In many parts of the Americas, the U.S.-led consensus about the “war on drugs” is beginning to fray. This is happening not only in obvious places, such as Bolivia, where the June 30 presidential election catapulted coca grower leader Evo Morales from parliamentary outcast to presidential powerbroker, but across the Americas. Uruguayan President Jose Batlle called for serious consideration of legalizing the drug trade last year, and Brazil enacted treatment-based sentencing reforms earlier this year.
While across-the-board legalization, with all of its hypothetical pluses and minuses, is not yet even on the political horizon, movement toward reforming the marijuana laws—as has been the trend in Europe, most recently with Britain’s announcement in July that it would decriminalize marijuana possession next year—is being seen across the Americas.
Mexico
Although Mexican President Vicente Fox last year made brief comments suggesting drug legalization may be the ultimate solution, and his Foreign Secretary, Jorge Castañeda, made widely-read calls for ending drug prohibition prior to taking office, Fox’s National Action Party (PAN) government has remained firmly in the camp of the U.S. drug war.
Not all Mexican political figures, however, are marching in lock-step with Washington: Patricio Martínez García, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) governor of Chihuahua, home of Ciudad Juárez and its notorious drug-business murders, last year called for a study of drug legalization and announced in June that his administration has launched a study of marijuana legalization within the state. At the annual bi-national Border Governors’ Conference, Martínez teamed with New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson to push the cause of drug reform. Johnson, a Republican, is the highest elected U.S. official to advocate for radical drug reform.
The urge to rethink the drug war is starting to cut across Mexican party lines. Even the left-leaning Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) has at least one legislator calling for dramatic change: Gregorio Urias, congressman from the drug-trafficking hotbed of Sinaloa, in June 2001 authored a report calling for legalization and criticizing U.S. drug policy as a threat to Latin American sovereignty. Urias has endorsed Martínez’ call for marijuana legalization. Organizations such as the Multiforo Alicia, a coalition of social and political organizations, some of which are linked to the Zapatistas, and the faculty of philosophy and letters at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City have also endorsed Martínez’s plan.
Canada
If a sort of de facto decriminalization exists in Canada’s British Columbia province, where the marijuana business generates at least $2 billion annually and provides an estimated 100,000 jobs, the Liberal government of Prime Minister Jean Chretien is hinting that it wishes to formalize a similar policy nationwide. In July, Justice Minister Maurice Cauchon floated a decriminalization trial balloon that would entail removing marijuana possession from the criminal code, making it instead a ticketable offense with a fine, similar to a traffic citation. Laws against trafficking would remain on the books, however.
Chretien and Cauchon may be attempting to preempt a report from a Canadian Senate committee studying drug policy changes. It is widely believed that the committee report, expected in September, will call for marijuana decriminalization. A preliminary report issued in May concluded that the negative health and social effects of the drug are minimal. The committee also found that an estimated 30-50% of Canadians aged 15 to 24 have used marijuana despite extensive and expensive suppression efforts.
U.S. drug warriors are watching with concern, and while officials such as Drug Czar John Walters have been circumspect—Walters recently noted that Canada is a sovereign nation, but urged it to reinvigorate its war on cannabis—some congressional hardliners are stirring nationalist antagonisms. After a meeting with a threatening Rep. Mark Souder (R-IN), who told incredulous Canadian legislators that BC-grown marijuana is as dangerous as cocaine, Vancouver MP Libby Davies (New Democrat) told the Toronto Globe and Mail: “I thought, ‘My God, what is this man talking about?’ We can’t be subservient to the ridiculous rhetoric coming out of the United States.”
Jamaica
Within the last year, Jamaica’s parliament-appointed National Commission on Ganja (marijuana) has called for the decriminalization of marijuana on the island, and the ruling Peoples’ National Party has endorsed Prime Minister P.J. Patterson’s call for a national debate on the topic. Last October, the PNP National Executive Council voted to place the party on record as supporting such a debate, but little progress has been made since then.
With marijuana’s use as a sacrament in the Rastafarian religion, the weed has a popular base in Jamaican society, and various blue-ribbon panels have called for its use to be normalized, but effective legislative action has been slow to materialize. Again, a glowering U.S. presence has been an effective restraint, with U.S. Embassy officers in Kingston quick to warn last summer that Jamaica could face decertification and as a result lose U.S.-aid if it moved forward with decriminalization.
According to local marijuana activists, the ganja commission’s recommendations and the PNP’s call for debate are now on the back-burner as a government worried by U.S. reaction and bedeviled by outbreaks of criminal violence quietly backs away from radical change in the marijuana laws. But while the PNP may be cooling its heels, the cause of decriminalization has found powerful converts. Last summer, the Jamaica Gleaner, one of the island’s leading media outlets, wrote: “We think it is important to recognize some current realities…neither law nor gentle persuasion will ever eradicate the growth and use of ganja in this society.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Phillip S. Smith is the editor of the DRCNet’s “The Week Online”. Subscribe for free at http://www.drcnet.org/
