COMMENTARY Mexico will hold a presidential election on June 2, but the reality is that its "de facto rulers" are drug cartels — and that's a big reason Floridians should legalize marijuana on November 5.
There are lots of reasons Florida’s ballot measure legalizing recreational marijuana use should pass on Nov. 5. Let me offer another: the future of the U.S.’s second-largest trade partner, Mexico.
Mexico looks set to elect its first woman president this Sunday, June 2. On its face, that’s a good, progressive thing for the country, for Latin America, for the Americas.
It’s just a shame that Mexico’s presumptive first female head of state — Claudia Sheinbaum, who’s leading voter polls by double digits — will have to co-govern with mobsters.
No, I’m not being an alarmist wise ass. A compelling Washington Post report this month is just the latest confirmation that Mexico’s narco-cartels and other criminal gangs have morphed from violent extortionists to virtual executives in the vast national turf they control. Mayors might still hold actual office there, but mafiosi hold actual power.
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“They’re embedding themselves in local governments to maximize that control,” says the Post — which quotes a Mexican security expert asserting criminal groups “have become de facto rulers.”
It’s a dark and relentlessly homicidal reality — more than 30 candidates running in the June 2 elections have been assassinated, while hundreds more have quit due to death threats — one I saw taking hold while covering Mexico for more than two decades at the turn of the century. And much if not most of the cash that fuels that barbarity, of course, is made from trafficking drugs. They include cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and fentanyl.
But what barely shows up on the shipment list these days is marijuana.
Little more than a decade ago, marijuana was the cash cow for any Mexican drug lord, bringing in more bucks than coke did. In the past few years, U.S. border agents report the biggest decline in drug seizures is pot.
Why defy the marijuana legalization trend that's deprived Mexico’s cartels of their big pot profits — especially if weed is no more dangerous than alcohol?
The reason’s simple: 24 U.S. states have legalized not just medicinal but recreational marijuana use. That effectively cuts the murderous cartels out of the Mary Jane sales mix.
I won’t deny Mexico’s traffickers have simply pivoted to deadlier junk like the opioids to make up for their lost pot profits. But that fact begs the question: Why would we want to stop the marijuana legalization trend that has deprived Mexico’s cartels of at least that revenue stream – especially when weed is considered no more dangerous than America’s legal drug, alcohol?
Rehab reality
More specifically: Why shouldn’t Florida become the 25th state to legalize marijuana — and join a movement that helps U.S. law enforcement focus its time and resources on the truly destructive stuff, whether it’s the blow that’s scrambling clubbers’ brains on Miami Beach, or the fentanyl that’s destroying communities in the Panhandle?
Why would we want to risk closing the marijuana legalization door — so we can re-open the marijuana racketeering window for Mexico’s new “de facto rulers”?
And yes, speaking of gates, I can already hear the marijuana demonizers insisting to me that pot is an insidious gateway drug, weed has higher THC levels today, and so on.
I didn’t say marijuana can’t be detrimental or addictive; I said it’s no more detrimental or addictive than the beer, wine and booze we freely traffic over the counter in this country — and which sends far more folks into rehab in said country, where more than a third of clinic admissions are alcohol-related and only a tenth are linked to marijuana.
Using that criteria, we ought to have a ballot question this fall on whether to re-criminalize alcohol, à la Prohibition.
The Bud Light and Chardonnay lobby wouldn’t allow that, of course. But the point is, busting people for smoking joints in the 2020s is as big a waste of national energy and money as raiding speakeasies was in the 1920s. Not to mention the toxic social result: the inordinate incarceration of young Black men, whose pot possession seems to draw inordinate police attention, for some not-so-strange reason.
Should we regulate recreational marijuana use the way we oversee alcohol consumption? You bet. You gotta be 21 to toke, for starters. But the Biden Administration was right last month to move to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous drug.
That’s a big step toward federal legalization. And it’s another reason Floridians should think about Mexico on June 2 — and Nov. 5.
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