Reflecting on history I am able to recall the old French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau and and that phrase of his: “When I say never, I mean maybe tomorrow.”
Many months have passed since President Enrique Peña Nieto assured that he wasn’t personally in favor of legalizing marijuana. However, we need to recognize his participation in the United Nations Special Session on Drugs, in which he explained something that we all know, that a prohibitive policy against drugs is a disaster.
The situation does not only exist in Mexico, but in other countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Colombia and in the United States, which today is the biggest market for illegal substances.
Now we have to change, leave illegality behind and accept the reality in which it is only a matter of time until marijuana, with medical purposes first and recreational ones after, will be able to be consumed freely in our country with certain conditions.
On the other side of reality, it reminds us that we cannot repeat history, like when the United States decided to intervene in World War I and after the pain of its army’s wounds, turn to morphine. Because the opium god helps us move from one life to the next without pain or to mitigate it until we are cured.
Because of this, due to the needs of the U.S., our poppy fields began to flourish. Afterwards the northern empire decided to prohibit it without asking how many people depended on opium’s production.
But that story was before gun trafficking and cartels, because now if Mexico opens the doors, they will also do so for everything that will be consequently unleashed.
In this sense, on one hand we don’t need to commit the stupidity of legalizing marijuana for medical use and only allow the U.S. pharmaceutical companies to be in charge of it.
And on the other hand, we should have civic courage and accept that another dangerous cartel exists that no one talks about: the cartel of doctors. At the end of the day — now when the United States has a surge in deaths from heroine overdoses — those who administer the legal trafficking of drugs with a bazooka in the form of a pen to prescribe drugs like methadone, are the doctors.
We welcome reality, so that Peña Nieto’s recharge goes all the way. And I hope that we will soon stop being the fields of death, where drugs are planted and harvested so that others can process them and obtain a profit.
