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"Obviously, it means that formerly productive farmers are otherwise employed in the drug trade, which is more lucrative, even after a corn price increase."

What? The unsuccessful attempts to decriminalize personal use of certain drugs in Mexico that were thwarted last spring have nothing to do with the price of corn. Their internal laws with regard to drug use don't have much to do with anything outside of Mexico. Laws with respect to possession and use of drugs appear to have little relation to demand for drugs and certainly little to do with production of drugs for export. Mexicans have grown marijuana for centuries, and probably for most of that time they've been selling at least some of it up here. Low corn prices or high corn prices haven't really had anything to do with that. The reason they sell so much drugs up here is because we have millions and millions of people up here who like to do drugs with billions and billions of dollars to spend on them. There is nothing new about Mexicans supplying drugs to Americans. They were doing it before the sixties. After drug use surged in the sixties their involvement grew, mainly because they just happen to be the only country on our southern border and that means most all drugs produced in Latin America will go through Mexico before reaching the country that consumes most of the illegal drugs consumed in the world, our country. This was going on long before NAFTA was ever even conceived, and realistically, it isn't going to change anytime in the foreseeable future. Fluctuations in corn prices have nothing to do with it. Corn can go up several dollars a bushel and it will still never be as profitable even as something like cheapo Mexican marijuana that sells in this country wholesale for hundreds of dollars a pound, and certainly nowhere near as profitable as drugs like heroin, cocaine, and meth, that sell in this country for thousands of dollars per pound wholesale. The profits to be made in the drug trade are huge and there will always be plenty of people willing to take the risks involved in that business to share in those huge profits. The wholesale price of corn would have to jump from the less than ten cents a pound it is now (56 lbs. in a bushel) on up maybe even into the hundreds of dollars a pound, or certainly at least many times higher than current prices before some crappy job in the cornfields is going to pull people away from the highly profitable drug trade. You're barking up the wrong tree.