Drug decriminalization in Mexico has failed to destroy society as promised

Personal possession of most of the drugs you've ever heard of was decriminalized in Mexico around a year ago.  Somehow, this landmark change in drug policy wasn't much discussed in US media.  So far, the result of this has been that the Mexican government has more money to spend going after organized criminals.  This increase in meaningful drug war activity may be why it's been a fairly violent year in Mexico, which you might have heard about.  It's not actually the most drug violence in Mexico in recent memory, though, which is also something that isn't put into context in the US media treatments of Mexican drug violence I've read lately.  I thought that Mexico had a record number of murders this year, because they have had a lot.  But it turns out the recent figures aren't even close to the kind of killing during the'80s.

In latin America, it has become a commonly held belief that the drug war is impossible for anti-drug elements to win.  The pro-drug team has the anti-drug team outclassed in terms of intelligence networks, weaponry, and possibly even public sentiment.  They have way more money to throw at the problem, and are indeed the means of financial livelihood for a number of people who would not otherwise be able to feed their families.*

Generally, personal drug possession decriminalization has almost no effect on drug use, supply, or demand.  I think this is an argument for drug decriminalization, personally.  I suppose it would be nice if legal possession reduced one of those things, but it doesn't.  If it made use more common, that would be an argument against decriminalization in some people's books, since it would mean that there would be more criminal behavior in trafficking and dealing to keep up with demand.  Since it has no effect except to put drug users in jail, we should stop doing it.  After all, it's expensive and it doesn't do anything.  

This is why Latin American countries are decriminalizing personal drug use, by the way.  They don't care any more than our government whether or not drugs or drug policies are harmful to people.  It's just that keeping so many people in prison is expensive.  So they've decided to make the use of drugs legal... sort of.

Mexico has a peculiar set of legal limits of each drug.  Peruse the follow list and tell me if anything jumps out at you.

Drug	Quantity
Opium (raw, smokable)	5	gm
Heroin	25	mg
Marijuana	5	gm
Cocaine	500	mg
LSD	0.015	mg
MDA	200	mg
MDMA (ecstacy)	200	mg
Mescaline	1	gm
Peyote	1	kg
Psilocybin (concentrate, pure active ingredient)	100	mg
Hallucinogenic mushrooms (raw, off the farm)	250	mg
Amphetamines	100	mg
Dexamphetamine	40	mg
Phencyclidine (PCP)	7	mg
Methamphetamines	200	mg
Nalbuphine (synthetic opiate)	10	mg

 Does it strike you as at all odd that A person can carry a kilogram of peyote for personal use, but only 15 micrograms of LSD?  In case you aren't familiar, 150 micrograms is generally considered to be a dose of LSD.  Below 20 mics, no one would even notice they'd taken a drug. 
Peyote gets you high because it contains Mescaline.  The effective dose for Mescaline, which has more in common with LSD than the other drugs on this list, is around 250 milligrams.  a kilogram of dried peyote has about 36 grams of mescaline in it.  That would be enough peyote to make 144 people hallucinate and gibber for the rest of the day.  Then again, a person can only carry up to one gram of pure mescaline (the same drug as peyote, you understand)  which is to say, about a sugar cube's worth, but peculiarly, the dried plant is legal in volumes that would be a significant bulge in your knapsack. 

The psilocybin/mushrooms limits have the opposite problem.  A 1/4 gram of dried psilocybin mushroom is well below the psychoactive threshold.  A common dosage would be about 2 grams.  But 2 grams of dried mushroom would contain about 10mg of psilocybin, the active chemical.  If you just carry the chemical itself, you can have 10 times that much.  That strikes me as a strange rule.

The law says in effect that you can have enough fresh peyote for 100 people, or less mescaline than you can use yourself, and you can have too little mushroom to get high, but enough psylocybin for ten people. Ah well, hey, okay, whatever.  It doesn't totally make sense, but it's a start.  I assume that the folks who came up with this policy were not familiar with these particular drugs.  They made some strange choices.  It beats sending people to prison for carrying a few joints, anyway.

Anyhow, I made up the map you see here that indicates the legal status of drug use in various Latin American countries.  I couldn't find any reliable info for Suriname or French Guiana, but I did find this peculiar fact the other day.  Residents of Suriname made a liqueur out of avocados.  This drink had a thick texture like a pudding, but packed around the same alcohol content by volume as wine.  These folks couldn't get avocados anymore when they moved to the Netherlands, so they used custard to mimic the texture instead.  This delightful relative of eggnog is called advocaat.  

