TM

ISSN 0186 • 9418

Voices of Mexico is published by the
Centro de Investigaciones sobre América del Norte, cisan (Center for Research on North America) of the
Coordinación de Humanidades (Office of the Coordinator of Human­ities), Uni­versidad Nacional Autónoma de México,
unam (National Autonomous University of Mexico).

Director
Graciela Martínez-Zalce

Coordinator of Publications
Astrid Velasco Montante

Editor-in-Chief Art Director Translator

Teresa Jiménez Andreu Patricia Pérez Ramírez Heather Dashner Monk

Editor Editor Translator for Art & Culture

Diego Bugeda Bernal María Cristina Hernández Escobar María Cristina Fernández Hall

Layout Assistant to the Coordinator of Publications Circulation and Sales

María Elena Álvarez Sotelo Minerva Cruz Salas Sury Sadahí Allende Flores

Rector, unam
Enrique Graue Wiechers

Coordinator of Humanities
Guadalupe Valencia García

Director of the Center

for Research on North America (cisan)
Graciela Martínez-Zalce

EDITORIAL BOARD
Sergio Aguayo, Carlos Alba Vega, Norma Blázquez, Fernando Rafael Castañeda Sabido, Roberto Castañón Romo
María Leoba Castañeda, Lourdes N. Chehaibar Náder, Gua­dalupe González, Roberto Gutiérrez López,
Elizabeth Gutiérrez Romero, Carlos Heredia, Julio La­bastida, Miguel León-Portilla (V), David Maciel, Paz Consuelo Márquez-Padilla,
Alicia Mayer, Humberto Muñoz García, Silvia Núñez, Olga Pellicer, Elena Poniatowska, Vicente Quirarte, Federico Re­yes Heroles,
Andrés Rozental, José Sarukhán, Mari Carmen Serra Puche, Alina María Signoret, María Teresa Uriarte,
Diego Valadés, José Luis Valdés-Ugalde, Mónica Ve­rea, Verónica Villarespe Reyes.

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 TM

4 Our Voice

Cannabis Speaks Out

Issue 120 Summer 2023 7 The Situation of Cannabis in Mexico

Midalia Denisse Arias Vergara

12 Cannabis Sativa L. Misunderstood

Noel Nefi Arias Reyes

15 Interview with Bruce Linton

Aaraón Díaz Mendiburo

19 The Queen of the Flowers

A Story of Love and Self-Discovery
Alitzel Moreno Aguilar

23 Prejudices in Society and

Academia against Cannabis
Moisés Zurita Zafra

Cover Art: Xanic Galván

27 A Long and Winding Road
@XanicGe
Cannabis Regulation in Mexico
Imer B. Flores

31 From Vulnerability to
Defending Cannabis Rights
Victoria Xochipilli Maciel Villaverde

34 The Geopolitics of Illicit Crops

South-South Cooperation for
Sustainable Biocultural Development
Carlos Emiliano Derbez de la Cruz

38 Cannabis as Political Subject in

Mexico: From the Countryside
To the City and Back
Fernando A. Gracián de Alba
42 The Consequences of Marihuana
Legalization in the United States for
Mexico’s Illegal Drug Economic System
Christian Herrera Medina
45 Holy Mary (poem)
Aura Pérez
46 Cannabis Workers’ Counterstories
And Stigma Reduction in Colorado
Marty Otañez
50 The British Columbia
First Nations’ Struggle around
The Cannabis Act
Liliana Cordero Marines
54 One Hundred Years of
Clandestine Medicine in Mexico
Édgar Ramssés Pahua Quezada
57 Tzö dapö: Using “Saint Rose”
In the Otomí Tepehua Mountains
María Guadalupe Ramírez Ramos
Illustration by Fernando Ibarra
Art and Culture
61 From Cancer to Cannabis
An Interview on the Nature of Pain
With Jimena Ortega
Luis Rubén Ramírez-Montes de Oca
Illustrations by Calavera (Paulina Vega)
66 Ten Photographs
Cannabis Culture in Victoria, and
Cannabis Counter-Culture in Mexico City
Víctor López García
72 The Devil’s Rock
Raúl Motta
Illustrated by Juan Palomino
80 Cannabis in Mexican Culture and
Art as Recreated by Artificial Intelligence
Francisco Servín R.
84 The unam Holds Its Fifth International
University Book Fair (Filuni)
86 From the Exemplary North
to the Violent South:
North American Representations
Of Marihuana in Documentaries
Óscar Badillo Pérez
90 Yet Another Celebration of
The Cannabis Film Festival
Tania Magdaleno Herrera
Reviews
92 Romper estigmas: arte y cannabis en Norteamérica
(Breaking Stigmas: Art and Cannabis in North
America) Volume 1, Activisms
Aaraón Díaz Mendiburo and Marty Otañez, editors
 Our Voice

I
s it appropriate to make comparisons between today and a time so long past as the Middle Ages?
Today, people are no longer burned at the stake for heresy, but, they are vilified, among other
things, to satisfy political, economic, security, and ideological interests that promote banning
some psychoactive substances, among them, cannabis. Today’s doctors and scientists, who bring to
light this plant’s benefits for medicinal as well as —and why not?— recreational use, could be the
equivalents of the witches of old. In the first decades of this century, we are living between prohibi-
tionism and freedom, as one of the authors in this issue writes.
A principle we hold very dear at this magazine has been to make space for the plurality of voices
that make up North American society in general, and Mexico’s in particular. Showing what is done,
thought, and said in Mexico from different perspectives contributes to breaking down the stereo-
types that sometimes exist in our culture using informed knowledge. With the desire to deconstruct
stigmatization, we conceived the idea of dedicating our magazine’s issue 120 to presenting different
versions, visions, and arguments about the cultivation, use, and consumption of this plant. An entire
culture has been created around it for decades, and in the 1970s, Bob Marley led the way in Rasta-
farianism, calling it the “wisdom weed.” From the standpoint of anthropology, botany, science, law,
politics, companies, human rights, activism, and art, the articles in this issue converge in a single
space: a place of respect and freedom.

Graciela Martínez-Zalce
Director of the Center for Research on North America

T
he years keep going by —a little over a hundred— and those in power continue imposing
stigmatizing narratives about marijuana and other psychoactive substances. In different
ways, these stigmas have stealthily sought to eat away at the lives of people who have histori-
cally been vulnerable simply because they consume these substances. This has often deadlocked
their bodies, since the stigma has been so voracious and the safety nets so weak that the battle has
seemed lost before it started. These insatiable narratives are constructed and reproduced through
the media, legislation, inside families, in educational institutions themselves, and, of course, in gov-
ernments and international bodies worldwide.
In North America, the stigmas, accompanied by disqualification, human rights violations, and
criminalization, have impacted above all those identified with diverse groups such as Afro-descen-
dants, Latin Americans, Asians, indigenous people, those of mixed race, or marginalized groups that
live in our cities’ peripheries.
Fortunately, however, these stigmas are also faced, dealt with, and confronted from different
spaces and using different resources. Cannabis resistance has been supported with solidarity and sis-
terhood, self-organization, the generation of information from the source, and in popular and artistic
expressions in order to be inclusive, approach the peripheries, the dissidences, in the very spaces
where they resonate the most.
Voices of Mexico, then, is dedicating a space to the intentionally silenced voices, but voices em-
braced by experience, by wisdom. These voices, the incarnation of cannabis diversities, invite us to

4
 Mike Von/Unsplash.com
journey through the articles in this issue: a mosaic of colors, textures, and dimensions that inject an
antidote to the stigmatization, information created based on their own experiences and reflections
from different spaces. Women, men, artists, students, activists, researchers, and people involved in
the different branches of human knowledge offer us in their stories the chance to familiarize our-
selves with different perspectives that enrich us as part of humanity. This allows us to rip away from
our eyes the veil that the dominant discourses have interposed between us and cannabis.
In this issue, “Cannabis Speaks Out,” we find approaches that range from the international drug
control regime’s analysis of the manipulation of psycho-tropical substances for their commercial-
ization, prioritizing U.S. pharmaceutical industry interests to the detriment of non-hegemonic cul-
tures that have been using psychoactive plants for thousands of years, to the promotion of private
at-home cultivation as a form of resistance to the voracious corporate market. Other outstanding
articles show through their authors’ experiences how important cannabis is in the lives of thou-
sands of people: “The Queen of the Flowers. A Story of Love and Self-Discovery,” “From Vulnerability
to Defending Cannabis Rights,” and “One Hundred Years of Clandestine Medicine in Mexico,” just to
name a few. But we also find articles that take us to the problems and ways of dealing with them in
places like British Columbia, Colorado, and others in Canada, the United States and Mexico. Finally,
we cannot leave out the scientific and spiritual perspectives: the first, in the article “Cannabis Sativa
L. Misunderstood,” and the second, documented in the experience in the use of “Saint Rose” among
the Otomís of the Tepehua Otomí Mountains.
I’m sure that after undertaking this journey through the passionate words the authors use to
write these articles, our vision of cannabis and everything involving it will be much stronger in the
process of deconstructing stigmas.

