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Mexico Gets It

By Michael Blankenship

The Mexican legislature voted to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine and other drugs.Read more...President Calderon proposed this legislation. His reasoning: It makes sense to distinguish between small-time users and big-time dealers, while re-targeting major crime-fighting resources away from the consumers and toward the dealers and their drug lord bosses."The important thing is . . . that consumers are not treated as criminals," said Rafael Ruiz Mena, secretary general of the National Institute of Penal Sciences. "It is a public health problem, not a penal problem."Clearly the government of Mexico gets it.

Full post as published by The Justice Gambit on June 21, 2009 (boomark / email).