[link to www.borderlandbeat.com]

Less than 50 Percent rule

Mexico plans to decriminalize all illegal drugs--"Prohibitionist strategy is unsustainable," reads the policy plan.

The five-year policy outline wouldn't make drugs legal, but it would offer users treatment instead of punishment by redirecting "the resources currently destined to combat their transfer and apply them in programs — massive, but personalized — of reinsertion and detoxification," Obrador's policy statement read.

"Public safety strategies applied by previous administrations have been catastrophic: far from resolving or mitigating the catastrophe has sharpened it," his statement read, adding that "prohibitionist strategy is unsustainable."

"The war on drugs has been extremely costly, not just in terms of government resources, but also human lives, and it has failed to accomplish its objective," Steve Hawkins, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project, told Newsweek. "Prohibition policies have, by and large, caused more harm to people and communities than the drugs they were intended to eliminate, and they haven't come anywhere close to eliminating the supply or the demand."

Obrador said he wants to pursue drug law reform in conjunction with the United Nations and the U.S., where it's estimated that $19 to $29 billion worth of Mexican cartel drugs are sold each year.

Why not legalize drugs altogether in Mexico?

Some have suggested that completely legalizing drugs in Mexico and the U.S. would cripple the cartels. But the Trump administration has said it would refuse to support any such legislation in Mexico or "anywhere."


"Before, we had organized crime, but operating strictly in narcotrafficking," Eduardo Guerrero Gutiérrez, a consultant and former presidential advisor, told Foreign Policy. "Now we have a type of mafia violence… and they are extorting from the people at levels that are incredibly high — from the rich, from businesses."