Aaraón Díaz Mendiburo

Researcher of the Center for Research on North America

5

Midalia Denisse Arias Vergara*
The Situation
Of Cannabis in Mexico
C
annabis originated in Asia and has been cultivat­
ed for 8,000 years for different uses. Scientific study
of it began in the late twentieth century after Is-
raeli Raphael Mechoulam discovered the endocannabi-
noid system at the University of Tel Aviv.
This complex plant has 483 chemical components, in-
cluding more than 130 cannabinoids, terpenes, terpenoids,
and waxes, some with mutually opposing psychoac-
tive and psychotropic effects. Historically, it has appeared
in the accounts of different cultures, such as the Sume-
rians, and in Biblical passages describing “King Solomon’s
weed.” Today, cannabis has political, economic, scientific,
cultural, and social implications.
* Midalia teaches at the Cannabis Medical Academy (Amedcann)
and is a clinical chemist at the Mexican Social Security Institute
(imss) National Twenty-first-Century Medical Center; you can
contact her at midaliadenissearias@gmail.com.
Photos courtesy of the author.
Image 1. The author’s legal plants, license number Cofepris-cas-derepsq-1242-2022, issued January
28, 2022. Seed: Santa Rosa Green Seeds.
Cannabis Speaks Out
Taking this into account, it is interesting to imagine
what is implied in clarifying everything about this plant’s
responsible, balanced use. Many countries have done re-
search about its application in the field of human health,
in the cosmetics and food industries, and in the fabrica-
tion of textiles, fuels, and polymer derivatives, all of which
makes it possible to define cannabis as a totipotent plant.
For decades in our country, the stigma associated with
cannabis or marihuana has limited scientific and bio-me­
dical research, as well as its use in industry, including in
the development of health supplements, biofuels, and
in general its use in biotechnology.
However, in Mexico, institutions such as the non-prof-
it Mexican Association for Cannabis Studies (ameca), whose
aim is to gather scientific, fact-based information with-
out promoting its consumption, have cooperated with
Mexican civic bodies, cannabis activists, and legislators.
These institutions have provided the latter with solid
7
Voices of Mexico 120
arguments to demand a comparable, equitable legisla-
tion that would allow for the free development of indi-
viduals’ personalities, as well as the using the plant for
different ends, in health, food, and various aspects of in-
dustry. They also take into account that the general public
requires more information and dissemination of the na-
ture and uses of cannabis.
The debate about its legalization is fraught with dif-
ferent kinds of reactions, ranging from moral prejudices
to legal barriers and the state’s obsession with punish-
ment. Mexican society has been ambivalent about the
plant: on the one hand it praises its benefits for science,
above all its medicinal use, and at the same time it rejects
its use due to the propaganda that generation after genera-
tion has been subjected to, linking cannabis to criminal-
ity and addictions.
Legal Issues
In Mexico, the General Law on Health allows an individ-
ual to carry up to five grams of marihuana, and the Fed-
eral Commission for the Protection against Health Risks
(Cofepris) has the faculty of issuing permits for private
cultivation and activities involving scientific research, in-
cluding biomedical research. I took on the task of finding
out what the procedure was for obtaining a license, and my
lawyer explained that I needed to request it in writing from
the commission. However, I was refused. Since there was
Image 2. The author’s legal plants, license number Cofepris-cas-derepsq-1242-2022,
issued January 28, 2022. Seed: Santa Rosa Green Seeds.
8
Mexican society has been ambivalent
about the plant: on the one hand it praises
its benefits for science, above all its medicinal
use, and at the same time it rejects its use
due to the propaganda that generation after
generation has been subjected to, linking
cannabis to criminality and addictions.
no reason to refuse my request to be allowed to privately
cultivate cannabis, I appealed to the Supreme Court, which
handles permits for cultivation, production, harvesting,
transformation of different cannabis derivatives, car-
rying, transporting, and acquiring the seed legally.1
Links to Crime
The recreational use of cannabis has taken on a connota-
tion of being criminal due to the decades-long prohibition-
ism, which stigmatizes the recreational user, who runs
the risk of being investigated as a small-time drug dealer.
That censure has not only failed to regulate and con-
tain cannabis use, but it has also unleashed other conse­
quences, including the fact that the stay granted by
Cofepris to users is not respected.
In addition, everyone knows that prohibition has cre-
ated small- and large-scale economic drug trafficking sub-
systems with the resulting social and ecological damage
to communities that have been penetrat-
ed and acted upon by organized crime and
by government security forces. The plant’s
illegality affects the poorest people, who
tend to be criminalized, processed, and jailed
for simple possession and use of cannabis,
and who are the most vulnerable to the vi-
olence around them. Among consumers,
the most vulnerable are those exposed to the
unhealthy conditions associated with its
being clandestine.
All these circumstances and, above all,
the controversies regarding the issue have
made the regulation of cannabis difficult.
Although the Supreme Court decision man-
dates that it should be regulated, what is
missing is the political will to develop clear,
 Cannabis Speaks Out

Figure 1
Municipalities (66) that Represent 87 percent of the Marihuana Fields Erradicated (January to October 2010).

Source: Miguel Molina, “Cuatro temas sobre el mercado de marihuana en México y en el mundo,” March 2016, p. 5,
https://www.gob.mx/cms/uploads/attachment/file/85735/MIGUEL_MOLINA_M3.pdf.

functional laws in this matter. On the other hand, some
politicians have taken the position that cannabis should
be regulated because that would be the panacea for erad-
icating the violence associated with drug trafficking.
Health Benefits
The General Health Law’s Regulation Regarding Control
for the Production, Research, and Medicinal Use of Can-
nabis and Its Pharmacological Derivatives was published
on January 12, 2021, in Mexico’s Official Gazette.2 This was
a historic step forward regarding Mexican legislation and,
based on it, it would be possible to start different research
projects and develop what would generate specific infor-
mation about cannabis and its metabolic characteristics.
However, the road forward toward developing and evalu-
ating medicinal studies about the phytocannabinoids (the
active principles) and the terpenes (the molecules that
give cannabis its smell and taste) is still littered with obsta­
cles. It will also be necessary to define the large repertory
of activities that this regulation will make possible, as well
as to visualize new perspectives regarding innovation and
development and determine the appropriate quality con-
trols by evaluating the regulatory criteria to estimate trace-
ability and validation of everything from raw materials
to the standardization of cannabis derivatives that can
be developed through Mexican research, and those that
can be brought into the country. That is, different dimen-
sions, such as research, education, health, food, the state
of business, and agriculture must be considered. This will
be fundamental not only for cultivating cannabis in the
Mexican countryside, but also for using technology in such
a way that the crops can be used for producing cellulose,
paper, fibers, textiles, bioplastics, food supplements, and
medications, just to name a few of its applications.
The plant’s illegality affects the poorest
people, who tend to be criminalized,
processed, and jailed for simple
possession and use of cannabis, and
who are the most vulnerable to the
violence around them.

9
Voices of Mexico 120

Table 1
Black Market Prices of Different Qualities of Marihuana, Mexico City

Pesos
Quality/ Price (pesos) per gram
Point of Sale Type Strength Presentation* Grams Min Max Min Max Observations Source
Hidalgo Neigh- Ask for a
borhood in a Normal special lime Young person
Low ½ kilo 500 400 400 0.8 0.8
Michoacana marihuana ice to get an
ice-cream parlor ounce
Condesa Average
Low ¼ kilo 250 800 1,800 3.2 7.2 Expert
Neighborhood plant
Commercial
Mexicana
Red-Headed
Mega-Store on Low One ounce 25 120 120 4.8 4.8 Young person
Stranger
Miguel Angel de
Quevedo Avenue
Red-Headed
Brujas Acoxpa Low One ounce 25 150 150 6.0 6.0 Young person
Stranger
Brujas Acoxpa Normal Low One ounce 25 150 150 6.0 6.0 Young person
Chafa
Downtown (Shoddy) 30 to 40%
Low 7.5 grams 8 50 100 6.7 13.3 Adult
Mexico City (the most waste
common)
University City Red-Headed
Low One ounce 25 180 180 7.2 7.2 Young person
Sculpture Garden Stranger
Perisur Shopping One joint (2
Normal Low 2 15 15 7.5 7.5 Young person
Mall cinema grams)
The dealers
Vaqueritos Traffic They say it’s
Medium One ounce 25 200 200 8.0 8.0 say it comes Young person
Circle Skunk
from Oaxaca
Acapulco
30 to 40%
Acapulco Princess Gold Medium One ounce 25 250 500 10.0 20.0 Adult
waste
(Golden)
Condesa
Hydroponic High One ounce 25 1,500 2,000 60.0 80.0 Expert
Neighborhood
Southern Mexico Indica Skunk
High 14 grams 14 1,000 1,000 71.4 71.4 20% waste Adult
City (Hydroponic)
Sunken Park Hydroponic High Grams 1 80 80 80.0 80.0 Less strong Young person
Probably
Tlalpan** High One ounce 25 2,340 93.6 **
Hydroponic
Probably
Federal District** High One ounce 25 1,820 72.8 **
Hydroponic
Average quality/low strength 5.3 6.6
Average quality/ medium strength 9.0 14.0
Average quality/high strength 70.5 79.6
Vaqueritos
Hashish High Grams 1 50 50 50.0 50.0
Traffic Circle
*According to experts interviewed. In Mexico, by convention, an ounce is equal to 25 grams.
** Source thepriceofweed.com, November 2012.
***Source: CFI, based on interviews, May 2010.

Source: Miguel Molina, “Cuatro temas sobre el mercado de marihuana en México y en el mundo,” March 2016, p. 12,
https://www.gob.mx/cms/uploads/attachment/file/85735/MIGUEL_MOLINA_M3.pdf.

10

Where Does Cannabis Grow?
Historically, the states that produce the most marihuana
are Chihuahua, Durango, Guerrero, Jalisco, Michoacán,
Nayarit, Oaxaca, Sonora, and Sinaloa.
However, in July 2011, the largest extension of land
ever planted with marihuana was found in Baja Califor-
nia (120 hectares), but the characteristics of the plants
were not made public. Estimates state that 17,200 per-
sons (heads of family) are employed directly in growing
and drying marihuana, meaning that 75,000 people de-
pend on the crop.3
Regarding prices, for example, in Mexico City, medi-
um-to-low-strength marihuana costs Mex$9 to Mex$14
(US$0.50 to US$0.75) per gram, or one-tenth of what it costs
in the United States.
Conclusions
The black market in cannabis implies a constant risk for
regular consumers; this means that regulations are need-
ed to develop and stabilize a resource with such diversi-
fied applications. While it is true that stigma still applies
to its production and consumption, it is important to
Cannabis Speaks Out
be critical and forge documented criteria in this regard,
remembering the wide variety of applications the plant
offers. This means it is necessary to promote a new view
of it, given its enormous potential for developing science
and, of course, our economy.

