By Beckett Mufson, Columnist
Dozens of medical organizations, from the American Nurses Association to the New England Journal of Medicine, have endorsed the use of marijuana for medical purposes and decriminalization of the drug for personal use. Drug cartels make over 2 billion dollars a year from growing and smuggling marijuana for U.S. markets. There are multiple organizations devoted to the purpose of affecting changes in marijuana laws all over the world.
This is an international movement, and marijuana represents only about 20 percent of the profits drug cartels make from U.S. markets. Heroin, cocaine, and other hard drugs sold to an utterly addicted American market provide the other 80 percent of the profits that cartels use to wage their drug wars in Latin America. Murder rates in Central America and the Caribbean are the highest in the world due to the prevalence of drug production and smuggling in the area. President Otto Perez Molina came into office in Guatemala at the height of its “dirty war” against the drug cartels. He campaigned promising a zero tolerance policy toward delinquency and the drug trade, about as conservative a drug policy as one could hope for. Since his election in December of 2011, he has radically reversed his opinion, calling the war on drugs a failure and advocating limited legalization of the production and consumption of drugs. The President of Colombia also called on the U.S. to “take away the violent profit that comes with drug