Mexico could legalize marijuana in five years -former president
Mexico could legalize marijuana
within the next five years, stripping brutal drug cartels of a major source of
income, former President Vicente Fox said on Friday.
Fox, who battled the powerful cartels while
president between 2000 and 2006, has since become a staunch advocate of
reforming Mexico's drug laws, arguing that prohibition has helped create the
criminal market that sustains the gangs.
Under his successor, Felipe Calderon,
Mexico launched a military offensive to crush the cartels, but the violence spiraled
instead, and more than 70,000 people have been killed in drug-related
bloodletting since the start of 2007.
Legalization was the best way of ending the
"butchery" of the drug gangs, Fox said as he hosted a conference in
support of the measure in his home state of Guanajuato in central Mexico.
President Enrique Pena Nieto, who took
office in December, is opposed to legalization, but he has said that the
decision by the U.S. states of Washington and Colorado to legalize recreational
marijuana use has given him a more open mind.
Asked by Reuters whether Mexico could
legalize marijuana by the time Pena Nieto's term ends in 2018, Fox said:
"I think it's going to happen much sooner. Once California gets
into this, Mexico is going to be obligated to speed up its decision
process."
Previous bills to legalize marijuana in
Mexico have failed to move forward and a majority of Mexicans oppose such a
move.
California, which borders Mexico, rejected
a 2010 measure to legalize cannabis, though medical marijuana is legal.
Plans are still underway to legalize
recreational use of marijuana in California, and Tom Angell, a spokesman for
Marijuana Majority, a U.S.-based group in favor of cannabis reform, said the
state was very likely to vote again by 2016.
Fox's view reflects a wider trend in Latin
America where a number of former and current leaders, including Guatemalan
President Otto Perez, are backing alternative approaches to U.S.-backed
strategies of eradication and interdiction.
The 71-year-old Fox, whose election in 2000
for the conservative National Action Party (PAN) ended seven decades of
one-party rule in Mexico, worked closely with the United States during his time
in office to combat Mexican drug gangs.
But after leaving office, he became a
fierce critic of the strategy pursued by his party colleague Calderon.
That angered many in the PAN, and Fox
sparked more uproar during last year's presidential election campaign by
encouraging Mexicans to support Pena Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary
Party, which ruled Mexico between 1929 and 2000.
Fox has been campaigning for marijuana
legalization at a series of events this year in the United States and Mexico.
On Friday he was joined by former Microsoft
executive James Shively, who plans to create the first U.S. national marijuana
brand, as well as a wide range of activists and academics that included former
Mexican health minister Julio Frenk.
REUTERS