Notes
1 Nevertheless, in 2017, under the presidency of Institutional-Rev-
olutionary-Party-(pri)-member Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018), the
Cofepris had already issued licenses for commercially exploiting can-
nabis. However, it later restricted their scope, which its licensees
denounced.
2 Diario Oficial de la Federación, Segob, January 12, 2021, https://www.
dof.gob.mx/nota_detalle.php?codigo=5609709&fecha=12/01/2021#
gsc.tab=0.
3 To have an idea of the volume and coverage of cannabis production,
the U.S. government and the United Nations stated in 2010 that mari­
huana production in Mexico might have reached from 15,000 to
27,000 tons a year. If we take the low estimate, 15,000 tons, it would
represent double Mexico’s annual domestic consumption; whereas,
if we take the high estimate, 27,000, it would represent 50 percent of
consumption worldwide. U. S. Department of State, “The 2010 Inter-
national Narcotics Control Strategy Report,” https://2009-2017.state.
gov/j/inl/rls/nrcrpt/2010/index.htm; unodc, “Examen de la situación
mundial del cannabis,” Boletín de Estupefacientes, vol. lviii, nos. 1 and
2, 2006, https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/bul
letin/2006/Bulletin_on_Narcotics_2006_S.pdf; and unodc, “Informe
mundial sobre drogas 2009,” https://www.unodc.org/documents/
wdr/WDR_2009/World_Drug_Report_2009_spanish.pdf.
11
Voices of Mexico 120
Noel Nefi Arias Reyes*
Cannabis Sativa L.
Misunderstood
A
ccording to Mexico’s Ministry of the Environment
and Natural Resources (Semarnat), the country has
122 forest areas in crisis due to different causes
such as clandestine logging and a clear worldwide prob-
lem of contamination from non-biodegradable plastics.
In this complex context, cannabis is a quick source of
important raw materials, since it can be harvested more
than once a year, using less water and yielding more than
conventional crops.
A Brief Overview
Human beings’ relationship with this plant has been ac-
tive and diverse. Its use for different purposes in different
cultures, like China’s, has been well documented. In the
* Noel is a pharmaceutical and biological chemist, a self-taught
autonomous entrepreneur, and a student of cannabis and other
plants; you can contact him at noel.nefi@gmail.com.
12
Richard T./Unsplash.com
past, one everyday medical application was as an ingre-
dient for anesthesia, but it was also used for rituals and
in textiles. It has been utilized as a raw material in navies
during colonization, since it was said that an empire was a
power in this area due to its ability to develop materials
that allowed it to sail the seas, and hemp ropes were more
resistant than those made of other materials in that era.
Although one piece of research mentions that hemp
may date back as much as twenty-eight million years,1 hu-
man beings have been in contact with it for at least 8,000
years. About 1,800 years ago, the Chinese surgeon Hua To,
who seems to have been the first practitioner to use an-
esthetic, had a formula that included cannabis among its
ingredients, and the ancient Greeks prescribed it for back
pain. Pedanius Dioscorides, a Greek first century a.d. phy-
sician, mentions it in his medical treatise.2 In India, it was
used for ritual and medicinal purposes.
In the Americas, after it was introduced in Chile by
sixteenth-century European explorers, cannabis was used

mainly as a raw material for naval uses since it was high-
ly valued due to its resistance to tension, the climate, and
salt water.
It arrived in Mexico during the “Conquest” and began
to be grown by Pánfilo de Narváez, but Hernán Cortés also
promoted its cultivation, documented in certain areas
during the colonial period. Although its use was mainly
industrial, the first peoples included it in their ritual cus-
toms together with other plants known as pipilzinzintles,
due to its psychoactive properties.
The Inquisition condemned any uses other than indus­
trial. However, the ban became stricter in the United States
in 1920 mainly for racial reasons, and then extend­ed
to Mexico. A campaign to grow it in the U.S. for industrial
purposes was waged during World War II, while in Mexico,
during the Revolution, marihuana was part of daily life.
The 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs differ-
entiated between the psychoactive varieties of cannabis
(with a high thc content) and the varieties that were not
psychoactive (hemp), with low or non-existent thc content,
considering the former to have no medical properties and
to be potentially addictive. China has never banned hemp
cultivation and is the world’s largest producer. In early
2019, the World Health Organization issued a series of
recommendations about marihuana and its derivatives.
Shortly thereafter, the UN International Narcotics Control
Board took cannabis off its List IV, the list of psychotropic
drugs. Mexico has decriminalized its use for medicinal
and scientific research purposes and the Supreme Court
recognizes the individual’s right to personal use for the
free development of his/her personality.
The Nature of Cannabis and
Its Effect in Human Beings
Human beings have a series of receptors throughout our
bodies called the endocannabinoid system, which has ho-
meostatic functions for intercellular communication and
responds to molecules produced by cannabis. This system
was discovered in the 1980s when the cb1 and cb2 receptors
were discovered in 1988 and 1993, respectively, although
there are more. We should underline that our bodies
produce their own endocannabinoids: anandamide (dis-
covered in 1992) and 2-araquinodilglicerol, or 2-ag
(discovered in 1995).
Cannabis Speaks Out
The rediscovery of the plant
seems to be in fashion; its cultivation
is part of the transitional process our
country and the world are undergoing.
Cannabis is a gift, a tool for humanity
that everyone should have access to.
The phytocannabinoids, so-called because of their plant
origins, most studied until now are thc and cbd, the for-
mer discovered by Raphael Mechoulam and his collabo-
rators in 1964, and the latter by Lumir Hanus and his team
in 1992. There are, however, others of interest, although
they appear in smaller quantities, such as cannabigerol
(cbg), cannabichomene (cbc), and cannabinol (cbn), among
others. More than one hundred of these have been iden-
tified up until now.
Before the botanist Carl Linnaeus began using the
term “cannabis,” the word “hemp” was generally used to
describe the plant.
This is a dioic species —that is, it can either be male
or female— that grows annually and can grow to be more
than five meters high. Detecting which sex it is before it
is visible is fundamental for cultivation in order to obtain
flowers as raw materials; the feminized seeds, micro-
propagation, or cuttings or slips can be used to determine
this. The female cannabis produces the flowers and the
resin, which contain the most interesting compounds.
The most common and easiest way of determining the
plant’s sex is to observe the spaces between nodes:
the presence of small, delicate pistils and the formation
of calyces with commonly two pistils each serve to trap
pollen from the environment indicates that it is a female
plant (the calyx is where the seeds grow). But if little balls
or clusters of balls take on the form of small bunches of
bananas, commonly yellow, and end by opening to dis­
pen­se pollen, we are looking at a male plant. A plant can
also have both sexual characteristics, due to factors such
as gene expression or conditions of environmental or
nutritional stress. Depending on what the plant is being
cultivated for, whether seeds are required or not, when a
plant is not pollenated, it directs its energy to creating
inflorescences and more resin. However, when it is pol-
linated, it concentrates on producing seeds, thus lower-
ing the number of flowers and resin production.
13
Voices of Mexico 120
What Does Cannabis Give Us?
The female cannabis plant’s inflorescences contain aromat­
ic molecules of interest in pharmacology, such as terpenes
and phytocannabinoids and especially its resin. The can-
nabis root has also been used in compresses, decoctions, or
medicinal teas. However, this part of the plant produces
almost no, or only insignificant, amounts of cannabinoids
compared to the concentration found in the resin, but it con-
tains other molecules that could be of pharmacological use.
Cannabis seeds are a super-food with interesting prop-
erties because they contain omega fatty acids and can be
used to obtain sub-products such as highly nutritional oil.
The leaves and flowers contain vitamins and minerals
that can be used in the daily diet and eaten raw without
causing any psychoactive effects.
After harvest, the stalks can be used in different ways,
among them, to obtain cellulose and fibers, with some va-
rieties providing a greater abundance of them than others.
Several companies worldwide use cannabis and/or its de-
rivatives in some of their products, from the auto and
military industries to food and pharmaceuticals.
The ligneous or woody part of the plant can be used to
obtain products that we currently get from other sources
of cellulose and can be used in activities such as construc-
tion. A mixture of the bagasse (the pulp of the plant), lime,
and water is the basic ingredient for making hempcrete
or cannacrete, materials with interesting mechanical and
thermal characteristics that give constructions energy-
saving and carbon-sequestering properties and making
them lighter and more resistant.
Human-caused environmental contamination can cause
toxic substances to penetrate groundwater and commu-
nities’ potable water supply. This is why materials derived
from cannabis have been studied as filtration agents; that
is, they can be used for phyto-repair in polluted soil, even
those contaminated with radioactive agents.
The plant’s cellulose can be used to obtain other prod-
ucts, such as the raw material for making paper: cellulose
pulp. The first step is to eliminate the greatest amount of
ligneous material possible; this is done by making a decoc-
tion using an agent to alkalinize the water, for example
sodium hydroxide (caustic soda), which we can replaced
with plant ash, preferable made from hardwoods.
After boiling, the cellulose is rinsed until its pH is neu-
tral, and we then can obtain the pulp using a tool to sepa-
14
rate the fibers in the stalks. During this process or afterward,
the pulp can be whitened.
This can be used immediately or can be stored to make
other products. It can be molded by hand and, depending
on the size of the particles, different textures and quali-
ties can be obtained. Artistic expression is among the va-
riety of uses humans have found for cannabis, a source
of inspiration that connects us to other sensations and
makes it possible to produce works that perdure in human
collective memory.
In short, the entire cannabis plant is useful, and its
cultivation can have multiple purposes.
A Resilient Crop
When I did research in my hometown, Grajales, Puebla,
I did not find any record of cannabis cultivation in the past.
However, people have carried out activism in the area in
favor of universal access to the plant. Because the local
climate is temperate, harvests are mainly seasonal, and
cannabis grows easily in that environment, although it can
fall prey to common pests like white flies; aphids; white
mealybugs; green worms; certain fungi like powdery mil-
dew, botrytis, or sooty mold; and winter frosts.
Nevertheless, it is resistant and can grow without pes-
ticides or herbicides and in its vegetative phase can resist
a frost since it has good recovery capabilities. In addition,
its carbon footprint is practically non-existent since dur-
ing its development it absorbs the same amount of CO²
as it exudes.
Lastly, I should point out that, fortunately, the redis-
covery of the plant seems to be in fashion; its cultivation
is part of the transitional process our country and the world
are undergoing. This means we could say that cannabis
is a gift, a tool for humanity that everyone should have
access to.

Notes
1 J. M. McPartland, W. Hegman, and T. Long, “Cannabis in Asia: Its
Center of Origin and Early Cultivation, Based on a Synthesis of Sub-
fossil Pollen and Archaeobotanical Studies,” Veget Hist Archaeobot
no. 28, 2019, pp. 691-702, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-019-00731-8.
2 De materia medicas (On Medical Material) a five-volume work on more
than 600 substances used in treating patients. Translated by Lily Y.
Beck (Hildesheim, Germany: 2005, Olms-Weidman). [Editor’s Note.]

