Two U.S. state decisions to legalize marijuana will
have important implications for international efforts to quash drug
smuggling, four Latin American leaders declared on Monday.
Mexico, Belize, Honduras and Costa Rica called for the
Organization of American States to study the impact of the votes in
Colorado and Washington and said the United Nations' General
Assembly should hold a special session on the prohibition of drugs
by 2015 at the latest.
"It has become necessary to analyze in depth the implications for
public policy and health in our nations emerging from the state and
local moves to allow the legal production, consumption and
distribution of marijuana in some countries of our continent,"
Mexican President Felipe Calderon said after a meeting with Honduran
President Porfirio Lobo, Costa Rican President Laura Chinchilla and
Prime Minister Dean Barrow of Belize.
Marijuana legalization by U.S. state governments is "a paradigm
change on the part of those entities in respect to the current
international system," Calderon said.
The most influential adviser to Mexico's next president, who
takes office Dec. 1, questioned last week how the country will
enforce a ban on growing and smuggling a drug now legal under some
state laws. Mexico has seen tens of thousands of people killed over
the last six years as part of a militarized government attempt to
destroy the country's drug cartels.
President-elect Enrique Pena Nieto has promised to shift the
government's focus to preventing violence against ordinary citizens,
although he says he intends to keep battling cartels and is opposed
to drug legalization. Guatemala's president has advocated the
international legalization of drugs.
Mexico is one of the primary suppliers of marijuana to the U.S.
while Honduras and Belize are important stops on the northward
passage of cocaine from South America. Costa Rica is seeing
increasing use of its territory by drug traffickers.
Luis Videgaray, head of Pena Nieto's transition team, told Radio
Formula on Wednesday that the votes in the two states complicate his
country's commitment to quashing the growing and smuggling of
marijuana.
"Obviously we can't handle a product that is illegal in Mexico,
trying to stop its transfer to the United States, when in the United
States, at least in part of the United States, it now has a
different status," Videgaray said.
Videgaray stopped short of threatening to curtail Mexican
enforcement of marijuana laws, but his comments appeared likely to
increase pressure on the Obama administration to strictly enforce
U.S. federal law, which still forbids recreational pot use.
