A diplomatic failure: the Mexican role in the demise of the 1940 Reglamento Federal de Toxicomanías

Isaac Campos

Third World Quarterly, 2018, vol. 39, issue 2, 232-247

Abstract: In 1940 Mexico implemented a new revolutionary strategy in its fight against drug trafficking and addiction with a policy that legalized the sale of morphine to opiate addicts. While this approach to drug addiction was not entirely new or unique, it was strongly opposed by the United States, which responded by declaring an embargo on narcotic shipments to Mexico. As a result, Mexico was forced to abandon the plan just a few months after it was implemented. Often seen as a moment when Mexico might have gone in a different, less prohibitionist drug-policy direction, this episode has been overwhelmingly interpreted as an early and striking example of U.S. drug-control imperialism in Latin America. While such interpretations are not incorrect, they have missed an equally critical element of the story—a series of catastrophic diplomatic failures on the Mexican side which undermined various opportunities Mexico had to salvage the policy in some form. The episode thus stands in contrast to more well-known diplomatic challenges during the period in which Mexico’s diplomats have been lauded for outmaneuvering their U.S. and European counterparts.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/01436597.2017.1389268 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:ctwqxx:v:39:y:2018:i:2:p:232-247

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/ctwq20

DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2017.1389268

Access Statistics for this article

Third World Quarterly is currently edited by Shahid Qadir

More articles in Third World Quarterly from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().