Interview with
Bruce Linton*
Aaraón Díaz Mendiburo**
A
few decades ago, in her Journalistic Genres class,
our admired professor, Celia Toibe Shoijet Welt­
man, assigned us the task of interviewing an
imaginary character. Without hesitation —and in a heart­
beat— I chose a character surrounded by magic, wisdom,
and who was a worthy representative of my cinemato­
graphic passion: Charles Spencer Chaplin. In July 2022, a
similar emotion possessed me with the prospect of getting
an interview with Bruce Linton, cofounder of the biggest
Cannabis corporation in the world, Canopy Growth. Through­
out my ethnographic research in Smith Falls (Ontario, Can­
ada) people would refer to Bruce as a supportive being;
* Bruce Linton is an entrepreneur and cofounder of Canopy
Growth.
** Aaraón is a researcher at the Center for Research on North Ame­
rica, unam; you can contact him at faraondiaz@yahoo.com.mx.
Cannabis Speaks Out
there was no one who would not have spoken well of him.
Occasionally, I thought it was a kind of a myth, not from
ancient history but from contemporary lore: a type of en­
trepreneur who, with his extremely socially oriented per­
spective about the cannabis industry, came to give hope
to a community that dealt with the consequences of Her­
shey’s shutdown, and therefore, with the labor crises and
global discomfort of our century. By hearing the testimo­
nies of these people and acknowledging Bruce’s impor­
tance in the Canadian and global cannabis industry, I
decided to leave no stone unturned until I got an interview
with him. Alas, this time it was not an imaginary subject,
but a real one. On June 29th, 2022, we met up, and now I
can share some fragments of that interview with you.
Aaraón Díaz: What does corporate social responsibility
mean to you?
Bruce Linton: I was operating under the assumption that
we were building a business that was going to have life­
time value, intellectual property, durability of science,
great new products. Corporate social responsibility (csr),
to me, was like “I am going to live, sleep and eat in a
bubble. Everything is here. I want to make my bubble as
pleasant, and good, and large as possible,” which means
your behavior must be: “If I have a choice between buy­
ing things locally, even if it is up to 5 percent or 10 percent
more costly, or buying them from elsewhere —and mak­
ing someone else’s bubble, far away from me, better— I
will buy it here.”
AD: I like your point of view about CSR, but what about
this bubble in connection with other bubbles competing
around the globe?
BL: We needed to compete by constantly inventing new
things intellectually. We needed to move faster on policy.
We needed to be the best example, so everybody in the world
would look at us when they were trying to come up with
their public policy. And if you think that way —having a
long term, very positive work environment, and a very
strong community connection— the effect is one of the
best ways to get ahead of the competition: to be the best.
And the best can be defined as the one who has the low­
est cost of capital with the highest percentage of market
share, and with the most intellectual property. All that
comes out of having an environment that encour­
ages employing people who are the best; attracting and
15
Voices of Mexico 120
keeping the best. What is number one doing? Innovating,
creat­ing, expanding. We were always the most visible, the
most active, and the most desirable.
AD: What happens now with Canopy Grow and the con­
struction of this bubble that you were endorsing?
BL: I think Canopy has had two changes of priorities since
I left. The first one was “We are just going to run this bet­
ter, and we are going to be very profitable.” That did not
work; they were giving people guidance. Then, the second
was “We are going to cut cost so much that we’ll become
successful.” That will not work either.
What you have to know is why people want to be your
customers, why they want to be your investors; they are
not always the same reasons. I think that things that I
viewed as core cultural considerations were perceived to
cost money, but if the activity of corporate social respon­
sibility, inclusion in the world, in the country and in the
city, lead you to have more customers and more share­
holders, they did not cost you money, but made you more
customers. And I think what has happened is —it is kind
of weird— the company is almost disappearing in terms of
its visibility. For example, in the case of British Columbia,
that whole facility is shut down. Now immigrant workers,
foreign workers, and short-term workers have nowhere
to work.
People do not understand the difference between Amer­
ican business and Canadian business. American business
is much more similar to a military structure. In my opin­
ion, the military has a much bigger impact on America
because we do not have a military impact in Canada. In
American business you have a general and a couple of
people reporting to them, but it is very much a hierarchy.
The general says: “We are going to make profits”, he yells
it, and everybody is supposed to do it. While in Canadian
business it is much flatter. There is no big general. You
can have a leader, but you have discussions about three
things: 1) we want to create profit someday; 2) we want
to be the number one thing that everybody wants to buy,
work at, hold shares of; 3) and we maybe want to do this
until we are old and in a rocking chair, a story that we
keep telling the nurses at the hospital over and over, be­
cause it is the most important thing we have other than
our family. American business is driven by the general
yelling profit, and Canadian business can be driven by
the general talking about three things at once.
16
“Mexico will have a better recreational
cannabis market, organized like Canada,
sooner than America will. They do not
have the problem that America has:
every state is doing something different.”
Canadian business sees the world as an opportunity
that does include American business. American business
sees it as an opportunity that must start with America.
And there is always the question of whether America is
ready to do cannabis, but they are not ready. They are
not going to be ready in the next five years, they will not
be ready.
Mexico will have a better recreational cannabis market,
organized like Canada, sooner than America will, before
five years. They do not have the problem that America
has: every state is doing something different. In Mexico,
not every state is doing something different, so you can
bring a federal system in without changing every state.
AD: Do you think that social responsibility is possible in
the capitalist system?
BL: I believe, a hundred percent, that it is possible in the
capitalist system. The key thing is that it is possible if we
quit thinking that every 90 days we need an objective. Short
term, quarterly planned processes and corporate social
responsibility, I think they are in conflict. But if you think
“I want this business to perform amazingly for the next
10 years” then everybody needs to know why we are build­
ing it for 10 years. I picked 10 years, because it is a long
time in business. Corporate social responsibility simply
means long-term thinking to create fully integrated val­
ue, so that everybody comes up with a business. Then,
the business is supported by everybody, right? Is that not
what we actually want? So, the only conflict between cor­
porate capitalism and csr is the short term. Short term
objectives. If you are on a ceo’s budget and his bonus is
made every quarter or once a year it is too short term.
From our discussion, I would say the one thing in which
we did not concur, or I think we might not agree on is cor­
porate social responsibility. Are you responsible for the
community? I think you have a responsibility to engage
with the community. That is long term. Are you respon­
sible for the environment? I think you are, because you
have to think about the footprint you are creating.

Are you responsible for the people who work in the
company? The answer is affirmative for each one of those
three groups. I keep saying it, if you are only thinking
about the next 90 days, there is no rational business. If
you were a private business and you knew that you were
going to give the keys of your building to your kid, and
they were going to give the keys to the building to your
grandkid, would you care about the environment? Yes.
Would you care about the community? Yes. Would you
care about the employees? Yes.
AD: What do you think about hiring temporary workers
under the csr framework? From my point of view, that
does not seem responsible at all.
BL: About hiring workers, we would use an expansion
pool that would be temporary. We would pay a premium
to those people in the expansion pool that performed su­
per well, to extract them from the social pool and bring
them into our company. They had proven themselves,
and we knew how they would work.
We went from small to big, but a lot of the people who
joined in this bigger phase came in through almost like
a trial period. I am not sure if that is not social respon­
sibility, because being corporate means you cannot hire
people you cannot afford, so we needed some burstabil­
ity, however the socially responsible part was looking at
finding those really good people.
And rather than leave them with these temporary
agencies, we would keep 25 percent of the salary. I do not
like this, but to organize all of that variable labor yourself
when you are trying to grow is super hard. So, you would
use them, but then you would extract or almost buy their
freedom out of there.
In regards to the other ones, if you have a very large
carbon footprint you need to have more labor than you
can necessarily afford. And a lot of the labor actually ends
up being local people who are first generation immigrants.
Like in our Niagara facility, we had many people from
“You have two types of customers: the
people who were already buying illegally every
day and the people who were not buying it
because it was illegal. Now, who are our
customers? I bet the illegal market did not
get any new customers, or very few.”
Cannabis Speaks Out
Hamilton, who were Vietnamese, Indian, many Pakistan­
is and people from India who came and worked for us.
They came on a bus. Most did not have a driver’s li­
cense, and we had to have people who spoke multiple lan­
guages, and they would work all day, and the bus would
take them back. Well, they would not get paid as well or
treated as well if they did not come to work with us. It
seemed like at least it was a progression.
I am not trying to justify it; I am saying that some of
those folks that needed this have come over permanent­
ly. But if you are in Canada and you do not speak English
or French, and you want to have a job, that is a really tough
problem. Getting work, which was accommodated for lan­
guages, because we had people who spoke multiple
languages, seemed like progress from not having a job.
AD: What is the cannabis industry like in Canada right
now? What are the problems that you see and what about
the illegal market?
BL: Canada’s cannabis industry changes about every six
months. I do not think there have ever been any super
serious problems with the industry. There has just been
constant change, and right now the panorama is that
there are over 500 companies that have licenses to pro­
duce cannabis, and that is a lot. There is a huge amount of
cannabis that can be produced in farm fields with almost
no protection, whereas before you had to have incredible
security. Two or three years ago, there were almost no
stores in this province where you could buy it. Now there
are too many places. For example, now this little town
has three stores, while before there used to be seven for
the whole province.
Listen, it is very hard to explain to people that Cana­
da was one of the biggest illegal producers of cannabis
in the world. It was produced Mostly in British Columbia,
some came from Vietnam, but we used to be big exporters
of illegal weed from British Columbia to the US. They did
not like it when Colorado started growing their own weed,
because they could not export to Colorado. They did not
like it when Oregon had their own weed, because they
could not export there either. There was a big export of
illegal weed.
The size of the market has expanded a lot and almost
all the new customers are not illegal. You have two types of
customers: the people who were already buying illegally
every day and the people who were not buying it because
17
Voices of Mexico 120
“The government did an unbelievably
good job in the medical field: direct to
the customer, not going to pharmacies,
not ripping them off, very good testing
methodologies. Medically they
did outstandingly.”
it was illegal. Now, who are our customers? I bet the illegal
market did not get any new customers, or very few.
Since legalization, I see the illegal market ­—from all
statistics— has maybe lost half their business. That is like
4 billion dollars. I think the illegal market is going to keep
losing. The illegal market will lose more, but the govern­
ment is not sending a very good message, is it? When you
buy illegal products, you might be buying unsafe products.
When I mean unsafe I mean it could be sprayed with
things like micro retinol, which is a chemical to keep off
certain things. But when you smoke it, it can be bad for
you. The product might contain fecal coliform, or human
poop, but the government is not pushing “buy safe” (which
they should). I think the police have done a much better
job of stopping the illegal guys. Because when you are
selling illegally, are you paying all the taxes and all the
things that the government collects? No. You are stealing
revenue from the government when you sell illegally. The
government cares now, but before legalization they did
not care. Because what would they do?
There was no money in it for the government. Now
they are raking it in. If I gave you 100 dollars and said:
“Please, go buy some illegal alcohol in this province”, you
will have a big problem: you cannot find any. You know
why? The government makes money selling alcohol. The
government makes money selling cannabis now, so they
are going to keep squeezing till they get all the money.
I could buy illegal meat, not supervised by a meat in­
spector, but who buys that? Nobody. Canadians like rules,
we like structure. I think when you are inhaling it, if you
get an education on what is in the illegal stuff, you will
care. The legal product is very controlled, very clean, right?
For example, no sprays, no biologicals. Compared to the
illegal market where they do not spend money on dehu­
midification, they spend money on spray.
The other part is there used to be nowhere to buy le­
gally. Now, if you are in Smith Falls, you have three stores.
18
Do you really want to go to that guy’s sketchy place? You
did not like him that much; you had to be nice because
he had weed. Now you walk in the store, you buy this
better stuff. It is never going to be gone. But I bet if we
talk again in five years, the guys that have been buying
for 20 years from a guy, they might keep buying for 10
more years until they die. Their kids are not buying from
that guy, they are buying from the store. There is a cycle.
AD: How do you feel about being assigned as a business­
man in this industry?
BL: I think I am probably an outlier. I think, actually, the
government did an unbelievably good job in the medical
field: direct to the customer, not going to pharmacies, not
ripping them off, very good testing methodologies. Med­
ically they did outstandingly. I think on recreational [can­
nabis], they had a good federal policy: who is going to grow
it, how it is available. Each province got to do what they
wanted; some were great, some were not, were they? If
you went to Alberta two years ago, it was going very well.
You went to Newfoundland, they never made a ware­
house. They just shipped it directly to the store. Ontario
had no stores, but now I think it is getting consistent. The
single biggest thing missing is that this town has 10 places
that sell alcohol for drinking in a bar, but not one for can­
nabis. It feels like you are supposed to take your cannabis
and go around the corner and sip it by yourself. There is
still the fact that a social platform for consumption, not
smoking, but drinking, eating should be available. It seems
very odd that we are selling it, but you have no use for
it except in your house. I don’t know, that seems weird.
If we talk about publicity, I would say tobacco has a
bigger problem now in Canada. Alcohol has a bigger ad­
vantage. We are somewhere around there, but I do not
think we are going towards tobacco. I think we are going
towards alcohol. It should be the same as alcohol. Do you
know what I mean? You should be able to show people
having fun at a beach. You can see a lot of advertising for
cannabis in social media.
You do not see any for cigarettes. You have been in
Canada for 18 years. Maybe when you first got here you
used to see tobacco. Now they are not allowed to exist;
even the containers, they sell them from packages with the
bad lungs. Everybody complains without thinking. Stop and
think, we could have been treated like tobacco. We fought
to get closer to here, and I think it is going that way.

