A Narco History. Carmen Boullosa

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      Not all drugs crossed the border. Some were destined for local consumption. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, psychoactive agents were commonly used in Mexico, for medical and recreational reasons. Opium smoking was chiefly a pastime of the Chinese minority; morphine, heroin, and cocaine appealed to bourgeois artists and intellectuals; and marijuana was primarily the province of the poor. But drug use was not a mass phenomenon. Ingestion levels were nowhere near those attained in Gringolandia.

      In part this was because Mexico, unlike the U.S., had a long tradition, inherited from the Spanish, of keeping a regulatory eye on drug use. Constraints of varying degrees had long been imposed on the consumption of alcohol, of peyote and other psychoactive substances used in rituals (which were seen by the Inquisition as theologically suspect), and of herbs, notably potentially dangerous ones like belladonna, henbane, hemlock, digitalis, and jimsonweed.

      Surprisingly—from a contemporary perspective—one of the drugs most frowned upon by officialdom was marijuana. Not an indigenous plant, the weed had been introduced by Spanish imperial authorities in the sixteenth century because hemp was highly prized as a nautical fiber, used for making ropes and sails. Gradually it became available from herboleros—indigenous pharmacists—and by Porfirian times (dictator Porfirio Díaz reigned from 1876 to 1911) it had become the drug of choice for the lower classes, particularly soldiers and prisoners. Marijuana had also gained the reputation of being able to trigger temporary insanity and murderous violence. There were indeed hundreds of well-documented cases, especially in jails and army barracks, of sky-high machos running amok, even when vastly outnumbered. But as Isaac Campos argues persuasively, this is better chalked up to context than to cannabis. The effect of marijuana, as with most psychoactive chemicals, depends on the setting in which it is consumed, which includes prevailing mindsets. It should not be surprising that its use in highly stressful situations, where defending one’s honor (and person) often demands an aggressive response to a perceived slight, could engender paranoia rather than mellowness, and promote a lashing out.

      A patchwork of state, local, and federal laws grew up during the Porfiriato. In 1883, marijuana and opium were among the two dozen drugs that could be sold only by prescription, and only through pharmacies, not herbolarias. The regulation was not aimed primarily at recreational users, but was intended to diminish the number of accidental (or purposeful) poisonings. The edict was reaffirmed in the first Federal Sanitary Code (1891). And in 1896, even Culiacán, capital of drug-friendly Sinaloa, banned the sale or use of marijuana without a prescription. So did Mexico City, a decision that municipal authorities reaffirmed in 1908, though they outlawed only cultivation and commerce, not possession of pot, nor giving it as a gift. By the 1910s there was substantial but not overwhelming support in Mexico for restrictionist policies, though most drugs, if prescribed by doctors, remained available in pharmacies.

      The Revolution strengthened prohibitionist forces. In 1917, the country was still reeling from a dizzying succession of events—the electoral defeat of the long ensconced Porfirio Díaz by Francisco Madero in 1911; Madero’s overthrow and murder by Victoriano Huerta in 1913; the outbreak of war against Huerta by the combined forces of Venustiano Carranza, Álvaro Obregón, Emiliano Zapata, and Francisco “Pancho” Villa, their anti-Huerta campaign aided and abetted by the United States, which briefly occupied Veracruz; Huerta’s overthrow in 1914; the seizure of power by liberal reformer Carranza in 1914, the recognition of his government by the United States in 1915, and his election as President in 1917. It was in the subsequent window of (very relative) tranquility and stability that Carranza and his immediate successors set in motion a change in Mexico’s approach to the business of narcotics, one that dovetailed with simultaneous developments transpiring north of the Río Bravo.

      In 1912, Francisco Madero’s government had signed the Hague Convention (though Mexico would not ratify the treaty until 1925). In part this was done because the still-shaky regime felt the need to align itself with the international movement being promoted principally by the United States. But in truth Mexico had preceded the U.S. on the road to regulatory regimes and was way ahead of it in its opposition to marijuana.

      The issue was put aside in the ensuing whirlwind of revolutionary combat, but once Carranza came to power, restrictionists took a further step. Determined to restore political order, Carranza convoked a Constitutional Convention, which opened in the city of Querétaro in December 1916. Battles between relatively moderate Carranza forces, and radical younger turks seeking social and economic as well as political change, were for the most part won by the radicals, with key provisions drastically curtailing the power of the Catholic Church, laying the basis for major land reform, establishing national rights to subsoil minerals, expanding lay education, and creating a powerful executive branch.

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