Mexico’s president proposes drug decriminalisation with legal supply via prescription

Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Kevin Jewell

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Mexico’s president proposes drug decriminalisation with legal supply via prescription

7 May 2019

By Kyle Jaeger

The president of Mexico called the ongoing prohibition of drugs “unsustainable” and proposed a broad decriminalization policy as part of his administration’s “National Development Plan” that was released last week.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and members of his administration have often talked about removing criminal penalties for certain drug offenses and diverting people suffering from addiction into treatment programs. And that’s exactly what he proposed in the new plan, which was submitted to the nation’s Congress and is expected to inform future legislation.

“In the matter of narcotic drugs, the prohibitionist strategy is already unsustainable, not only because of the violence generated by its poor results in terms of public health,” the administration said, according to a translated version. “In most of the countries in which it has been applied, that strategy has not been translated into a reduction of consumption.”

“Worse still, the prohibitionist model inevitably criminalizes consumers and reduces their odds of social reintegration and rehabilitation,” the proposal states. “The ‘war against drugs’ has escalated the public health problem represented by substances currently banned until it becomes a crisis of public security.”

The document says it is time to “renounce the claim” that addiction can be combated through prohibition and to instead “offer detoxification treatments” to people with addiction “under medical supervision,” and calls for money that’s currently used to enforce anti-drug laws to be used instead to fund treatment programs.

“The only real possibility of reducing the levels of drug consumption resides in lifting the prohibition of [those] that are currently illegal,” the document states.