Jorge Castaneda: Will US Intervene if Mexico Allows Marijuana Use Nationwide? Jorge Castaneda - The Los Angeles Times
go to original November 11, 2015

So what's behind the increase and how is policy across the Americas shifting? CCTV America was joined by Laura Carlsen from Mexico City. She's Director of the Americas Program at the Center for International Policy. (CCTV America)

Mexico may soon enter an elite club composed of Holland, Portugal, Uruguay and Colorado, Oregon and Washington state: It's on the verge of excluding marijuana from the destructive war on drugs. But will the United States stand in its way?

On Nov. 4, Mexico's Supreme Court voted by a wide margin to declare unconstitutional the country's ban on the production, possession and recreational consumption of marijuana. A group of citizens had banded together in a so-called cannabis club (named SMART, for the initials in Spanish of its full title) and requested permission to grow and exchange marijuana among themselves; the government's health agency (the equivalent of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration) denied them permission; the group sought a writ of habeas corpus, and went all the way to the Supreme Court, which granted them the writ and ordered the agency to legalize the club and allow it to function.

This decision does not entail an across-the-board decriminalization of recreational marijuana. For the moment, it applies only to the group that sought permission. But the court's ruling may eventually extend to everyone seeking to grow or consume the drug.

Absent injury to third parties, the court resolved that, under the constitution, every individual has the right to enjoy life as he or she sees fit, and that secondary legislation — like prohibiting marijuana — cannot curtail that right.

The court also ruled that although marijuana may cause some degree of harm to some adult users in large quantities, prohibition is an excessive antidote to that harm. Other dangerous substances, such as alcohol and tobacco, are legal and subject to regulation, so why not marijuana?

Read the rest at The Los Angeles Times

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Related: Mexico Supreme Court Decision on Marijuana: What Did Mexico Win Exactly? (SinEmbargo)

Related: Is Smoking Weed a Human Right? Why the Mexican Supreme Court Thinks the Answer Is Yes (The Atlantic)

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