MEXICO CITY (AP) – Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said on Monday that the government is studying what to do with opium poppy growers who have been hit by competition from synthetic opioids, suggesting that some type of legalization scheme may be possible.
Asked about the legalization of marijuana production – a project that is now in Congress – López Obrador said the issue also involves opium poppies grown illegally in some parts of Mexico to make heroin.
“With regard to the commercialization of marijuana and opium poppy, it was decided to carry out an in-depth study of these plantations,” said López Obrador.
The government tried to introduce alternative crops, such as wood and fruit orchards, into poppy-growing areas, but López Obrador clearly suggested that the new study was added to these efforts.
He said farmers in remote communities in the mountains of Mexico lost income because traffickers are starting to buy fentanyl from Asia, instead of paying people to grow poppies and harvest the poppy gum needed to process heroin.
“We are in the process of analyzing and reflecting on what will most benefit Mexico,” he said. “There are now unparalleled conditions for doing what most benefits Mexico and our people, because the current government is totally free, it is not subordinate to any foreign government.”
This was an apparent reference to US pressure to reduce Mexican opium production, almost all smuggled into the United States.
Studies on legal opium production have been circulating in Mexican government circles since before López Obrador took office in December 2018. However, several factors have made these proposals never adopted.
The production of medicinal opioids needed for operations and terminally ill patients – something that has been proposed in the past – would require much stricter control over farmers than Mexico is likely to achieve in the mountainous communities of northern Mexico and in the state of Guerrero, on the coast of Mexico. Pacific, where illegal production is currently centered.
The US Drug Enforcement Administration said in a recent report that poppy and heroin production in Mexico declined in 2019. He said that “the low prices of opium paid to poppy growers in Mexico, along with an increase in fentanyl use in the United States States, probably impacted the decrease in cultivation. “
Traffickers are increasingly cutting heroin with fentanyl to increase its potency, and “DTOs (drug trafficking organizations) may see heroin as simply a fentanyl adulterant,” according to the report.
But even if marijuana cultivation is legalized and some solution is found for poppy growers, Mexico still faces an expansion of illicit drug plantations.
In February, López Obrador said experimental batches of coca leaves, the raw material for cocaine, were found in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero. The plant is native to South America and has so far been grown mainly in Bolivia and Colombia.
“I want to tell the bandits that we know that they are experimenting with coca production in Guerrero,” said the president. “We found a few batches of coca in Atoyac,” a conflicted municipality known for drug gang violence and drug production.
Any legalization of opium poppies would represent yet another point of friction with US officials, already hurt by Mexico’s decision to withdraw immunity for foreign agents and restrict its activities in Mexico.
Mexico also strongly encouraged the United States to release a former Mexican defense secretary arrested in Los Angeles in October on drug charges. Mexico cleared retired general Salvador Cienfuegos after conducting only a cursory investigation of the US evidence against him and then published the entire case file.