The damaging effects of marijuana and the violence caused by its illegal trade were the subjects broached in “Forum on Marijuana” in the Pontifical University of Mexico.
The president of the Senate, Roberto Gil, said that the black market for the drug must be controlled to prevent its consumers from extortion from the police.
He also asked for the establishment of programs focused on reducing consumption of the drug.
The worst that could happen to us in regards to problems that we can solve is to legalize the problem.”
-Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera
“It’s absolutely false that legalizing or regulating marijuana differently will end violence,” he said. “That is absolutely false and the only thing that we can hope for with a regulatory change is to diminish the effect of the black market.”
María Elena Medina Mora, the director of the Ramón de la Fuente Muñiz National Institute of Psychiatry dijo, “when the money is hidden it is very hard to regulate, and with those elements I think that we should be thinking in regulation more than in a free market.”
“The most important study was done in New Zealand, comparing young people who began using marijuana in their adolescence with those who did not and you can see that in their youth they lost eight points of intellectual coefficient.”
Although he supported the medicinal use of marijuana, Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera said that behind the drug hides a human and social drama.
“The worst that could happen to us in regards to problems that we can solve is to legalize the problem,” said Rivera Carrera. “Behind the use of this plant that, used wisely, could have beneficial consequences, hides a human drama and a social problem that we can’t ignore, although we could say that it is an emblematic theme of something much deeper that has to due with other forms of self destruction promoted by empty criteria that commercializes death.”
The cardinal asked that in the debate that is taking place at a national level, that the authorities and legislators design public policy that has nothing to do “with individual petitions and egotists.”
