Denise Dresser: Better Some Marijuana Users Than a Mexico on Its Knees Denise Dresser - Reforma
go to original October 27, 2015

Javier Sicila, of the Movement for Peace, with Denise Dresser in the "human chain" protest of the telecommunications law, last spring. (Aristegui Noticias)

Here we are on our knees before a war no one will ever win. Fighting against an enemy, the drug trafficking market, no one will ever beat. A war full of human sacrifices, shameful alliances, corrosive corruption, and brutal statistics that has not produced the promised results. Rather than containing violence, it led to its implosion. Rather than dismantle cartels, it led to their expansion. Today Mexico is more dangerous, more unstable, more violent than it was when the government decided to make marijuana the greatest evil in the country. And with more increasingly counterproductive results like the internal disputes over territorial control, government complicity and the growing power of Mexican cartels from the Altiplano prison [from which "El Chapo" Guzmán escaped] to Iguala [disappearance of Ayotzinapa students].

Congratulations then to Minister [Supreme Court Justice] Arturo Zaldivar for acknowledging a reality so many want to reject, via a project that proposes to legalize marijuana for personal consumption. Congratulations then for the intervention that helped alleviate Grace’s suffering, a child riddled with pain [suffering from an extreme form of epilepsy], through a marijuana derivative [illegal in Mexico]. Applause to those that understand that millions of people around the world can go to a dispensary to get marijuana for medical reasons or use it for recreational purposes. Legally.

Read the rest at Mexico Voices

Translated by Ruby Izar-Shea

Mexico Voices is a blogging endeavor aimed at raising the awareness of U.S. citizens regarding the destructive impact of the U.S. economic policy and the War on Drugs on Mexico — on its people, their economic and physical security and their human rights, on the nation’s dysfunctional justice system, and on the rule of law and Mexico’s fragile democracy. Visit the website at MexicoVoices.blogspot.mx

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!