Uruguay Tells US Drug War to Take a Hike

Newsflash! Uruguay has fashioned a marijuana legalization program that is smart and graceful, yet does not turn the little South American nation into a tourist Mecca like Amsterdam. It may be the best decriminalization model yet. In the annals of beleaguered US Attorney General Jeff Sessions — whose obsession with weed I wrote about earlier — this amounts to another warning shot from the real world making it clear re-invigorating federal anti-marijuana law enforcement is not going to be easy. Everybody knows the bloodhounds are baying in the woods and getting closer on the scent of Sessions’ Russia problem. In a front-page interview with The New York Times, President Trump makes it clear he’s fed up with Sessions for recusing himself on the Russia investigation. Jeff Sessions may be approaching pariah status in Washington DC.

Uruguay’s actions are part of a general trend in Latin America that expresses how fed up leaders there are with the US Drug War. One leader after another has expressed frustration with the US military and police obsession with the supply of drugs from the South, while leaders in the US fail to socially address the demand here that drives the so-called “war.” Latin American leaders are effectively reading the US the riot act. Bastante! Enough. That goes for leaders in Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, Costa Rica, Jamaica and even Canada.

Former Uruguayan President Jose (Pepe) Mujica at his presidential farmhouse

One of the most interesting examples of this reality occurred during the notorious summit meeting in Cartagena in 2012. Conservative Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos publicly requested of President Barack Obama that the US do more about demand and let up on Latin America for being the supplier of that dysfunctional US demand. Like, hey, get your own house in order and stop scapegoating us.

Americans, however, never got this story. As many will recall, what we did get was a raft of juicy scandal stories about the President’s secret service detail getting laid by high-class Colombian prostitutes. (Prostitution is legal in Colombia and thrives in Cartagena.) Was this an insidious conspiracy? Or was it, rather, just the exceptionalist American subconscious at work making it clear the United States never recognizes problems having to do with itself. As any morally righteous Anglo North American understands, the true horror was American special agents protecting the President of the United States having sex with dark and furtive Latin women for cash. Elite American warriors compromised by Mestizo honey pots — now that’s a story you can run with in Gringolandia. Good editors decided Americans didn’t want to hear that the USA had been using its Drug War to demonize Latin America for supplying it what its population demanded — as if that isn’t a perfect definition of free private enterprise.

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