groups are nothing but pure f**king evil and they will literally shoot you unarmed where you stand if they get the chance.

[Warpy]

8. I described the reasons they use to sell the insanity to us now

Originally it was a war on brown and black people. Anybody who's read the vile ramblings of the early drug warriors like Anslinger knows that.

[HankyDubs]

4. As always...

the drug cartels (the illegal drug cartels, to be specific) and the prison industrial complex have a mutual interest. Working hand-in-hand to terrorize civilians, disseminate misinformation and generally promote mayhem. If marijuana were legalized, these two key interest groups would be threatened. Unacceptable!

[sabrina 1]

5. It's the only way to end the violence. Prohibition, all it ever does

is create new and more powerful crime cartels. It sure didn't stop people from doing drugs. Ending the drug laws would starve the murdering thugs of cash. It's so simple, you wonder why they do not do it.

[Bobbieo]

6. Money - Money - Money!

[sabrina 1]

10. Yes, but for whom? If governments are not profiting from this

criminal activity, then why would they worry about cutting off the drug lords? Keeping this fake war on drugs going has to be beneficial to someone other than petty drug dealers or even not so petty ones. The only sensible thing to do to stop the violence is to legalize and then regulate everything.

[Turborama]

9. War on drugs: why the US and Latin America could be ready to end a fruitless 40-year struggle

I thought this excellent article from the Guardian was worth cross posting here...

Mexico's president Felipe Caldéron is the latest Latin leader to call for a debate on drugs legalisation. And in the US, liberals and right-wing libertarians are pressing for an end to prohibition. Forty years after President Nixon launched the 'war on drugs' there is a growing momentum to abandon the fight

Rory Carroll and Paul Harris
The Observer, Sunday August 8 2010

=snip=

The atrocity last month in Torreón, an industrial city in the northern state of Coahuila, came amid headlines shocking even by the standards of Mexico's drug war. A sophisticated car bomb of a type never before seen in the country; a popular gubernatorial candidate gunned down in the highest-level political murder; and then last week the release of official figures putting the number of drug war-related murders at 28,000.

It was against this backdrop of bloody crisis that President Felipe Calderón said something which could, maybe, begin to change everything. He called for a debate on the legalisation of drugs. "It is a fundamental debate," he said. "You have to analyse carefully the pros and cons and key arguments on both sides."

A statement of the obvious, but coming from Calderón it was remarkable. This is the president who declared war on drug cartels in late 2006, deployed the army, militarised the city of Juárez and promised victory even as the savagery overtook Iraq's. Calderón stressed that he personally still opposed legalisation, but his willingness to debate the idea was, for some, a resounding crack in the international drug policy edifice.

"This is a big step forward in putting an end to the war," said Norm Stamper, a former Seattle chief of police and now spokesman for the group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (Leap).

Richard Nixon launched the war on drugs on 17 June 1971, a hard-line prohibition policy continued by successive US presidents. Four decades later there is growing momentum in the US and Latin America to abandon the fight and legalise drugs, or at least marijuana. There have been false dawns before but many activists say the latest rays of sunlight are real.

Long article well worth reading in full (especially the part about "US states seem to be joining the revolt"): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/08/drugs-legalise-mexico-california

Posted in Editorials: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x552504

[sabrina 1]

11. Finally, some light at the end of the this dark tunnel.

Great article. It's too bad that so many had to die before these drug warriors were ready to end this phony war, and so many lost their freedom. But better late than never. And it's not as if there was no precedent for what happens when prohibition is imposed. Human beings are very slow to learn.

I hope they do it fast. It is so out of control already as they should have done this years ago. But at least they're talking about it.