USA TODAY: … [Businessman Armando] Santacruz and his partners at the non-profit studied the problem for years, inviting experts, drug czars and even ex-presidents to try to untangle the conundrum of drug-related crime in Mexico. Their conclusion: legalize marijuana and you erase a major profit stream for cartels, alleviate Mexico’s overcrowded prisons and actually bring down drug consumption.
“At the end of the day we realized that the elephant in the room which no one was talking about was drug policy,” Santacruz told me. “We had massive corruption of the police, massive corruption of government, massive intimidation and overpowering force on part of the cartels. The driving force behind all that was drug prohibition.”…
As a model, Santacruz points to Switzerland, which, faced with a lethal drug problem, legalized and regulated heroin consumption starting in the 1990s. Rates of first-time heroin users plummeted, as did drug-related deaths and HIV levels… (more)
