Posted on 03/15/2016 9:30:49 PM PDT by Huntress
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - A senior Mexican official has said legalizing cultivation of opium poppies for medicinal purposes might help reduce violence in one of the regions most affected by brutal drug gangs that have ravaged the country for years.
Hector Astudillo, governor of Guerrero, one of the most violent states in Mexico, told Milenio television it was worth at least exploring the possibility of allowing cultivation.
"Let's do some sort of pilot scheme," Astudillo, a member of President Enrique Pena Nieto's Institutional Revolutionary Party, told Milenio in an interview recorded last week but broadcast on Monday.
"Provided it's used for medical issues ... It's a way out that could get us away from the violence there has been in Guerrero," he added.
Home to the beach resort Acapulco, Guerrero was the scene of the September 2014 disappearance of 43 trainee teachers, who the government says it believes were massacred by a drug gang working with corrupt local officials and police.
The disappearances sparked widespread international condemnation of the state of law and order in Mexico.
Astudillo, who was elected governor of the southwestern state last year, said Guerrero could not tackle the violence on its own, and argued bringing poppy cultivation into the open could weaken the hold gangsters have on local farmers.
He did not offer details of how such a scheme could work in Mexico, which is currently conducting a national review of its policy on marijuana after the Supreme Court last year granted an advocacy group the right to grow it for recreational use.
Though the marijuana ruling only applied to the group in question, it could eventually usher in nationwide changes.
Still, President Pena Nieto has been very cautious about the possibility of liberalizing Mexico's drug laws.
Opium poppies are used to make opium and heroin, as well as morphine and other pain-killing drugs. They can only be grown legally in a handful of countries, including India, Turkey and Australia.
More than 100,000 people have died in Mexico due to clashes between drug gangs and the state since the previous government sent in the armed forces to fight the cartels in late 2006.
(Reporting by Dave Graham)
As if they are not growing already??? Who is kidding who??
Make the wall another ten foot higher.
Who is kidding whom?? You'd know that if you weren't smoking opium.
; )
The governor is either hopelessly naive (and soon to be killed by narcoterrorists) or he is on the payroll of some narcotrafficante group that wants this to happen.
Most likely such a group would want it as a cover for their illegal trade.
Didn’t Great Britain try this same thing with China during the Victorian Era? That didn’t work out too well for the Chinese.
Dumb idea, which won’t end well.
Maybe our druggies will move there illegally to get high!
Puff, puff, puff, puff.....
yeah, right, Growing Opium in Mexico will be sooo helpful for America.
The answer to the addicts problems is a herbicide for the poppy fields. This is essential because heroin kills the appetite for sex. That is a tragedy for the addict.
Pot is becoming more and more legal in the U.S.. The Mexican marijuana market is loosing its customers to local/legal producers. Very soon the profit will be gone.
Legitimizing Opium for medical use and touting it as a way out of the violence caused by DRUG GANGS seems legit as long as it is made clear that the gangs have to resepct the law and not steal any of the opium for themselves. MMM-KAY?
Hey, I got this CRAZY idea, how about cutting off their number one buyer of illegal drugs? How about securing their preferred route to distributing drugs?
Eh, who am I kidding. A secure border wall just means that the Mexican cartels move all of their operations to here in the United States rather than just most of them as it has been for years.
I mean, honestly, if Mexico did pay for the wall, they’d have a much less corrupt government, far fewer illegal drug cartels, and a vastly lowered crime problem as hordes of transients on their way to the US border won’t be there.
Of course, take home money for most of Mexico’s politicians and police would also take a massive hit, probably why they squawk so loudly whenever the topic is brought up.
As long as we shoot anyone bringing that stuff over it’s alright by me.
I don’t like drugs coming into the country, though the USA’s addicts do cause a lot of the Mexican problem by being willing customers.
OK, I'm failing to see the downside, here. We can lock them up, and pay millions, or let them die, happy, and dump the body in a hole, and, if we remember, write down their useless names, somewhere.
(Most of them are Bernie bots, so it's no great loss to the economy.)
If we were smart, we'd make the corruption of the Mexican government an urgent foreign policy priority. We're in a much better position to clean up Mexico than we are the Middle East. Just reducing or eliminating the amount of aid we funnel to hopelessly corrupt officials is a YUGE start.
They might even begin thinking the time has come that they might just have to come up with some ideas to make it on their own.
We've been enabling these people way too long.
IMHO Mexico was, is and prolly always will be corrupt.
The narcos could take over completely and start executing every single person who ever opposed or offended them?
Then they could cross the border and start executing INS and FBI officers, National Guard officers, Texas Rangers and DPS officers, county and city LE, and every rancher they could get their hands on?
Like that?
Everyone - chill out and consider this.
Once upon a time, back in ‘03 and ‘04, the consensus among some US, UK and Allied military planners in Afghanistan was to convert their poppy growing into medicinal supply for the third world. People in the back country areas of the globe require pain killers, just like in the ‘modern’ countries.
The idea was that the farmers would be paid for growing the same stuff they grow anyway, but instead of selling it to the drug lords of central Asia, they would sell it to the factory down the road. Where the opiates would be turned into medicinal drugs for sale.
The idea was quashed from powers on high. I suspect that two BIG pharmaceutical companies, one from Europe and one from North America, decided that the introduction of cheap opiate medicines on the world market was something they didn’t want.
They make huge profits off synthetic versions and they don’t want competitors.
Our government, and others, swept in and we had DEA agents in combat, with air support, doing half-assed eradication efforts.
The idea to use traditional opium growing regions to provide medical-quality medicines at a lower rate is anathema to the companies that make lots of money making and selling their own.
That’s why we’ll never see cheaper drugs, and this mayor will either be bought or killed for coming up with the idea. Plata o Plomo.
Chill out? I was making a joke.
But if you want me to be serious;
They probably killed that idea because no matter how many fields of poppies are grown for legitimate medicine the black market for heroin will still exist and will be supplied by black market poppy fields. It’s probably also cheaper to synthesize opioids and that’s why they don’t use poppy derived opioids.
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