The huge financial returns from supplying America’s demand have fueled the rise of drug gangs across our southern border. Marijuana prohibition keeps the price high and the supply controllable. As a result few have as great a financial interest in continuing to keep marijuana illegal as do these Mexican drug gangs.
In an interesting development, Héctor Aguilar Camín ( a historian, a novelist and the publisher and editor of the Mexican magazine Nexos) and Jorge G. Castañeda (Mexico’s foreign minister from 2000 to 2003 and teacher at New York University) penned an op-ed in Sunday’s Washington Post, California’s Prop 19, on legalizing marijuana, could end Mexico’s drug war. Excerpt,

On Nov. 2, Californians will vote on Proposition 19, deciding whether to legalize the production, sale and consumption of marijuana. If the initiative passes, it won’t just be momentous for California; it may, at long last, offer Mexico the promise of an exit from our costly war on drugs.
[. . .] A growing number of distinguished Mexicans from all walks of life have recently come out in favor of some form of drug legalization. Former presidents Ernesto Zedillo and Vicente Fox, novelists Carlos Fuentes and Angeles Mastretta, Nobel Prize-winning chemist Mario Molina, and movie star Gael García Bernal have all expressed support for this idea, and polls show that ordinary Mexicans are increasingly willing to contemplate the notion.

A question for readers: is it possible that drug interests south of the border might become involved in efforts to oppose Prop 19? There is a great deal of money at stake depending on which way this ballot initiative goes. There is a history of entrenched moneyed interests getting involved in elections that can alter their interests.