Mexico May Legalize All Drugs in Ten Years, Says Former President Vicente Fox

Hard drugs like cocaine, crystal meth, and heroin may be legally available in Mexico within a decade, said former president Vicente Fox in an interview with Reuters this week. He was responding to the news of a landmark case in the Mexican supreme court, where the court ruled it unconstitutional to ban marijuana use. While the ruling only applied to the group of plaintiffs involved in that specific case, many say it signals shifting tides in the country's prohibition laws.

Fox, who was the country's president between 2000 and 2006, is now a vocal advocate for the legalization of all drugs, which he says is a way of ending Mexico's bloody war between cartels and authorities. "The dramatic war on drugs in Mexico, in which tens of thousands of young Mexicans have been killed, is proof of prohibition's failure," Fox wrote in an op-ed for The Globe And Mail last year. "We must extricate ourselves from it."

In his interview with Reuters, Fox said that "marijuana [legalization] is a first step," adding that "the other drugs will take a longer cycle, say five to 10 years." The current Mexican president, Enrique Peña Nieto, has stated that he is against legalization, though he recently called for a national policy debate on the subject, Reuters reported. Small quantities of drugs for personal use have already been de-criminalized across Mexico, thanks to a law passed in 2009 that allows people to carry up to five grams of marijuana, half a gram of cocaine, and 50 milligrams of heroine, among other substances.

Fox said it's still early in the legalization process, and that the future of prohibition in Mexico depends greatly on United States policy to move forward. "Obama has to resolve his things over there and Pena Nieto has to make sure he sorts out this problem here," he explained. "Everything in good time."