Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

It's a bit of an old story, but perhaps newly relevant after Mexico's incumbent president Felipe Calderon saying last week that existing policies don't seem to be working, and that it is time to consider legalization, though he didn't go so far as endorsing the idea. Given the ~28,000 drug-war-related deaths in Mexico over the last 4 years, I can see why he might be considering alternatives. The previous president, Vicente Fox, enthusiastically endorsed the idea a couple of days later. Retired officeholders can afford to be more bold than when they were in the hot seat, but it came as a big surprise to me to see a sitting president put the idea on the table.

Surprisingly, this news made barely a ripple in the US media...then again, coverage of Mexican affairs here is not that good, and even discussing legalization is political suicide in most of the US. One articulate and credible advocate for the idea is a judge and self-described former 'drug warrior' from Orange County named Jim Gray, who left the GOP to run as a libertarian candidate in 2004 (for the senate, of all things). I caught him speaking recently on CSpan and was highly impressed by his pragmatic approach.

http://www.judgejimgray.com/grayarticles.php or http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/295043-1 or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_P._Gray, for text, video, and background respectively.

In Mexico, marijuana, cocaine, and heroin are already legal in personal use amounts much like Portugal. The problems Mexico is having are the side effects of drug shipment cartels that move substances from South and Central America to the USA.

Mexico could further legalize transshipment of drugs so that cartels could just hire Mexican shipping companies to deliver the drugs to the USA border. And that might help a little in the interior of the country, but the interior of Mexico already sees low levels of drug crime.

The real problem will be crossing the USA border with the drugs. As long as that is a critical concern of the cartels, they will need decoys, armies of labor, help from police, forged bills of lading, bribed officials, and the whole infrastructure of corruption and violence.

Since the USA isn't going to be legalizing anything as far as I can see, there will always be violence in Mexico paid for by USA users. I don't see anything the Mexican government can do about it.

Quite so. Quite aside of the various problems inside the USA (sentencing disparities, resources taken away from other crimes, families and careers wrecked, and worse), our current policies create terribly perverse economic incentives - and not just in Mexico. Check this out: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-07/wachovia-s-drug-hab...

The sad fact is that every time we or the Mexican government removes a top-level dealer, there's a gruesome competition to take his place because the market is worth billions of dollars. Even a vanishingly thin slice of such a huge pie is worth the risk of death to many people. The more of a high-risk occupation we make it with aggressive enforcement, the more marginal and unscrupulous the individuals who will be attracted to it. The sort of people who are willing to decapitate their competitors or massacre civilians are not rational actors who are influenced by the calculus of deterrence; as we've seen in Central and South America, the net effect of escalating the conflict into paramilitary activity is to just bring drug suppliers and illegal arms dealers into closer proximity.

If you have the hour to spare, I felt Judge Gray had a very pragmatic and persuasive approach to overcoming the political and legislative inertia, but it's going to be an uphill struggle. While the Obama administration has finally altered national policy a little (eg by supporting legislation to eliminate crack/cocaine sentencing disparities and taking a hands-off approach to state policies on medical marijuana), more fundamental changes will require the voters to demonstrate where the safe electoral ground is.

Although I'm pro-legalization/pro-decriminalization I don't think it's a good idea for Mexico.

"Instead, they're referred to a panel comprised of a drug-treatment specialist, a lawyer and a civil servant, who usually recommend treatment -- and pay for it, too." is something that won't happen here. And I think that's a fundamental part for legalization to work.

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