Back to the map, Uruguay gets special mention because drugs haven't ever been illegal there.  The Brazilian government has recently decided that drug users need counseling rather than jail time, so they're heading in the right direction. 

As you can see, Latin America is leading the world in drug legalization.  I think it's probably a good sign.  It may be a sign of what's to come, too.  Ain't the future grand?


* I could tell you about it, or you could watch movies on the drug war and see these people explain it themselves, so I leave it to you if you're inclined.  I highly recommend a documentary called Drug Wars: the Rise and Fall of the Worlds Largest Drug Cartels.  This movie is a 4-part series, and is badly edited, but extremely informative.  It's pretty unbiased, and will make you think about this stuff in different ways.  You can stream it on Netflix or buy it at Amazon.  It really is a great survey of drug use worldwide. 

Anchorage bicycle law about to be rewritten to be more stupid.

The Municipality of Anchorage Traffic Code is being rewritten this year.  The rules governing the use of roads and sidewalks are all being reviewed with the intention of bringing them into sync with the driving conditions of our city.  This sounds like a neat idea, but dig this proposed addendum to Anchorage bicycle law:

9.38.060(c): C. Persons operating a bicycle upon a sidewalk, recreational trail or bike trail

must yield the right-of-way to traffic before crossing a roadway, street, or driveway.

The justification for this rule is practical-sounding and goes something like this.  The right-of-way given to pedestrians crossing streets is based on the idea that the rider is going slowly enough to be seen by drivers.  But since bikes can go really fast, they are harder to anticipate, and so drivers shouldn't be held responsible for making sure they don't run them over.  This is a leading cause of accidents, and so by changing the law, we can make riders more responsible, and so avoid accidents.

The problem with that idea is that it's based on the faulty reasoning that bicycles are darting into the roadway in front of vehicles because they have the right of way and so causing accidents.  That's not actually what happens.  What actually happens is that bikers, and walkers for that matter, often travel on the left sidewalk of a road, facing oncoming traffic.  If you drive a car, you know that when turning right onto a street, the cars you are merging with are all coming from the left.  Thus, cars merging on to the street who want to avoid getting into vehicle collisions will generally be looking left while they are turning right. These people are engaging in what I refer to as Backwards-Looking, Oppositely-Oriented Driving (BLOOD).  They are actually the leading cause of vehicle/pedestrian accidents, since they aren't looking where they're going.

Nearly everybody who drives a car does this.  It's not rare in the slightest.  It's the most practical way to merge a vehicle into traffic.  The problem is, and this really should be the problem of the driver, that pedestrians can be coming from the other direction.  They usually aren't coming, because there aren't many pedestrians on most Anchorage roads.  That doesn't change the fact that people driving big machines around should be aware of where they are putting them at all times.  Giving them the right-of-way over pedestrians is definitely not going to make this happen.

Personally, I've been hit by cars on two occasions.  They were both caused in the same way:  I was crossing a street and the driver was turning right.  The first time, I was on the left sidewalk and they didn't see me until shortly after they hit me. They just looked at me and kept going, since I didn't appear to be hurt.  They didn't even stop.   

Here's a little thought experiment:  cars merging cause a large number of accidents.  So here's what we can do about it: give them the right-of-way.  That way, cars going straight on a roadway know that they have to yield to cars turning on to the roadway.  It's flawless, right?  That ought to prevent tons of vehicle collisions.  Write your assembly member.

I have a friend, let's call him Manfred, who is a regular bicycle commuter.  Prior to becoming one, he was a regular rollerblader.  When Manfred and I first started hanging out, we were riding somewhere up the left sidewalk. A car waiting to turn right pulled out in front of us in the crosswalk, causing us to stop riding so that we didn't get run over.  The driver then proceeded to turn onto the road, and never at any point did they so much as glance in our direction.  So my friend spat right on their passenger side window.  The driver didn't notice.  Manfred said he used to do that all the time back in his rollerblading days.  If they didn't notice getting a loogie on their window, they wouldn't have noticed running us over till it had already happened.   

To prevent both accidents and window loogies, I recommend the following addendum to the Anchorage Traffic Code:

9.22.010: A (continued). Drivers turning right shall turn their fucking neck and see if they're about to drive into something before they begin their turn.

 To sum up, giving cars the right of way isn't going to prevent vehicle/bicycle collisions.  However, it may increase the number of bewildered drivers trying to figure out who spit on their windshield.