MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

AMLO eyes referendum to legalise drugs in Mexico for medical purposes

AMLO plans to hold the referendum once his administration makes further progress in strengthening social security.

Mexico's leftwing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) took a challenging stance towards traditional medicine and admitted a referendum about legalising some drugs for treatment purposes was likely.

 “I am not ruling out the possibility of calling a referendum or a collective reflection about legalising certain drugs, especially those used for medical purposes,” Lopez Obrador said Friday in  Merida, the capital of the state of Yucatan.

“I have also been considering how this is part of the chain for ensuring peace and tranquility,” AMLO added in reference to violence surrounding illegal drug trafficking.

“There are some people who do not want to legalise the use of drugs, not even for medicinal purposes, and there are people who support it,” he went on.

The president said the consultation on this issue will be held once his administration makes further progress in strengthening social security.

Last month, the United States issued a presidential memorandum in which Mexico was identified as one of the 22 major drug transit and producing countries in the world.

AMLO also announced during the weekend that the federal government received a supply of methotrexate, a drug used in cancer treatment. It “has already been bought in France [and it] has arrived so those medicines are not lacking,” he explained.

He also said that the three main distributors of medicines in the country wanted to cause a boycott, by not delivering the medicines needed for children with cancer, but the government is not going to be blackmailed by anyone.

“They wanted to boycott [us by] not delivering, not selling the medicine that is needed to cure the children of cancer and weighed that they were going to bend us,“ the president insisted.

”What did we do? The medicine was bought in France, so it is lacking,” he said.

López Obrador pointed out that the companies causing the shortage of medicines “did not even produce [them], they were not even laboratories... Distributors yes, with influences, with handles, closely linked to the powerful...” But he underlined that “all that is over.”