Mary O'Grady, who writes a column on the Americas for the Wall Street Journal, including ones that call for drug legalization, interviews the mayor of Ciudad Juarez.
So what's his plan to retake the city for law-abiding Mexicans? ... Cleaning up the mess here will require the proper diagnosis, and I ask the mayor to share his. "If you have the biggest consumer of drugs just beside your [border] and you have a lot of people here who have no opportunity, you have the culture for insecurity," he tells me. But the mayor doesn't dwell on what he cannot change. Instead he zeroes in on Mexico. "The real causes that are generating the insecurity in Juárez and all over Mexico are lack of opportunity, lack of education, lack of [necessities], impunity, lack of justice. It is a mixture of a lot of problems where we Mexicans haven't done our homework," he says. ....
Is he saying, I ask, that there is a perception in Mexico that marijuana is already legal in the United States? 'Yes, oh yes,' he tells me. He makes clear that he thinks the stuff is bad for you, but he says that any move to legalize it must be done on both sides of the border—and all over the world. 'Otherwise you will get Hell's Kitchen here in Mexico.'
I press him on that point, asking whether legalization, on both sides of the border, would stop the bloodshed and disintegration of the state. If you want to end the violence and corruption it creates, he says, you only need to turn the business over to governments. He says that he could then deal with the extortion and kidnapping epidemics separately." Nov. 13, 2010
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