Mexico: marijuana, Castro and the US
It is not very long ago that the US federal administration would have expressed displeasure at two significant developments south of the Rio Grande this week. On 4 November Mexico’s supreme court of justice [SCJN] handed down a landmark ruling that paves the way for the legalisation of marijuana; the very next day Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto received his Cuban peer Raúl Castro for a three-day official visit, his first since taking over from his brother Fidel in 2006, and proceeded to heap praise on the Cuban government’s achievements while making no reference to anti-democratic and human rights concerns. It would be a mistake to view either development entirely through the prism of US-Mexico relations, but there is no doubt that the legalisation of marijuana in certain US states and the US rapprochement with Cuba played a part.
In August 2013, a group of four led by Juan Francisco Torres Landa, a lawyer and secretary general of México Unido Contra la Delincuencia, a civil society group dedicated to improving public security and justice, decided to take action to force the Mexican justice system to enter the debate on drugs, arguing that the present prohibitionist policies have contributed to the violence from drug trafficking organisations (DTOs) ravaging Mexico while the country’s marijuana production (95% of which goes to the US) provides them with a major source of income. Torres co-founded an entity known as Sociedad Mexicana de Autoconsumo Responsable y Tolerante (Smart) and filed a suit against the government before the SCJN on the constitutional grounds that prohibition denied them “the right to the free development of personality” and hence a dignified life. The first chamber of Mexico’s SCJN ruled by 4-1 in favour of the four plaintiffs in the case, who are now legally entitled to produce and consume marijuana for recreational use.