Drugs
Those discourses are never completely objective nor politically neutral and have created some misunderstandings and frictions between the two governments. Despite theoverwhelming information and common places generated by U.S.A. officials and reproduced world-wide by the media about drug trafficking in Mexico, there are still many questions that some social researchers are posing and trying to answer. These concern in particular the historical sociology of the phenomenon in the country, the U.S.A.-Mexico relations on drug issues, the subculture of drugtrafficking, drug use, and the dynamics of the relationship between drug traffickers and political power. The objective of this paper is to show a synthetic, comprehensive vision of those drug-related problems in Mexico since the end of the last century.
In the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, drugs such as marijuana, opiates and cocaine were commonly used in Mexico, speciallyopiates, basically for medical reasons. Laudanum and other opium derivatives such as morphine and heroin, as well as pharmaceuticals such as cocaine, coca wines and marijuana cigarettes were prescribed by doctors and easily obtained in pharmacies, popular markets and even hardware stores. The authorities were concerned about the quality of these products and tried to protect the consumers.Addicts were considered as ill persons not as criminals (1). There had been some attempts to control laudanum, poppy and marijuana commerce since 1870, but they did not succeed (2).
In the first decade of the twentieth century, the U.S.A. government was very active in the international arena, trying to convince other countries to accept opium control and create special laws to punish the offenders.The Shanghai Conference in 1909 for opium control was the beginning of the U.S.A. diplomacy on drugs. The Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, approved in the U.S.A., aimed at controlling opium consumption, was a sort of founding reason to expand American official perceptions and laws on drugs world-wide. At that time, the Mexican revolution was taking place. Revolutionary leaders in Mexico were moreinterested in political survival than in controlling opium trafficking which was of, not an important or special concern for them. Prohibition on one side of the U.S.A.-Mexican border and legal commerce on the other created the conditions for drug trafficking.
Poppy culture existed in Mexico since at least the last quarter of the nineteenth century (1886) in the north-western state of Sinaloa, forexample (3). On 19 January 1917, congressman (Coahuila) Dr. José María Rodríguez proposed an amendment to the fraction XVI of article 73 of the Constitution, which gave powers to the Congress to dictate laws on citizenship, naturalisation, colonisation, emigration and immigration, and general health in the country. Among the reasons for the amendment was the concern about alcoholism and the...
Regístrate para leer el documento completo.