Decriminalization fails to alter Mexican reality

Last April, with the nation engrossed in the swine flu epidemic, Mexico's Congress quietly decriminalized the possession of various drugs. Though trafficking and buying drugs remained illegal, Mexicans would no longer face criminal charges for carrying small amounts of previously prohibited substances: up to half a gram of cocaine, five grams of marijuana, and similarly small amounts of other drugs.

The idea behind the law was that Mexico's police, freed from the burden of chasing the peons of the drug trade, would be able to concentrate on the greater threats from the industry.

"Decriminalization says that we should focus our resources on the bad guys, not the [low-level] dealers or the users," said Walter McKay, an analyst with the Mexico City-based Instituto para la Seguridad y Democracia (in English, the Institute for Security and Democracy).

An added benefit is that Mexico's addicts would be free of the burden of the harassing police. "[Because of the] reduction in those consequences, it could be possible that consumers are less of a target for extortion by police," said Mexican security analyst Jorge Luis Sierra.

When the law went into effect in August, Mexico appeared at the forefront of a new policy vanguard. A commission of ex-presidents of Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia had recommended the full legalization of marijuana in February 2009 as a remedy for the brutal bouts of drug violence not only in Mexico, but in Central America and Colombia as well. In Argentina, Brazil, and Ecuador, major changes on drug policy had either occurred or were expected in the near future.

The opening sentence in a write-up of Mexico's decriminalization in The American Prospect magazine, a longtime standard-bearer of the American left, was reflective of the mood: "A call for drug policy-reform is echoing across Latin America, where a decades-long, U.S.-sponsored battle against drug production and distribution has fostered a climate of fear, insecurity, and death."

Yet some addiction-treatment professionals in Mexico were as unhappy about the precedent set in April as legalization advocates were jubilant. One director of a Mexico City rehab center, who wished to remain anonymous out of respect for his patients, questioned the wisdom of the decriminalization.

"It's obvious that the people who took this decision don't know anything at all about what addiction is," he said. "Obviously [there will be] negative consequences on an individual, familiar, and societal level."

The director also thought that the timing of the law's passage, right in the middle of the swine flu outbreak and with little publicity, was suspicious. "Why do something so important this way?" he said.

Thus far, notwithstanding all the hullabaloo surrounding the August decriminalization, the climate in Mexico appears remarkably unchanged. The state of the nation's public security is strikingly similar: some of Mexico is safe, much of it is suffering from increasingly intense bouts of drug violence, and certain regions -- Tijuana, Sinaloa, and especially Juárez -- are among the world's most dangerous.

Despite concern about the possibility of drug use skyrocketing, many analysts say this is not a probable outcome.

"Personally, I don't think [drug use will spike]," Sierra said. "The calculus is that the consumers as well as the small-scale vendors will better control the weight of the dosage that they carry to avoid legal consequences."

McKay, a former Vancouver police officer, said that although this bill was intended to help police do their jobs, it's not likely to be a huge factor for Mexican law enforcement. "Frankly, I don't see it changing the job at all," he said. "Right now you're talking about sicarios [hit men] attacking police officers with hand grenades and AK-47s and killing them. That's going to be on my mind more than whether a high school doper has three or four joints on him."

The backdrop has also proven stable for users of drugs. Ángeles, a college student who smokes marijuana on a daily basis, was in fact unaware that the possession of drugs had been legalized. She said that the legal consequences of her drug use have never been a worry. "If they grabbed me I would give money to the police and they'd go away," Ángeles said.

Alejandro, a systems engineer who occasionally smokes marijuana and uses ecstasy, likewise said that, even before the legalization, the police never entered into his thoughts. "I never worried about that possibility," he said. "I usually did it with trustworthy people in private places."

(Both Alejandro and Ángeles asked to have their last names withheld so as to avoid being publicly associated with drugs.)

But while it may not have fundamentally altered life in Mexico, the new law does represent a striking change in the prevailing political reality. When former President Vicente FoxVicente Fox attempted to enact a similar law in 2006, the apoplectic US reaction convinced him to veto the bill.

The April decriminalization bill, however, came after a succession of American officials, Hillary ClintonHillary Clinton and Barack Obama prominently among them, visited Mexico City last spring and presumably blessed President Felipe Calderón's plan privately. When the bill passed, it aroused hardly a sigh of disapproval from the US government.

Analysts acknowledge that the August decriminalization was an unprecedented step, but they said to truly address Mexico's security problems, the US would need to not only accept changes to Mexican law but also consider some of their own. "The [only] game-changer would be legalization by the US," McKay said.

Sierra agreed. "If the United States at a federal level decides on the path of decriminalization, that could help Mexico take more decisive steps on the issue," he said.

What drives their belief is the fact that Mexico's rates of drug use are relatively low, and legalization of personal use in Mexico can therefore have only a limited impact on the broader drug-trafficking context. According to the most recent National Survey on Addiction, around 5.5 percent of Mexicans had used drugs in the previous year. In comparison, according to recent government figures, in the US nearly twice that percentage had used marijuana alone in the past year, in a population three times as large as Mexico's. In other words, the major force driving Mexico's drug trafficking industry is not local use, but the American market.

For the time being, with the drug-trafficking industry largely unaffected by the decriminalization, and with deeper changes in the American laws politically impossible, the Mexican government is stuck fighting a losing battle.

"The impetus [for the drug trade] is the 52 million people who live in poverty," McKay said. "If you are one of the 52 million and you have a maybe first- or second-grade education, you can make $500 a week by killing the guy the boss says. How does the government fight that?"