By Benjie Cooper
IG: @nuglifenews
YouTube: Lucid’s Vlog
Mexico’s president-elect, Andrés Manuel López Obrador will assume office on December 1, 2018, and when he does, his new foreign minister Marcelo Ebrard says that cannabis legalization is very likely to follow.
López Obrador and Ebrard see legalization as a way to help curtail violence that has resulted from a failed war on drugs in the country.
“It doesn’t make sense to have a law forbidding the possession or production of cannabis, and we have 9,000 people in jail for that, we have a huge amount of violence in the country,” Ebrard told reporters. “You spend a huge amount of money (on policing), you cause suffering for a lot of people, and it doesn’t make sense.”
“Prohibition doesn’t work,” he said. “You have the cannabis anyway.”
In 2006, the Mexican government began using the army to fight drug cartels. Since then, more than 200,000 people have been murdered, and an additional 37,000 have been reported missing.
In 2017, the killings hit an all-time annual high at 28,702.
On Monday, Ebrard and Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland discussed Ottawa’s experience with legal marijuana.
Ebrard told reporters that he and the president-elect see legalization as an “interesting option in the short term for Mexico,” stating that they would likely follow either the Canadian model or the Uruguayan one.
Uruguay legalized cannabis for recreational use in 2013.