Alitzel Moreno Aguilar*
The Queen of the Flowers
A Story of Love and Self-Discovery
S
tudying biology and being a pothead, a grower, and
a woman has not been simple. A lot of people may
think that the life of a gardener is easy, but it’s not.
Taking care of our plants implies not only preventing and
eliminating pests and fungi, but also resolving other prob-
lems linked to a balance between temperature and humid-
ity and even with us. Growing together with the plants
—in our case, Cannabis— implies the political commit-
ment of being with them during their cycle, creating a
relationship, and accompanying them. It requires a great
deal of observation and patience to get the results we
want. It’s not just planting a seed and waiting for the
harvest: it’s a long process that you have go through and
learn from.
* Alitzel has finished her undergraduate coursework in biology
at the unam School of Science and a gardener at the Terraza
Weera self-cultivating network @terrazaweera; you can contact
her at alixihue@gmail.com.
Cannabis Speaks Out
Crisanta Espinosa Aguilar/Cuartoscuro.com
The First Puff
Fortunately, there are only women in my family, since
the mens were conspicuously absent. My mother, a work-
er, a government employee, labored almost all day long
for a wage that would put food on the table, and I only saw
her at night. I remember being about fourteen when I was
in the afternoon shift at my middle school. That’s where
I met my first “friends,” who smoked marihuana between
classes. One day I was curious and wanted to try it, and
they invited me to have some. When I took the first puff,
I remember tasting something like burned grass and
starting to cough right away. After getting rid of all the
smoke, the only thing I could do was to laugh with an
unending laugh that made me cry; my stomach hurt
from laughing so much, and then I knew: “This is good
weed,” I said, and from then on I began smoking cannabis.
I was very young as a user, and I did it fully intent on
19
Voices of Mexico 120
making my schoolwork more enjoyable. From then on I
felt that it inspired me to do things like paint and draw,
but I didn’t yet give the marihuana plant the full worth
it essentially has.
My mother caught me smoking at my fifteenth birth-
day party. I didn’t have a big fancy party; rather, we took
a trip to the Mayan Riviera in Quintana Roo, and I had a
little bag of dope, a metal pipe, and a lighter with me. In
Valladolid, we stayed at a hotel and one day, while I was
bathing, my mother looked for a sanitary napkin in my
suitcase and found my stash. The end of that trip was
harsh, mainly for her, because she had to accept that her
young daughter enjoyed smoking marihuana.
When we got home, she told my older sister, who my
mother thought would help her to get me away from weed.
That same night my sister told me that she had been
smoking marihuana for seven years and had never been
caught. It was a very open talk that made me realize the
stigmas that existed, not only in my family, but in the
world in general, in this sexist, heteronormative society,
and that something considered criminal was even worse
if you’re a woman.
However, that was the time in my life when I felt the
most confident. Instead of stopping smoking cannabis,
my sister and I began to smoke together and our relation-
ship improved. My mother began to realize that when we
smoked, we really didn’t turn into juvenile delinquents or
become aggressive; on the contrary, we enjoyed dinner
or watching a TV show or a movie together even more.
As time went on, she realized that it was part of the de-
velopment of our personalities, and we began to find out
more about its medicinal properties, not only its enter-
tainment value. For example, I remember that my granny
always carried alcohol with weed for her pain. That was
how we decided to grow some plants at home for our own
consumption and not risk getting it through violent means,
like from drug dealers. My house became a safe, canna-
bis-tolerant place.
My sister and I decided to grow
some plants at home for our own
consumption and not risk getting it
through violent means, like from drug
dealers. My house became a safe,
cannabis-tolerant place.
20
As I began to wander the streets of my neighborhood
in Tláhuac, my social and school life began to fill up with
men. I couldn’t understand why they were the only ones
who felt they had the freedom to smoke and why they
always told their sexist jokes or made inappropriate com-
ments when I was there. It began to be bothersome, un-
safe, and uncomfortable for my “friends” or “boyfriends”
at the time would dare to tell me when and with whom
I should smoke. At the time, I thought it was normal; I
didn’t cut them off; and I even thought that they were look-
ing out for me because I was in their space, the men’s space.
I started questioning myself about the role we women
played in that reality and, mainly, what place we wanted
to occupy as cannabis consumers.
I decided to get away from those circles where I felt
threatened, and they began to think of me as a rebel and
a feminist just because I was following my own person-
al interests, trying to build other non-normative ways of
being a cannabis consumer. I think I broke down the pa-
triarchal hierarchy thanks to the opportunity of having
a better informed consumption at home with my mom
and my sisters.
The Garden of Beautiful Flowers
At university, I met a group of biologists like myself;
of their own free will, sure of themselves and as potheads,
they helped me finally find myself. For the first time I had
a loving relationship with other women whom today I con-
sider to be my sisters. Thanks to that, I began to feel more
secure about my decisions. They were the inspiration for
me to start growing. As I went through my coursework,
I also learned to crochet in a unique style, as part of the
fourth generation of family crocheters.
Ever since I was a little girl, I liked fashion very much
and I wanted to study design. My mother didn’t have the
money needed to support me in that choice of studies,
though, so crocheting, redesigning, and creating a garment
from nothing became the best experiences of my life,
even though I only crocheted for myself. And cannabis
helped inspire my creations. At the same time, I devel-
oped a taste for electronic music and raves. Since those
expenses were beyond my mother’s budget, I had to man-
age my time, and what began as a hobby is today my
lifestyle: that’s how Tejidos Árbol de la Vida (Crocheting

