Mexico's recipe for legal drug use

August 25, 6:53 PMDallas Libertarian ExaminerGarry Reed

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There's an exciting new recipe making the rounds in Mexico's culinary drug circles.

For that very special party mix, take 5 grams of marijuana, add a half gram of cocaine, mix in 50 milligrams of heroin, blend with 40 milligrams of methamphetamine and add just a pinch (0.015 milligram) of LSD.

¡Ay, caramba! You've just whipped up a new Mexican law: drug decriminalization.

Those are the amounts of each illegal drug a person can possess under Mexico's new "personal use" legislation without facing immediate criminal prosecution.

Unless one over-consumes, that is. Caught once or twice, users are "encouraged to seek treatment." Caught a third time and they're put on a mandatory diet.

With drug cartels gunning down police and soldiers and innocent bystanders and each other all along their northern border, and with crooked cops shaking down smalltime users for a few pesos instead of pursuing the big-time drug lords, Mexico, according to USA Today, "has emphasized the need to differentiate drug addicts and casual users."

Alleged Mexican drug traffickers and the seized weapons of their trade,
lined up for a photo op. (AP photo)

Whether that differentiation is a practical reaction to the uncontainable drug thuggery or an act of policy enlightenment isn't clear. What is abundantly apparent is that American drug warriors can't, or doggedly refuse to, make that same distinction.

Aside from medical marijuana, The only exceptions in the U.S. seems to be a few scattered jurisdictions that allow a couple ounces of pot or instruct cops to treat the occasional joint as their lowest enforcement priority.

Not so for the feds. As recently as May, U.S. Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske, reading from his official Drug War Cookbook, listed one of his top priorities as "curtailing abuse of prescription drugs such as the addictive painkiller OxyContin."

Everyone in America has used, or knows someone who has used, some sort of drug in some way at some time that was not officially sanctioned by the Sanctimonious Overseers in our higher bureaucracies. Yet everyone can, and does, make the distinction between "use" and "abuse" except for those Self-Righteous Ones.

For reasons probably political and self-promoting, America's professional drug-warring classes just cannot bring themselves to use the word "drug" without following it with the word "abuse."

There is no such thing in their intolerant, proscriptive worldview as “drug use” or “substance ingestion” or “prescription taking” or “alcohol consumption.” It’s always drug abuse, substance abuse, prescription abuse, alcohol abuse. Given enough incentive we'll likely be hearing about Aspirin abuse and Pepto-Bismol abuse and tic tac abuse.

Until the American substance interdictors become as (a) practical, or (b) enlightened as their counterparts south of the border this nation will continue its recipe for ruining innocent lives and breaking incarceration records in the civilized world by banishing people behind bars who have committed the act of harming no one.

The libertarian position on the War Against Some Drugs is simple: stop it!