War on Drugs conference: Legalize marijuana, participants say

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Legalizing marijuana in the United States would weaken Mexico's powerful drug cartels, panelists at a War on Drugs conference said Tuesday.

During the two-day conference, speaker after speaker said that the United States was as much to blame for the violence in Juárez as was the Mexican government. Now that Mexico is trying to rid itself of the drug cartels that have killed thousands of people in the past 20 months, the United States should have an honest debate about drug policies that have done nothing to lessen demand, panelists said.



David Courtwright spoke about the history of drug abuse Tuesday at the Plaza Theatre. (Victor Calzada / El Paso Times)

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“Anyone under 21 will say it’s easier for them to get marijuana than alcohol … because it is regulated, but to buy drugs from a dealer you don’t need an ID.” -- Judge James Gray

A conservative trial judge from Orange County, Calif., James P. Gray has become a troubadour for the decriminalization of marijuana as the only way to put a dent in illegal trafficking and the destruction that rises from it.

Addressing the lunch crowd at The Global Public Policy Forum on the U.S. War on Drugs on the UTEP campus Monday, Gray said the key to the problem is demand but there is little chance that the appetite for marijuana and other drugs will lessen in the United States.

If the United States were successful in cutting off the supply of marijuana from marijuana, it would come from the Middle East or Asia or California, where it is already the state’s leading cash crop.

By legalizing, regulating and taxing marijuana, estimates are the annual revenues would approach $1.4 billion in California alone. Legislation is now pending in California to legalize marijuana, Assembly Bill 390, when and if the federal government allows states to do so.



Judge James Gray

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Contrasting opinions on policy and cultural implications were among topics discussed during the first panel of the second day of the Global Public Policy Forum on the U.S. War on Drugs.

Offering the comparative perspective, Dr. Craig Reinarman -- professor of sociology and legal studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz -- spoke of his time spent in the Netherlands, where coffee shops allow patrons to smoke marijuana. He compared statistics of drug use in Amsterdam to that of San Francisco. “The striking thing about this is it shows Amsterdam, where you can say you can’t throw a brick without hitting a place that sells cannabis, has a starkly lower rate, or prevalence rate, and that includes lifetime prevalence, last year prevalence, and last month prevalence,” he said. “It’s quite paradoxical, because we’ve always been led to believe that availability is destiny.”

Reinarman said that as signatories on U.N. treaties on drug control, the Dutch have still have laws against marijuana. The level of incarceration was the point of departure. “The Dutch don’t call their drug policy a drug war. They do not incarcerate hundreds of thousands of low level drug users.” He added that they have regulated use, which has included a ban on advertising, increased minimum age of purchase, decreased the amount that can be sold and closed some coffee shops.



Anthony Placido, assistant administrator and chief of intelligence for the Drug Enforcement Administration’s intelligence program