GreenForce Staffing/Unsplash.com
a Tree of Life) began; my crochet creations brand pays
my bills.1
In a girlfriend’s apartment, we began an indoor crop
in the living room. We set up the electricity connections;
we got the lamps, the pots, the substratum, the compost,
and the nutrients. We prepared the germination every
full moon so the seeds would take the maximum advan-
tage of that light and grow appropriately. We played the
plants music, talked to them, and smoked with them. That
was when we decided to form a women’s collective called
Girls with Weed on Instagram, where we shared all this
craziness and what we learned.2 The only thing we want-
ed was to keep researching, disseminating, and informing
people about the plant’s properties and uses and the dif-
ferent ways of being consumers without stigma.
While we were going to the university, we did indoor
cultivation, putting into practice what we were learning
in botany classes; this was our first theoretical-practical
experience. Observing the plants in their vegetative state,
we noted that they grew both in length and width and
their leaves gradually took on their popular form and some
very curious-looking offshoots appeared in their axils that
looked like little hairs or balls, which revealed the sex of
the plant —you might think that they’re all masculine
or feminine, but only 7 percent have a single sex and the
rest are hermaphrodites. If they have only one sex, they
need air-borne pollination to reproduce, and this only
happens if we want to preserve certain characteristics
for our benefit. That is the power of artificial selection.
Cannabis Speaks Out
Harvesting the Fruits of Our Labor
The Covid-19 pandemic left us without classes and not
being able to move around. The easiest solution was to
self-organize and care for each other where we con­
sum­ed, in this case, cannabis. Dulce Marihuana, a sister
from our college class, invited us to participate in Ter-
raza Weera and there we met Jardinerx Chirri.3 The idea
was to build a network of cannabis growers and people
with other skills, that would question the prevailing ideas
about capitalizing on marihuana and to call for the build-
ing of a cannabis culture from that platform using our own
knowledge about growing without imitating the models
originating in the Global North.
So there, my objectives and personal desires met, and
after a few months, I was collaborating in that space. It
was a beautiful time, when we began to weave a network
of local producers and incentivize barter and fair trade
without intermediaries, while we managed our organic
gardening materials, encouraging people to replicate
self-cultivation.
In that sense, then, I consider Terraza Weera a space
free from sexist violence where we still have to continue
to deconstruct ourselves, attempting to be equitable, non-
hierarchical, and respectful of all. I feel safe there and
taken into account for what I am: a woman pothead.
We turned ourselves into a fruit that matures from
the flower. For the first time I tangibly felt the return on
my theoretical contributions in an authentic hothouse for
growing cannabis. By spending most of the pandemic with
the plants and observing them, watching them grow and
change, I realized that it is a labor of a great deal of love
and patience. The plants also communicate with you, per-
haps not in language like human language, but they show
when they need something through how they look phys-
ically. You can see when they need water, humidity, light,
nutrients, prevention, and even when they need attention,
because they’re alive and they feel. If what you want are
By spending most of the pandemic
with the plants and observing them,
watching them grow and change,
I realized that it is a labor of a great
deal of love and patience.
21
Voices of Mexico 120
We proposed workshops with a gender
perspective, activities with autonomist
proposals, and to pollinate knowledge
for autonomy. Getting to know many
cannabis-oriented women has been
one of the best experiences of my life.
“good” marihuana plants, you have to care for them like
your daughters.
Thanks to the experience of planting using my scien-
tific knowledge, I realized that we had really built a method
for cultivation. That’s why we were encouraged enough
to give workshops on caring for the plants, extracting
medicines from them, and cooking with them. They were
all collectively done, with many workshop coordinators
and friends that we have met during this cannabis ad-
venture. That was how I was able to become completely
independent with Dulce and how we began to live alone
in an apartment of and for women and go to cannabis
culture activities. We became more involved in the com-
munity, but we also noted again that the milieu was led
—once again— by men. We decided not to get close to
the “leaders” with ambitions linked to political parties or
profit-making, and Dulce and I proposed workshops with
a gender perspective, activities with autonomist propos-
als, and to pollinate knowledge for autonomy. Getting to
know many cannabis-oriented women has been one of
the best experiences of my life.
In 2022, I represented Terraza Weera to carry out a
workshop alone called “Super-erotic Girls” for the anni-
versary of the Super-Smoker Girls feminist project, where
we talked about sexuality and the possibility of self-gen-
erating our pleasures with cannabis to sensitize us. That
was how we worked for a new cultural construct organiz­
ed around marihuana. I went to different sources to write
a document in which I explained the difference between
male and female plants, and the reasons why the repro-
ductive structures of the female plants (the flowers) are
important for preparing many of the “pothead” medica-
tions and other products. These female plants have tri-
chomes, shiny structures that contain substances called
cannabinoids, and these molecules have many pharma-
cological and recreational applications. The male plants,
by contrast, do not. Nevertheless, there are several kinds
of trichomes, which means that all the plants, male or
22
female, can have many applications, such as the fiber
called hemp.
Today, the genetics industry is working to modify the
plants and seeds to get them to produce many trichomes
and terpenes (the components that give plants their aro-
ma) to achieve better production and sales. However, grow-
ers can fix genetic characteristics naturally adapted to
their surroundings according to their needs by following
up the regular local seeds year after year, without spend-
ing thousands of pesos in seeds or damaging the environ-
ment. The genetically modified seeds are a reflection of
capitalist corporate interests to get us to depend on their
companies at the same time that they destroy local flora,
making it lose genetic diversity and increasing its vulner-
ability to pests. All this creates dependency on certain
fertilizers and causes allergic reactions in people unused
to them or who are sensitive to cannabinoids like thc
(tetrahydrocannabinol).
In my experience, when you study biology and you
grow cannabis at the same time, the only thing you want
is to learn as much about it as possible. You want to study
its morphology, phenology, anatomy, and biochemistry,
and you realize that it’s unique, very special in its adapta-
tions and physical, anatomic, and biochemical structures.
There’s no other plant like cannabis. Unfortunately, it’s
not easy to study in Mexico due to current legislation.
When I was doing the social service for my bachelor’s de-
gree, I was able to study its anatomy, and I was surprised
at the figures that make up its cells’ tissue: a stain on the
stalk and a heart in the petiole, the stalk that attaches
the leaf blade to the stem.
Its components, something we can’t see with the na-
ked eye, are what turn cannabis into what it is: a weed that
can grow almost anywhere, in an empty lot or at a ban-
quet, but that, with the love of a gardener, can grow all
the characteristics worthy of the queen of the Canna-
baceae.

Notes
1 For more about this, see https://www.facebook.com/tejiendorai
cesencrochet/. [Editor’s Note.]
2 Visit their site at https://instagram.com/girls.withweed?igshid
=YmMyMTA2M2Y=. [Editor’s Note.]
3 For information about Jardinerx, see https://www.facebook.com/
vaikidu/. [Editor’s Note.]

Moisés Zurita Zafra*
Prejudices in Society and
Academia against Cannabis
W
hen they called me from Voices of Mexico to
ask me to write about cannabis, I got very ex­
cited. I remembered the teachings of Profes­
sor Rolando Rosas: “Everything is work, sometimes very
intense, and the spark of the muses must find you working.”
I’m from the Mixtec region in the mountains of Oaxa­
ca. In my childhood, organized crime groups came to
town with marihuana seeds and convinced the peasants
to produce it. Away from the hustle and bustle and the
city, the bushes grew lushly, and in two years, abundance
descended on us. A miracle had happened, and the illu­
sion of well-being set in for a while.
* Moisés is a professor and researcher at the Chapingo
Autonomous University in Mexico, you can contact him at
fzuritaz@chapingo.mx.
Cannabis Speaks Out
Cuartoscuro.com
They bought pick-ups; they built their houses out of
brick; they cooperated as never before in the fiesta of the
local patron saint. Everything was rosy until the army
came. There was nowhere to hide; not a stone was left on
top of another; they burned all the weed and took away
many peasants… The violence was brutal, in the very
style of the dirty war.
Anxious to show its power, to violently impose on the
oppressed and the dispossessed, the army went into all
the houses looking for weed and torturing the families.
When my Aunt Venancia tried to protect her husband
who was lying, bleeding, on the floor, she was also beat­
en; they broke her leg and she has never recovered since.
That was how sadness and loneliness took hold of the
town, plus the fear of the “accursed” weed.
23
Voices of Mexico 120
I developed professionally amidst the most violent campaign against
the plant, orchestrated in the United States, that made Mary Jane out
to be the worst evil of all time. I was far from having a critical and
academic view of the issue; I’m ashamed to admit that.
When I went to study at Chapingo University, I came
into contact with Mary Jane again, but I was always very
careful. By then, I was aware of my weaknesses and that
I could be seduced right away by “sin,” and so, I’ve always
had a lot of respect for marihuana. However, laziness has
often saved me from many sins.
I’ve never been interested in narco-culture. Despite
having been delighted to hear “Boss of Bosses” by the band
Los Tigres del Norte, I prefer “The Load Askew,” a corrido
involving contraband with social aims, which includes a
dealer called “El Rojo.”1 I don’t go near “altered corridos”
or any about war,2 as, in general, I believe myself to be a
peaceful person. But I must admit that I’m amazed at
the ingeniousness of some of the lyrics, like the one by
Los Tucanes de Tijuana, “My Three Old Ladies”: “Sweet-
smelling, green-eyed Mary / her little butt is just delish,”
clearly alluding to cannabis buds. Or “Kilo-sized Packs,”
also by Los Tigres del Norte: “How cute my cows look, / with
lamb’s butts.” Not related at all to genetic engineering,
but just another way to refer to marihuana.
I developed professionally amidst the most violent cam­
paign against the plant, orchestrated in the United States,
that made Mary Jane out to be the worst evil of all time.
I was far from having a critical and academic view of the
issue; I’m ashamed to admit that, while I didn’t think the
accusations hurled at cannabis were real, I also wasn’t
interested in knowing more. In the end, that is, I think,
the duty of anyone who subscribes to academic thinking.
I work among good-willed researchers, both men and
women. They grow corn, beans, tomatoes, mushrooms, or­
chids, and other plants that Mexico’s countryside needs.
So, several years ago, I began working with popcorn. This
is interesting because, although Mexico is the main origin
of corn, more than 90 percent of the popcorn we consume
comes from the United States, a reason why working with
cannabis didn’t seem like a good idea.
The conflict that had to be overcome was, undoubt­
edly my own prejudices. What will people think of me?
Will I be considered a drug addict forever more? Lots of
24
things like this went through my head. My memories of the
class on Galileo Galilei were of no use, of how he faced
down the Un-Holy Office of the Inquisition and saved his
skin —unlike Giordano Bruno who died, both body and soul
burned. Suffice it to say that today’s lynchings take place
in the media and social networks.
I believe that academia has turned into an “aristoc­
racy” in our universities: once people get to that point, they
tread water; advancing knowledge seems to matter little.
Cutting-edge research is no longer interesting; what seems
important is preserving privileges, remaining in the Na­
tional System of Researchers (sni), at the cost of the work
of new generations who, apparently will never be able to
occupy the posts of the gurus of knowledge.
The idea of working with cannabis came to me one day
for no apparent reason. I often think that our university
should be the cutting edge in the development of variet­
ies for the Mexican countryside. I am, of course, referring
to healthy food, both agricultural and animal, but it should
also delve into emerging crops and be there when they
come to call.
Little by little, some disperse data began to get my at­
tention. For example, that cowboy pants were originally
made with cannabis fiber —recently some were found in
an abandoned mine in California and were in good con­
dition almost a century and a half later— or that the ties
on sails in ancient times were mostly made of hemp. Even
today, masons use hemp twine.
But, if it’s so resistant, why did people stop producing
cannabis? The reality is that it was banned in North Amer­
ica, but in Asia and Africa, production never stopped. We
already know that the economy moves politics in many
cases, and to understand that better we must ask our­
selves who benefitted by banning cannabis. Among oth­
ers, it was southern U.S. cotton growers.
In the mid-twentieth century, production of cannabis
in Mexico was gradually increasing. Despite the ban, es­
timates say that the country was the world’s top producer
for several years. Later, Colombian marihuana arrived,

