On Thursday, Mexico decriminalized possession of small amounts of drugs for personal use. But don’t start celebrating that common sense and the freedom to put things into your body absent harm to others was the rationale for drug decrim within our southern neighbor’s borders. Nope. It’s simply that since the U.S. demand for drugs from Mexico has fueled unprecedented cartel violence there, arresting and prosecuting people for small amounts of drugs is just simply a stretch of U.S. complicity of human rights abuses finite resources.

After all, there have been over 11,000 drug-related deaths since 2006 — 7,500 since the beginning of 2008 — sparked by several cartels not only fighting the country’s police forces, but also fighting amongst themselves to gain more control of the drug trade.

Now, it’s apparent that this act by the Mexican government which, by the way, was also passed by the Mexican Legislature in 2006 only to be buried under pressure by the U.S., won’t stem the violence by the cartels because the criminalization that drives black market profit (mostly from U.S. demand) will remain.

But it is telling that the Mexican government recognizes that criminalizing small amounts of drugs for personal use is an ineffective policy that takes vital resources away from dealing with the cartels — although combating cartel violence will continue to be ineffective because ONDCP won’t even consider marijuana tax and regulation, even though marijuana continues to be the cartels’ #1 moneymaker. Portugal has decriminalized drugs for almost ten years, and by many measurements this policy has produced decreased drug use and increased treatment admissions.

Innovative drug policies implemented by our neighbors to the north, including supervised injection facilities and heroin maintenance programs, are now bolstered by decrim from the south. The mighty U.S. drug policy machine is now surrounded by some alternative approaches (how some of these approaches are implemented remains to be seen) from two countries that suffer their greatest casualties, and attempts to change their prohibition-based course are largely undermined because of, U.S. drug policy.

The next move is ours.

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