MEXICO PONDERS THE LEGALIZATION OF MARIJUANA

The Los Angeles Times is reporting that the widespread legalization of marijuana in the United States is quote “killing Mexico’s illicit marijuana business” as drug cartels increasingly abandon the crop that was once their staple export item.

For decades, marijuana flowed in one direction: north from Mexico to the United States. These days, however, “drug enforcement agents regularly seize specialty strains of retail-quality cannabis grown in the United States being smuggled south.”

The efficacy of legalizing marijuana as a means of weakening Mexico’s powerful drug cartels has not gone unnoticed by Mexican political figures. Mexico’s Secretary of Tourism, Enrique De La Madrid, recently expressed support for legalizing marijuana for recreational use in certain Mexican states in an effort to reduce growing violence across the nation.”

De La Madrid certainly isn’t the first Mexican political figure to propose the legalization of marijuana in Mexico. Enrique Pena Nieto

In March of 2016 in an editorial featured in the Los Angeles Times, Ernesto Zedillo, a former Mexican president, also called for the legalization of marijuana and other measures as a way of wresting control of the drug trade from organized crime citing examples of marijuana legalization in the United States and Uruguay.

This broader legalization debate is occurring in the wake of one of the deadliest years in Mexico’s modern history. In the first 11 months of 2017, Mexico registered a record 23,101 murder investigations.