Oldies but Goodies

A couple of columns from weeks past that I've been meaning to highlight: 

Mauricio Merino sees a slippery slope between the culture of impunity that prevails in Mexico and the broader failures of state institutions: 

From the impotence of the State to punish those who violate the most elemental social codes we have drifted, bit by bit, to the imminent risk of State capture so as to affirm impunity. Something like that has already happened, in any event, in other spheres of public life, from spheres where rules were bent so that the authorities could avoid punishment, to surrealistic extremes like the handout of Hummers by the leaders of the teacher's union, which is another form of impunity turned into State policy.

And Jorge Fernández Menéndez thinks that the proposal to legalize marijuana shouldn't be debated within the context of the war on drugs, and worries if Mexico's relationship with the US will withstand the proposal's passage.

In other words, if the legalization of marijuana is going to be discussed, it should start from other principles: it's not because of the failure or not of the war on drugs, but rather it must be debated based on the benefits or harm that legalization could generate. Those who propose {legalization] have a point in their favor when they indicate that, in normal doses, marijuana has not been demonstrated to be more harmful than alcohol or tobacco.

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Key questions remain: Can a country decide to decriminalize one of these drugs without an international consensus? Can it do so when it has a border of thousands of kilometers with the principal consumer market of drugs in the world that maintains, above all toward marijuana, an attitude that is at the very least divergent in the legal and the moral aspect?