CC’s drug consumption not divorced from violence, discrimination

Professor Santiago Guerra visiting in the Southwest Studies department this year from University of Texas at Austin.

Do you know where your marijuana comes from? Do you know the whole chain of events that brings it to your room? These questions, along with questions about legalization and racial discrimination, were discussed at the Glass House Dinner and Discussion on Wednesday night titled, “Marijuana and Social Justice.”

The discussion was led by Santiago Guerra, a visiting assistant professor in the Southwest Studies Department from University of Texas at Austin. Guerra grew up in a Texas town on the U.S.-Mexico border in a family and community of drug smugglers.

Guerra began by giving a brief historical overview of the rise of drug cartels. Illegal trafficking originally began in the ’20s, during Prohibition, when people would smuggle bootleg alcohol from Mexico into the U.S. Marijuana was made illegal in 1937. Guerra says that the campaign to criminalize marijuana was related, in large part, to prejudices: the campaigners were, “trying to criminalize marijuana for its association with African-Americans and Mexican-Americans.”

When marijuana became an illicit substance, the traffickers who used to move alcohol simply diversified. Guerra described them originally as just “businessmen”. The alcohol traffickers became drug traffickers as drugs became more popular in the United States.
During the ’60s and ’70s, the demand for illicit drugs skyrocketed. Drug smuggling became a serious, sophisticated system because of the potential for enormous profit. Mexican drug smugglers also expanded to other drugs. By the ’80s, intervention in the Caribbean and Florida drove the cocaine smuggling sector from those areas into Mexico as well. Finally, by the ’90s, there came “a real intense effort to redirect policing to the U.S./Mexico border,” according to Guerra. “Drug smugglers…were looked at as enemy insurgents.”

As the opportunities for profit increased and the methods of sophisticated crime improved, smugglers branched out beyond drugs. They started performing kidnappings, murders, immigrant smuggling, and more. This is why, when the topic of legalization inevitably arose, Guerra said that simply legalizing marijuana would not be a simple and conclusive solution. With all the drugs, other crimes, and power struggles going on amidst cartels in Mexico, legalization of marijuana would not have a very large effect.
“They would feel it to some extent,” Guerra said, when one student said that in the past year, he stopped buying marijuana when he didn’t know where it came from, so as not to contribute to the drug war. The cartels have many other products and services to fall back on.

Guerra’s insight into the racial injustice in the system started with a personal story of his concerning two incidents he witnessed. Around the time he started college, his cousin, a Mexican-American lower-class drug mule, was caught with 2000 pounds of marijuana and sentenced to 5 years in prison. Then, during Guerra’s sophomore year in college, his neighbor, a white middle-class male, was caught with almost 500 pounds of marijuana in his dorm room.

Under just circumstances, the college student drug-dealer should have been subjected to full legal prosecution, as was Guerra’s cousin. However, the entire college community suddenly jumped to his defense and raised money and support for him. The student ended up getting off with the bare minimum punishment.

Guerra clarified that he does not wish that his neighbor had been put away for five years or something similar, like his cousin. Instead, he’d rather neither serve so much jail time. However, the point is that the difference in the two criminals’ race and class made up the difference in their sentencing.

One question we discussed during the presentation was the amount of marijuana in the U.S. that is domestically produced versus the amount imported from Mexico, and often from South America, that has travelled north through Mexico to reach the U.S. Guerra explained that marijuana is difficult to track since, of course, it is not a controlled substance. However, based on his research, he guessed that, “at least 60 -70 percent of marijuana is transitive to the U.S. from Mexico.”

When legalization came up, Guerra said that it would’ve worked best if the idea had been presented and campaigned for during the ’60s and ’70s, when drugs were especially popular and socially acceptable. What’s more, “white marijuana users in the U.S. are less affected…than users of colors,” said Guerra about why legalization is a difficult process. Unless white users and minority users are punished with equal severity, whether marijuana is legal or not does not matter all that much comparatively for white users.

Guerra said there seemed to be an idea in America that legalizing marijuana, and thus, cutting off the demand for drug smugglers, would solve all the problems. Guerra disagreed with this assertion, saying, “We’ve completely altered life in a lot of places because of this war on drugs. For those communities, there’s no going back.”

Guerra explained that we, the U.S., have caused all these problems by buying the illegally imported drugs. Now, if we legalized it, then the U.S. “would be all good and dandy, but we can’t turn a blind eye to what we’ve done to Mexico. We have to think of new ways to create a legal, stabilized situation in that country.”

The main problem is that American marijuana users don’t seem to think about all the circumstances that they avoid. “We’ve exported the drug war,” Guerra said. “We’ve been able to export what we don’t want to see to our backyard.” Guerra pointed out, “It’s okay for 40,000 people to die in Mexico, but if that happened here, it would be a humanitarian crisis.”

Another problem is that when the United States outlawed many drugs, it influenced many other countries to outlaw the same drugs. Now, if we changed our policies, it would amount to the U.S. announcing that we made the wrong decision, something the country is not generally prone to do.

Guerra also noted the common idea that drug traffickers are “bad” or “evil”. Many are young men who feel they have no other choices. Being a 14-to-40-year-old male on the Mexican border is extremely dangerous in these times, because everyone assumes you’re on someone’s side, either the police’s or one drug cartel’s or another’s, even if you have nothing to do with them.

Guerra emphasized that these men are putting themselves in extreme danger often only because they don’t see any other road to take. Growing up desperately poor in a town with nothing but drug runners makes people think, “It’s the only thing to do in these border communities now.” Guerra additionally counted off six cousins, who he grew up with and loved, saying that, “four are imprisoned, one was kidnapped, and one disappeared.”

Guerra ended with some words of caution: “You can be an apathetic drug user if you want, but know that other things are taking place while you enjoy this privilege.”