AMLO: Legal Poppy Production for Pharmacueticals

Translated by Yaqui for Borderland Beat from: TeleSur

June 9, 2018
Part 2, below from Milenio

Mexico's president-elect, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, is open to the idea of selling opium for pharmaceutical use, a senior aide said on Wednesday.

The move would be a sign of the deep changes the next government is considering over the U.S.-led ''war on drugs'' approach.

"Why not sell it to pharmaceutical companies?" said Olga Sanchez Cordero, a former Supreme Court judge who is the incoming president's pick to run the Interior Ministry.

She said the next president, a 64-year-old former mayor of Mexico City, supported a public consultation on the possibility of regulating opium and decriminalizing marijuana.

Sanchez said the newcomers were also exploring decriminalizing marijuana for recreational use, saying it no longer made sense for Mexican authorities to engage in a violent struggle against the drug when Canada and several U.S. states have already adopted more lenient policies.

                                        Lisa Sanchez                    Olga Sanchez Cordero

"What are we thinking? Tell me.  We are killing ourselves. Really, why keep on killing when most of North America is decriminalizing?" she told  "W Radio".

Sanchez said any such move would be in parallel to rehabilitation programs and strict punishments for anyone selling drugs to children.

To legally grow and export opium poppies for painkillers, Mexico first would need authorization from the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), a United Nations body.

Lopez Obrador, who takes office in December, upturned Mexico's political status quo in the July 1 election with more than half the country voting for him. His coalition will have a majority in Congress, projections show, ending 89 years of rule by just two parties.

He did not take a clear stance on decriminalizing drugs before the election, but says he will try out new approaches to tackling Mexico's violence, including possible amnesty for some cartel employees.

In Mexico, the battle for control of heroin production and trafficking is held partly responsible for the country's record levels of violence, which involved nearly 30,000 murders last year.

Regulation of opium poppy farming for morphine production is a model used in Turkey and India, among other countries.

Lisa Sánchez , director of the civil association United Mexico Against the Crime (MUCD), applauded that the ex- member of the Supreme Court,  Olga Sanchez Cordero, who has spoken out in favor of the legalization of the planting, harvesting and recreational use of the marijuana . 

In an interview with Carlos Puig for Milenio Television , Lisa Sánchez stressed that Sánchez Cordero "is someone who understands the subject, who has the evidence, and who proposes it in conjunction with other actions", among which is:  "a transitional justice plan plus an amnesty plan . " 

The director of MUCD considers that the amnesty proposed by López Obrador during his campaign- and legalization of marijuana should go hand in hand.   

"They have to go together, because an amnesty without a regulatory change of an illicit economy the size of drugs is doomed to fail, " said Lisa Sanchez .

"If you make an amnesty for the growers, for the producers , even for those small merchants who are  victims of the "cam" (when the organized crime groups forcibly recruits growers), they could access certain benefits, to certain amnesties, but if you do not remove that incentive of illegality from those markets, those amnesties will hardly work, " she stressed. 

The proposal of Sánchez Cordero: 

Proposed by López Obrador as his Secretary of the Interior, Sánchez Cordero told AFP in June that, if the standard-bearer of Morena won the elections, she would seek the decriminalization of marijuana for its use and work through " transitional justice ", a series of special legal mechanisms that can be activated after systematic violations of human rights in a country.

Here part of the interview she gave to the AFP:

-How is the amnesty going to work for perpetrators of crimes?

I am thinking of a law with reduction of sentences for informants that will lead us to true and accurate information, collated, such as the locations of some of the disappeared.

I believe that there will be no material or human or economic resources that we can allocate to the location of the disappeared, which in the black figure could be many.

-Who would you include the amnesty?

To the victims of forced labor. (organized crime groups forcibly recruit growers). There are many many young people  and if they do not  accept the forced labor they just kill them. Either they go with them and do their bidding or they kill them and/or  disappear them.

We have a generation of young people who are the disappeared, especially young men, disappeared, most of them from 15 to 21 years old. We have had at least 18 years of losing a generation of young people. We can not continue like this.

- How do you convince a tempted boy to walk away from  the easy money of a life of crime?

We are going to offer him school, a culture of peace, to lay down his arms.  It should suit him to have another future, that his immediate future may be to want to have a Hummer , but that  immediate future  does not end there.

-There are areas such as the Sierra de Guerrero where people devote themselves to poppies and complain that there is no other industry to work in.

We have to start thinking about the decriminalization of drugs. So it goes. In an over all policy of decriminalization of drugs. Obviously starting with marijuana.

-Only the marijuana ?

Marijuana for recreational use and the derivitives.  I'm going to propose to Andrés Manuel at the time, the decriminalization of marijuana in planting, harvesting, transport , medicinal and recreational use.

In terms of the poppy, it is convenient as Afghanistan has done. Opiates are  highly valued for pharmaceuticals and for medicinal use as legal drugs especially in trauma cases and compassionate end of life care.