Mexico goes ahead with drug decriminalization plan
Mexico's president will approve a law that decriminalizes possession of small amounts of marijuana, cocaine and other drugs to concentrate on fighting violent narco gangs, the government said on Tuesday.
Under the law, police will not penalize people for possessing up to 5 grams of marijuana, 5 grams of opium, 25 milligrams of heroin. Nor does the law penalize possession of 500 milligrams of cocaine -- enough for a few lines.
The legal changes will also decriminalize the possession of limited quantities of LSD, hallucinogenic mushrooms, amphetamines, ecstasy and peyote -- a psychotropic cactus found in Mexico's northern deserts.
A pretty radical plan, it will be interesting to see how this play out in Mexico. Getting druggies out of the criminal system and into treatment so the police can concentrate on the dealers is a good thing. Without a good drug treatment plan to go with this, I'm not sure it will do any good however.
No offical US reaction yet, because this caught people off gaurd. But we can be sure that the US government will hate this. The got up in arms about Canada's trivial marijuana only plan, and this one covers a bunch of hard drugs and in fairly large amounts. And of course any plan that both points to a real way out of the war on drugs and requires moving money out of building prisons is clearly against US government interests.
Jay