Mexico Legalizes Medical Cannabis

Mexico legalizes medical cannabis, but for now needy patients will only be offered products with less than 1 percent THC. Mexico has legalized medical cannabis. President Enrique Pena Nieto signed a measure this week that received overwhelming support in both the Senate and Chamber of Deputies to create a narrow band of legal products with room for expansion. Mexico joins Canada, Colombia, Chile and a handful of other countries, mostly in Europe, with this humane and common sense decision. Pena Nieto, once a staunch opponent of marijuana, has become a champion. The War on Drugs has done incredible harm to his country, and he has become all too familiar with how prohibition enriches and empowers the cartels that control swaths of Mexico. “We, Mexicans, know all too well the range and the defects of prohibitionist and punitive policies, and of the so-called war on drugs that has prevailed for 40 years,” President Pena Nieto said in April. “Our country has suffered, as few have, the ill effects of organized crime tied to drug trafficking.” Last year, Pena Nieto introduced a bill that would have decriminalized possession of up to an ounce (up from the current limit of 5 grams), but that bill didn’t have enough momentum to make it through Congress. When it came to medical cannabis, however, the consensus was overwhelming. The bill that Pena Nieto confirmed this week passed the Senate in December, 98-7, and the Chamber of Deputies in April, 347-7. A statement from the Chamber of…

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