Follow the money. In New Jersey, marijuana use is legal for adults, but you are forbidden to grow your own at home. In Mexico, if it doesn't line pockets of the powerful, it's forbidden.
Italy, Mexico, and New Jersey, all run by mafias, are cut from the same cloth. Besides discovering the Americas, and misnaming the Indians in their pursuit of spice trade routes, Italians were more interested in pasta than spreading their seed like the horn dog Spanish.