and after that, cocaine, which inundated the drug market.
Organized crime grew in the shadow of governments,
and for several years now, the Sinaloa Cartel has become a
very powerful multinational that has left the European
and Asian mafias in its wake.
Another well-founded fear of academia is that orga­
nized crime is everywhere. As we know, there are lookouts
on every corner, and the universities are another impor­
tant center for the flow of Mary Jane and other dangerous
substances —here, I’m not referring to laboratory solvents,
but to crack, rock, and other products that the young “can­
dy” sellers offer to any passerby, by catalogue, or for de­
livery at a mid-point.
The panorama is complicated, but we have to recog­
nize that the driving force behind science is the desire to
know, to find out a little more. So, a few years ago, when
I saw a meme on Facebook that said, “You want to do it
but you’re afraid. So do it with fear,” I did it. I started the
project, and like all great projects, it went from the bot­
tom up and little by little.
The first problem is that, given the ban and the fears,
there is very little academic information in Mexico. So, the
task was to contribute to generating more. Also, we can
find general information from growers, who also offer seed
on the informal market. The prices are high, of course, and
the seed can be obtained, but it costs from one dollar a
seed and up.
I acquired some seeds and asked for donations from
my acquaintances. Weed smokers regularly throw out
the seeds because, as we know, growing was prohibited
and continues to be stigmatized This is the first lesson,
of the most elementary variety: the sale of seeds is a
huge market sector that will undoubtedly be exploit­
ed in time.
So, I started off on the road of the grower. Just like a
child in primary school who germinates his little bean and
goes to look at it every five minutes, I watched it grow. The
wait was long, and I had to take good care of the plants
because, as I said, there is no trustworthy information
We know now that the human body produces cannabinoids naturally, which are
necessary for neurotransmitters and are fundamental in all physiological processes.
This means that, far from being a plant “for evil,” cannabis is rather a plant
“for good.” Its contributions to human health are essential.
Cannabis Speaks Out
about how to grow them. However, cannabis is a very no­
ble, generous species.
The first yield was six plants. In this first stage, I con­
centrated on observing. I had never had plants that had
demanded my attention for so long, so sometimes I thought
that the time invested might have been wasted. I don’t re­
member if I got to the point of talking to them, but I think
I did. I would say things like, “Wow, Juanita, you’re so pretty!”
They grew and reached puberty and then it happen­
ed: two of those plants that I had grown from a seed
weren’t Juanitas, but Juanitos. Being ignorant, I felt disap­
pointed and asked the seller of the seeds for my money
back. I must clarify that growers look down on male plants
because their aim is to grow a flower, which concentrates
the terpenes, the aromatic molecules used in making es­
sential oils; thc (tetrahydrocannabinol), the psychoactive
substance; and cbd (cannabidiol), the medicinal agent.
It occurred to me to put a female plant next to the male
plants and that produced an impressive number of seeds,
which then allowed me to systematically do viability tests.
To observe the seeds, I put them in a glass recipient on
a kitchen napkin. Using a manual nebulizer, I sprayed wa­
ter on them twice a day. That allowed me to log the germi­
nation that took place in the first hours for some of the
seeds but could take up to ten days. After that, they didn’t
germinate. Most germinated on the third day.
To develop the seedling, I used all available substrata,
like vermiculite (a mineral formed by iron or magnesium
silicates) and coconut fibers. However, there was a problem
with handling given the plant’s delicacy and mani­pulating
it when it was tiny was a problem. So, I decided to germi­
nate them in seventeen-centimeter polyethylene hothouse
bags. When they were two weeks old, they were ready to
be transplanted to the ground or to forty-centimeter hot­
house bags.
I got my supplies in the local agricultural store and at
flower markets. That’s where I purchased garden soil, bags,
and fertilizers for flowers. There are two stages: growth and
flowering, and each stage requires its own fertilizer.
25
Voices of Mexico 120
However, the first crops didn’t get fertilizers or added
light; water and daylight help the leaves to do their work.
Using one of the experimental models, I was trying to
see the difference in how the plant developed when treat­
ed differently; so, I had control batches, others with light
added, others with commercial fertilizer, and others with
bio-fertilizers and compost, but with this process, more
questions arose. The difference in development among
the plants using one or another substratum was not sta­
tistically significant, but variations did exist in the propor­
tion of male and female plants. For example, the batches
using commercial fertilizer yielded more males.
When the plants had grown to their full size, I went
on to the drying (just as other plants like tobacco or coffee
require), which must be done in the shade. Two weeks lat­
er, they can be cured, which consists of putting the dried
flowers in glass jars to preserve their aroma. At that point,
I had new tasks. First, I went to the National Research
and Agro-food and Forestry Service Laboratory (Lanisaf),
located on the University of Chapingo campus, so the flow­
er samples could be analyzed. However, the answer was
negative, with considerations totally unrelated with aca­
demia or science.
It is important to point out that I had the collabora­
tion of Chayan, a social sciences scholar from Guerrero
who is familiar with illegal cultivation of varieties such as
the historic Acapulco Gold. From his first contact with the
plant, he knew it had been grown indoors with agroeco­
logical techniques. He noted the moderate citrus touches
and then the broad spectrum of its effects, compared to oth­
ers, whose effects are more immediate but last less time.
So, I have two prototypes: “The Fabulous VP,” in refer­
ence to El Viejo Paulino (Old Paulino),3 and “Eme Zeta”n
(MZ), the result of the stratified visual mass selection pro­
cess,4 which is very similar to the improvement our ances­
tors achieved in domesticating the first cultivated plants.
I also delved into agro-industry, the transformation of
the flower: I implemented two processes, one with solvents
and another without. For the former, I used non-denatur­
ed 96-percent alcohol, and for the second, mineral water.
Marihuana leaves can be eaten in salads and used as con­
diments. However, I remember that once I added a flow­
er to a mushroom dish and the effect was intense, not
appropriate for sensitive individuals.
For the extraction of the essential oils that did not use
a solvent, I put the flower in a double boiler (a recipient
26
with the flowers and mineral water placed inside anoth­
er recipient with water) and heated it for almost two hours.
The mixture must be stirred regularly and the oil separates
due to gravity, with the oil on top and the water below. This
procedure is used to make ointments and cosmetics.
Cannabis substances are liposoluble, that is, they can
be mixed with and remain in fats. In the home, the flow­
er can be placed in a recipient with olive oil and after a
month, can be used as a salad dressing.
For the extraction using solvents, indicated for mak­
ing medicinal extracts, non-denatured 96-percent alcohol
is used. The flowers should be weighed, since that standard­
izes the process, which is necessary if the idea is to market
the product. After being left in the freezer for four days, the
tincture is ready. The alcohol is extracted using a double
boiler, and at the end of the process, you are left with the
full-spectrum resins, that is, the thc and cbd families, which
guarantees a fuller effect for the patient’s health.
We know now that the human body produces cannabi­
noids naturally, which are necessary for neurotransmitters
and are fundamental in all physiological processes. This
means that, far from being a plant “for evil,” cannabis
is rather a plant “for good.” Its contributions to human
health are essential. This means that this small contribu­
tion to the knowledge and dissemination is part of my
contribution to the common good, since it is important
to know that in the same way that you can put a rose
bush or an epazote plant in the window or in your gar­
den, anyone can have a cannabis plant —or six— for your
well-being.

Notes
1 The corridos mentioned here can be heard at “Jefe de jefes” (Boss
of Bosses), by Teodoro Bello (1997), https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=tKQwOuTiY-A; and “Carga ladeada” (The Load Askew), by Paulino
Vargas, https://frontera.library.ucla.edu/es/recordings/carga-ladea
da-13. [Editor’s Note].
2 “Altered corridos” are a sub-genre of narco-corridos whose lyrics
openly portray and glorify the way of life and beliefs of people who
are part of or live amidst drug trafficking. This kind of corrido is what
is known as the “altered movement.” [Editor’s Note.]
3 This was the nickname of the celebrated composer and singer from
Nuevo León, Julián Garza Arredondo (1935-2013). [Editor’s Note.]
4 This is a widely used phyto-improvement method used for open
pollination plants. See “Módulo de selección masal estratificada,” from
the Proyecto Buena Milpa, https://www.asocuch.com/wp-content/
uploads/2020/06/Modulo-Seleccio%CC%81n-Masal-Estratificada.
pdf. [Editor’s Note.]

Imer B. Flores*
A Long and Winding Road
Cannabis Regulation in Mexico1
Straight people don’t know what you’re about,
They put you down and shut you out.
You gave to me a new belief,
And soon the world will love you, sweet leaf.
Black Sabbath, “Sweet Leaf,” Master of Reality (1971)
Introduction: Human Rights and Public Health
Recognizing the need to regulate cannabis and review
drug policy in Mexico and the world are not only clear
consequences of the failed war against drugs and the
prohibitionist model, but also indications of the possibil-
ity of moving on to a paradigm based on human rights
* Imer is a researcher at the unam Institute for Legal Studies
(iij) and a professor at the unam Law School; you can contact
him at imer@unam.mx.
Cannabis Speaks Out
Galo Cañas Rodríguez/Cuartoscuro.com
and public health.2 In this way, the system for controlling
drugs will have to jibe with —and even reconcile with—
human rights instruments by integrating a public health
perspective, that of reducing damage, managing risks,
and a perspective of economic and social development.3
While advances have been made in this field in Mex-
ico, they seem to follow a minimalist logic by taking only
one step at a time or taking baby steps instead of great
strides.4 The vast majority of states in the United States
and some Canadian provinces have liberalized little by
little to a greater or lesser degree the regulations about
marihuana on a local level.5 Although we could charac-
terize this as a “marihuana localism,” I think it is part of
a broader global phenomenon involving different spheres,
from local and national to regional and global.6 We could
call this “marihuana glocalism.”
In Latin America, since the publication on December
20, 2013 of the Law to Regulate and Control the Cannabis
27
Voices of Mexico 120
Market in Uruguay, also known as Law 19,172, as well as
the innumerable legal decisions about the exercise of
constitutionality, the countries throughout the region
have debated about the banning of cannabis consump-
tion,7 including the emblematic case of Colombia. Mex-
ico certainly has not been the exception, particularly
since a series of strategic pieces of litigation have been
filed echoing an incipient surge of legal guarantees.8
Ups and Downs
Since 2006, about fifty bills to regulate cannabis have
been introduced in Mexico, a few more than thirty just
since 2015. Generally speaking, some attempt to change
only the General Law on Health and the Federal Penal
Code, but the most audacious propose completely new
legislation in the matter. Outstanding among the legal
reforms approved in the framework of the so-called “war
on drugs” instituted by former President Felipe de Jesús
Calderón Hinojosa (2006-2012) is the decree published in
the Official Federal Gazette on August 20, 2009.9
The following cases are among the legal precedents:
1. Writ of amparo under review 237/2014 (Smart Case)
(November 04, 2015);
2. 
Writ of amparo under review 1115/2017 (Ulrich
Richter Morales case) (April 11, 2018);
3. Writ of amparo under review 623/2017 (Armando
Ríos Píter case) (June 13, 2018);
4. Writ of amparo under review 1163/2017 (Zara Ash-
ley Snapp Hartman et al. case) (July 04, 2018);
5. Writ of amparo under review 547/2018 (Zara Ashley
Snapp Hartman et al. case) (October 31, 2018);
6. Writ of amparo under review 548/2018 (María Josefi­
na Santacruz González case) (October 31, 2018);
7. Writ of amparo under review 57/2019 (the case of
Margarita Sandra Garfias Hernández in representa-
tion of the minor Carlos Avilés Garfias) (14/08/19).
We should remember that the first stay granted by
the Supreme Court involved not only the recognition of
personal cannabis use as part of the right to free develop-
ment of the personality, adding that it also implied the
exercise of the right to health due to its possible benefi-
cial and/or prejudicial effects, but also called on the ex-
28
ecutive and legislative branches to hold a broad debate
about the issue and its possibilities.
The indirect writ of amparo 1482/2015-II (Grace case)
(May 9, 2016) should also be mentioned here. Based on the
right to health, the case attempts to declare Article 237
of the General Law on Health unconstitutional, exclu­ding
it from the “legal sphere for youth” and establishing that
no authority could prohibit or restrict “access to the med-
ical applications of Cannabis or its derivatives. . . or those
of other substances or treatments that have the aim of
providing well-being and health to persons with grave
ailments and that the current state of science has prov-
en can offer notable improvements in their health.”10
While the legislative and regulatory adjustments do
not legalize cannabis, they do liberalize its medicinal use
by adults through an administrative regime with the aim
of research, production, the medical application, manu-
facture, and even destruction of the raw materials, the
pharmacological and medical derivatives of cannabis. It
does all this through the Federal Commission for the Pro-
tection against Health Risks (Cofepris).
Until now, the Supreme Court has handed down dif-
ferent decisions about regulating cannabis in the frame-
work of the writ of amparo, which include thirteen cases
of binding court precedents and a general declaration of
unconstitutionality regarding its consumption. The res-
olution of the aforementioned writs of amparo under
review gave rise to the approval in First Chamber closed
session on February 13, 2019, of eight theses of binding
court precedent. These were published on Friday, Febru-
ary 22, 2019, in the Semanario Judicial de la Federación (Fed-
eral Judiciary Weekly).
Even though all these binding court precedent deci-
sions are interrelated due to their content and scope, we
could group these criteria by theme into four large sub-
groups: precedents referring to the right to the free de-
velopment of the personality; others related to the scope
of the absolute prohibition of recreational marihuana
consumption; another linked to the individual and social
dimensions of the right to the protection of health; and
one more regarding the impact of banning personal con-
sumption of marihuana on the free development of the
personality.
Regarding these precedents, the very same First Cham-
ber, in its March 6, 2019, closed session, approved another
precedent. This stipulates that the absolute prohibition

