North America’s Largest City Moves to Legalize Pot.
By Ioan Grillo / Mexico City
6 hours ago
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..Though deprived of sunlight and breathing the smog-ridden air of Mexico’s mountain capital, the marijuana plants, from a strain known as purple kush, reach three feet in a brick home in a middle class suburb. They are alimented with electric lights and kept behind closed curtains by the owner, who says he grows them to smoke himself. If police found them, he could be nailed for drug production and face a hefty prison sentence under laws designed to tackle the country’s ultra violent cartels.
But that situation could change with a series of bills that Mexico City legislators plan to file at the end of this month to legalize and regulate marijuana consumption. Proposals include the setting up of cannabis clubs to grow herb for their members and tolerance of anyone carrying up to 30 grams, or just over an ounce, of marijuana. Leftist lawmakers, who dominate the city’s assembly, say the measures would free up police to focus on serious crime and take a step towards ending the country’s catastrophic drug war, which has claimed more than 60,000 lives in the last six years. “The war against drugs is a failure. We are not going to win it,” says Assemblyman Vidal Lleranas who is working on the legislation. “We cannot hope for a drug free world. But we can hope to limit the damage and take the profits away from organized crime.”
The Mexico City bills are part of a wave of marijuana proposals across the Americas in the wake of the American states of Colorado and Washington voting to legalize cannabis last November. The Uruguayan lower house has passed a legalization law, which the senate is expected to vote on this month, and advocates are looking at measures from Brazil to Argentina to Canada. While the United States was long a world leader in drug prohibition, U.S. legalization has now become influential force outside its borders. Alison Holcomb, the chief architect of the Washington state law, has spoken across the continent this year, including at a recent forum in Mexico. “I have seen a sea change in thinking. People are no longer asking if it can be done, but how it can be done,” says Holcomb, who is the drug policy director for the ACLU in Washington state. If the Mexican capital, which is the largest city on the continent, were to legalize marijuana, it would add even momentum to the pro-legalization wave, possibly paving the way for similar measures in other Mexican states and in neighboring Central American nations such as Guatemala.
