In a crowded street outside of Mexico City, a police officer searches a young man for drugs. After emptying the man's pockets, the officer is left with a half gram of cocaine, the equivalent of about four lines. His prison sentence? There is none. The man is recorded and walks away. It is the first of his three warnings, after that he will be required to go into a rehabilitation clinic.
This scene, now a reality under a law enacted by the Mexican government in late August, also applies for five grams of marijuana (about four joints), 50 milligrams of heroin, 40 milligrams of methamphetamine and 0.015 milligrams of LSD according to The New York Times.
However, before you gasp at the problems that may accompany this seemingly radical law, consider these simple truths. Mexico is not the United States, and right now Mexico has much larger problems to deal with than small time drug users.
Since Mexican President Felipe Calderon began his war on drugs in 2006, violence has erupted in Mexico, leaving the country with an alarming death toll currently topping 13,500, according to The New York Times. Calderon's deployment of more than 10,000 federal troops to fight the powerful cartels has upset the deeply entrenched Mexican drug industry and led to unprecedented violence as the cartels battle both the government and one another for lucrative trade routes to the United States.
Ciudad Juarez, bordering El Paso, Texas, which is the third safest city in the U.S, is now one of the deadliest in the world. With more than 1,600 drug-related murders last year and more than 326 killings in August 2009 alone according to The New York Times, apparently the cartels are not ready to back down anytime soon.
The new law, Calderon hopes, will help to curb both drug usership and corruption in Mexico's police force by decreasing bribes received from small drug arrests. While the move is progressive in the sense that it treats drug addicts much like alcoholics and offers them treatment instead of prison, it will most likely do nothing to stop the violence and drug trafficking coming out of Mexico. Tony Payan, a political scientist at the University of Texas-El Paso, who also teaches in Juarez, thinks so at least.
"If they asked me, will decriminalization of the possession of small amounts of drugs save a single life in Ciudad Juárez, where there have been about 3,200 murders in 21 months, my answer would be a rotund no, " Payan said in a New York Times column.
The cartels, which enjoy a virtual monopoly on America's lucrative drug market, thanks in part to a 1980s U.S. policy which closed off the Caribbean as a narcotics passage and forced many of the world's drugs to come overland through Mexico, should not feel a very large impact.
Business is good and, like any good corporation, they are built to last. In fact, according to Rolling Stone they generate as much as $38 billion in gross proceeds every year, more than even Coca-Cola.
While the new law is an impressive move in what seems to be a war that will require drastic changes, it is wrong to think that it may expedite the end to the war anytime soon. However, a possible benefit in the short term is that less time dealing with small time users may allow more federal resources to be used on arresting the major drug traffickers. Also, as former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda pointed out in the New York Times discussion, it does provide Mexico with much needed mandatory sentencing laws for drug users, perhaps giving more teeth to drug laws than ever before.
In any case, it is difficult to see Calderon being able to win this war as long as the source of the cartels power, U.S. drug money and guns, continue to flow steadily into Mexico. The legalization of drugs in Mexico will do little to hurt the cartels as long as the lucrative illegal drug market still exists on the other side of the border.
If the recent cartel killing of 17 recovering drug addicts at a Juarez rehabilitation center in early September is any indication of things to come, it looks like it could be a long road for Calderon and Mexico.
Will Hoyt hoytws@muohio.edu
