![]() “Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did,” John Ehrlichman told a Harper’s Magazine writer in 1994. President Richard Nixon vowed to crush the drug trade in 1971 in a push that one of his closest advisers later admitted was driven by a desire to crack down on African Americans and Vietnam War protesters. When Mexican health officials briefly tried to take over the sale of drugs to so-called addicts for a few months in 1940, Washington quashed the experiment by threatening sanctions. Anslinger, the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, once told Congress that marijuana could lead to “homicidal mania,” and, according to journalist Nacho Lozano’s book, Mariguana a la Mexicana, blamed Mexicans for bringing it to the United States amid high rates of unemployment during the Great Depression. Though the United States wouldn’t effectively outlaw marijuana until 1937, Mexico’s neighbor to the north always exerted an outsize influence on the country’s drug laws: Harry J. That law, which barred substances that could “degenerate the race,” has remained in place for over a century now. In 1920, the revolutionary federal republic banned marijuana. As Isaac Campos argues in Home Grown, his meticulous history of the plant in Mexico, marijuana slowly gained a negative connotation in the country when it became associated, misleadingly, with Indigenous people, and more justifiably but luridly, with prison inmates and the soldiers who fought the decade-long Mexican Revolution beginning in 1910. The plant moseyed across the country, but was smoked by few. Spaniards brought cannabis to Mexico in the 16th century to make hemp, which was used at the time in ropes, sails, and paper. Mexican Cannabis Movement activists set up camp around the Senate in Mexico City, planting marijuana plants and lighting up. “This isn’t a step forward, it’s a step back.” “This plant has been stigmatized for over a century,” Espejel said. ![]() Guadalupe Espejel, a psychologist with a Velma-style bob, was dismayed: As she puffed on one of the thin glass vapes she sells, she explained that the law would still leave people like her at risk of arrest-or at the very least, police might continue to ask her for bribes. Though the Mexican Cannabis Movement, which organized the garden outside the Senate, is representative of only one faction in the legalization movement-they believe in no limits on marijuana possession for personal use-the pall that settled over their camp after senators passed the bill last year was palpable. ![]() The idea that a country owes something to its citizens as it starts to undo some of its mistakes is not a new one, but Mexico seems to be stumbling as it at once admits that past administrations’ drug policies failed while also doing little to undo the militarized enforcement that got the country into its current morass of violence. If the current version passes, advocates ask, who would the law be for? But many of Mexico’s marijuana proponents are still opposed: The bill would allow for a cannabis industry on terms that they say favor corporations, and would still impose fines and prison sentences on people without connections or power. The seeds this movement planted are finally yielding results: After decades of strict drug policy, Mexico’s congress is expected to pass a federal law this year that would for the first time create a legal cannabis trade in the country-the Senate passed the bill in November, and the lower house is set to vote on it this spring. The stunt was just the latest sign that Mexico’s marijuana-legalization movement, which once consisted of a handful of protesters, had transformed into a diverse and vocal lobby. ![]() Reporting for this story was funded by a grant from Fundación Gabo.
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