Many Latin American countries have been pondering a new approach to weed. Latin America mulls pot legalization

If the legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington state bends your mind, consider that it could prompt Mexico, Colombia and other Latin American countries to ease off of their enforcement efforts.

Weary of the gang violence fueled by America’s estimated $100 billion illegal drug habit, many countries in the region have been pondering a new approach to the challenge of countering the intercontinental drug trade — an issue that will take center stage Friday at the Organization of American States’ General Assembly meeting in Guatemala.


“I think you can no longer expect countries like Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala — certainly on marijuana — to channel resources to fighting drug production and trafficking if they see Colorado and Washington have legalized marijuana,” Arturo Sarukhan, a former Mexican ambassador to the United States, said.

“The United States can’t have its cake and it eat it too,” he said. “At some point, it will have to reconcile what it is doing domestically — a slow motion but inevitable process toward de facto legalization — with its international law enforcement and drug control policies.”

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As part of the push toward alternatives to the current drug-fighting regime, Organization of American States Secretary General José Miguel Insulza said the group would issue a joint statement Friday urging members to focus more on treatment and rehabilitation for drug offenders rather than incarceration.

The countries, which include the United States and all 34 other nations in the Western Hemisphere, also agree that they should explore moving away from mandatory jail sentences toward alternative punishments for possession or sales of small amounts of drugs, the former Chilean diplomat said.

And while members will stress the need to strengthen public institutions to fight organized crime, especially in countries where there is weak rule of law, they will also recognize that the illicit drug trade affects countries differently in terms of violence and its drain on government resources, “so we will be tolerant to what countries want to do,” he said.

“In war terms, you could say we are successful,” Insulza said with a twist of irony. “We have taken a lot of prisoners in this war. But at the center of the debate is, if it’s a public health problem, why do we send people to jail? Victims should be treated in hospitals.”

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In a separate statement ahead of the OAS meeting, he elaborated: “What we wanted to achieve was to remove this war on drugs, that was a never-ending war, that led nowhere, that produced nothing and that affected greatly our countries. We are achieving this.”

The special meeting in Guatemala — a country that stands at the bloody crossroads of the international drug trade — follows a series of OAS reports on the issue commissioned by President Barack Obama and other regional leaders at a 2012 Summit of Americas meeting.

One such report outlines several scenarios for dealing with the problem over the next decade, including “trying and learning from alternative legal and regulatory regimes, starting with cannabis.” But even if prohibition continues, another scenario envisions Central American states abandoning the fight against drug production and transit through their territories in the hope of reducing the brutal toll from gang battles over control of the trade.

In that future, several Central American countries would soon find themselves declaring that “the most important and urgent drug problem is the tens of thousands of deaths caused by violence, many of which are associated with the transit of drugs through their territory, and that this situation is intolerable,” the report said.

Although most of the profits in the Western Hemisphere drug trade are made by those who sell in the United States, most of the violence occurs at the production and transit points in the supply chain, at least partly because the illegal nature of the activity leaves few other options for resolving disputes between rivals.

By most accounts, the current enforcement efforts have failed to make much of a dent. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimated the value of the global retail market for illegal drugs at around $320 billion in 2003, with North America accounting for 44 percent of the total and the rest of the hemisphere about 3 percent.

Since then, America’s appetite has hardly abated.

U.S. consumers spend more than $100 billion on illegal drugs each year, including roughly $41 billion on marijuana, $28 billion on cocaine, $27 billion on heroin and $13 billion on methamphetamines, the Rand Corporation said in a report for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. A recent U.N. estimate put the retail value of the U.S. marijuana market even higher, at $64 billion, and the South American market at $4.2 billion.

The prevalence of marijuana use — “the most widely used illicit drug in the world,” according to OAS — has made it a top target for decriminalization.

“Marijuana is a special case,” Insulza said. “It is the most consumed by far and probably the least damaging from a health point of view.”

Uruguay has been a trailblazer on the issue. It legalized marijuana in late 2013, although the country’s president, Jose Mujica, recently announced a delay in the first sales under his government’s new highly regulated system to give it more time to work out the kinks of implementation.

Mexico, which is believed to supply about half of the marijuana used in the United States, no longer prosecutes the possession of small amounts of pot, cocaine, heroin and other drugs for personal use, although the government records the incidents and informs individuals of treatment options.

In the United States, Colorado and Washington state have legalized the production, sale and possession of marijuana, subject to government regulations and taxes. Many other states, beginning with California in 1996, have moved to decriminalize it and allow its sale as a medicine.

Further, the U.S. Sentencing Commission, acting on a recommendation of Attorney General Eric Holder, has approved reduced sentences for low-level drug offenders. It also voted in July to begin applying the policy retroactively in November 2015, potentially shortening the sentences of some 46,000 current prisoners by an average of 25 months, roughly a fifth of their term.

But marijuana is still illegal at the national level, and the United States still pressures other countries to eradicate fields and seize shipments — a position that could be harder to maintain if other U.S. states move toward legalization.

Meanwhile, pot is just one source of income for the criminal gangs sowing violence in Mexico, Central America and the Andean region. Their revenue streams include cocaine, heroin and synthetic drugs, all of which have far less support for legalization, as well as illegal arms and human trafficking, counterfeit goods, prostitution, extortion and kidnapping.

“If you legalized all drug production in Mexico tomorrow, you would not de-fang organized crime,” Sarukhan said. “If less money is to be made from marijuana because it has been legalized, they will move on and expand into other illicit activities.”

Still, the decades of unsuccessfully fighting drug gangs by destroying crop fields and seizing shipments indicate it’s time for a new approach aimed at financially crippling the organizations by doing more much more to prevent and deter bulk cash trafficking and money laundering, he said.

“Einstein described insanity as doing something over and over again and expecting different results,” Sarukhan said. “That’s precisely what the international community has been doing for over 30 years with drug control policy.”