of marihuana for recreational purposes is not necessary
for protecting health and public order since alternative
measures exist that may be ideal for achieving those
ends but that affect the right to the free development of
the personality less.
Based on these theses handed down by the Supreme
Court, grounded above all in the right to the free devel-
opment of the personality, it was possible to declare the
system of administrative prohibitions that exist in differ-
ent parts of the General Law on Health to be unconstitu-
tional (the last paragraph of Article 235; and Articles 237,
245 [Section I], 247 [last paragraph], and 248).
Declaring unconstitutional the Ministry of Health’s ab-
solute ban of authorizations to carry out activities linked
to personal consumption of cannabis and tetrahydrocan-
nabinol (thc) for recreational purposes also implied that
Congress had to review the legislation in this matter
within ninety days, that is, by October 31, 2019.
The president of the Senate Presiding Committee re-
quested an extension, and, on October 29, 2019, the closed
session of the Supreme Court plenary agreed that it would
extend the period “as an exception and for one time only”
to be able to fulfill this obligation before the “last day of
the [next] regular session,” that is, before April 30, 2020.
Later, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, in its April 17, 2020,
closed session, it agreed to a second stay. Once that pe-
riod was up, again at the request of the president of the
Senate Presiding Committee, the Supreme Court agreed
to a third and last extension in its closed session of De-
cember 10, 2020, until the last day of the following regu-
lar session of Congress, that is, by April 30, 2021. When
that period was up and the issue of constitutionality had
not been resolved, the plenary decided to pass the Gen-
eral Declaration of Unconstitutionality 1/2018 on June
28, 2021.11
It should be mentioned that there was a later rul-
ing: the writ of amparo under review 355/2020 (Desart
MX case) (December 1, 2021. This is relevant for several
reasons:
1) It is the first amparo filed against the General Decla­
ration of Unconstitutionality and the constitutio­nal
reform with regard to the Judiciary Branch, pub-
lished in the Official Federal Gazette on March 11, 2021,
which established a system of direct precedents for
the Supreme Court plenary and chambers;
Cannabis Speaks Out
2) The same writ of amparo broadened the basis of
the right to consume cannabis by also recognizing
it as complying with the freedom of trade and in-
dustry, in addition to the right to the already rec-
ognized personal and medicinal uses; and
3) As a result, four theses of direct legal precedents
were derived from the decision on this writ of am-
paro and were published in the Gaceta del Semanar­
io (Weekly Gazette).
What is more, recently, on March 3, 2023, two more
theses were published. They reiterate that absolute pro-
hibition violates the human rights to the freedom of trade
and work, as well as stating that the criterion of propor-
tionality is applicable. These theses are derived from the
writ of amparo under review 461/2020 (May 25, 2022).
Is There a Way Out?
People may consume cannabis for different legitimate
reasons, in addition to scientific research. This has led the
Supreme Court to recognize the following uses:
1) Personal. Free and responsible, regardless of the
motivation, but for any legitimate ends. This is re-
served for adults and preferably persons older than
twenty-five.
2) Medicinal. Regardless of the concentrations of thc
and cbd, as well as that of other compounds pre-
scribed both for human beings and other living
beings; and
3) Industrial. When it is possible to use hemp given its
concentration of less than 1 percent of thc.
As we have seen, the system of administrative prohibi-
tions was declared unconstitutional because it was coun-
ter to fundamental rights recognized in the Constitution:
Over the years, it has become
clear that the system of administrative
prohibitions, renamed today “administrative
authorizations,” can also violate other rights
and freedoms, such as those of association,
expression, the expression of ideas, of
protest, and even the right to petition.
29
Voices of Mexico 120
1) Free development of the personality (Article 1);
2) Right to health (Article 4);
3) Human dignity, equality, and non-discrimination
(Article 1, paragraph five);
4) Rights to intimacy and a private life, as well as to
one’s self-image (Articles 1, 14, and 16); and
5) Freedom of trade and industry (Article 5).
Over the years, it has become clear that the system
of administrative prohibitions, renamed today “adminis-
trative authorizations,” can also violate other rights and
freedoms, such as those of association, expression, the
expression of ideas, of protest, and even the right to pe-
tition. As U.S. psychiatrist Lester Grinspoon (1928-2020)
would say, it is increasingly clear that our society cannot
be both free and drug free.12
In addition to generating a comprehensive regulation
for cannabis, among the other challenges we face in this
matter, we need to base ourselves on a broad dialogue
among different fields of knowledge to:
1) Fight against the stigma and prejudice associated
with consumers or users, as well as combat the ex-
torsion and persecution they often face;
2) Decriminalize and stop penalizing simple posses-
sion, under the assumption that its origins and in-
tended use are licit, except in cases proven to be the
contrary;
3) Avoid administrative bottlenecks by eliminating the
requirement of authorizations, licenses, and permits,
and liberalizing the issue so that it is sufficient to
give notice or, in any case, making permission au-
tomatic if the authorities do not respond, without
having to go through any more paperwork, includ-
ing strategic amparos;
4) Identify areas of opportunity: localisms;
5) Prevent damages and reducing risks, with special
attention to mental health and addictions;
6) Regulate based on scientific evidence and not mere
whim; and
7) Design and implement public policies based on hu-
man rights and public health, including the net for
a regulatory or coordinating agency, which could
be a broad, inter-ministerial commission.
30
Conclusion: Sweet Belief
To close, the only thing remaining is to reiterate that, de-
spite the long, winding road, full of ups and downs, I hold
to the sweet belief that soon we will have a way out for
comprehensive regulation of cannabis in Mexico. Compre­
hensive regulation must guarantee the full, generaliz­ed
exercise of our human rights, including access to health
without undue limitation or restriction, much less in a
way that constitutes privileges for the few. For this reason,
I am convinced that it will be a door to the review of drug
policy in our country, the region, and the world.

Notes
1 In writing this article, the author has enjoyed the support of Project
15111, “La regulación de los diferentes usos del cannabis y la evalu-
ación de sus impactos sociales, a partir de una política basada en
evidencia científica” (Regulation of Different Uses of Cannabis and
the Evaluation of Its Social Impacts Using Science-based Evidence),
of Mexico’s National Science and Technology Council (Conacyt) Na-
tional Strategic Health Program (Pronaces-Salud).
2 Imer B. Flores, ed., 4 20. Momento de regular el cannabis y revisar la po­
lítica de drogas (en México y en el mundo) (Mexico City: iij-unam, 2020).
3 Milton Romaní Gerner, “Modelos de regulación de cannabis en las
Américas,” oea-cicad, 2017, p. 13, https://www.scribd.com/document
/433758647/ROMANI-Modelos-de-Regulacion-de-Cannabis-SPA-PDF.
4 Imer B. Flores, “One Step Forward: Cannabis Regulation in Mexico,”
Verfassungsblog, July 20, 2021, https://verfassungsblog.de/one-step-
forward-cannabis-regulation-in-mexico/.
5 Robert A. Mikos, “Marihuana Localism,” Case Western Reserve Law
Review, vol. 65, no. 3, 2015, pp. 719-767.
6 Imer B. Flores, “Hacia un derecho ‘glocal’ o ‘transnacional’ y una ju­
­risprudencia ‘glocal(izada)’ o ‘transnacional(izada)’: repensar el de­re­
cho a la luz de la ‘globalización’ o ‘gobernanza global’,” in José María
Serna de la Garza, comp., Gobernanza global y cambio estructu­ral del sis­
tema jurídico mexicano (Mexico City: iij, unam, 2016), pp. 91-103.
7 Adriana Muro Polo, comp., El control de constitucionalidad de las Altas
Cortes sobre la prohibición del consumo de cannabis en América Latina (Me­
xico City: Suprema Corte de Justicia de la Nación, 2020).
8 Imer B. Flores and Daniel Márquez, “Tercera llamada, tercera… Hacia
un modelo de regulación de los diversos usos del cannabis en México,” in
Imer B. Flores, ed., 4 20. Momento de … op. cit., pp. 205-227; and Fernan­
do Silva García, comp., Marihuana y jueces (Mexico City: Porrúa, 2021).
9 “Decreto por el que se reforman, adicionan y derogan diversas dis­
posiciones de la Ley General de Salud, del Código Penal Federal y del
Código Federal de Procedimientos Penales,” Diario Oficial de la Federa­
ción, Segob, August 20, 2009, https://dof.gob.mx/nota_detalle.php?c
odigo=5106093&fecha=20/08/2009#gsc.tab=0. [Editor’s Note.]
10 Emphasis in the original [Amparo Indirecto 1482/2015-II].
11 Imer B. Flores, “One Step Forward: Cannabis Regulation in Mexi-
co,” Verfassungsblog, July 20, 2021, https://verfassungsblog.de/one-
step-forward-cannabis-regulation-in-mexico/.
12 Lester Grinspoon, Marihuana Reconsidered (New York: Bantam
Books, 1971).

Victoria Xochipilli Maciel Villaverde*
From Vulnerability to
Defending Cannabis Rights
J
ust in case my blood-test diagnosis wasn’t enough,
in 2016, my country’s public health service denied me
the possibility of continuing to take antivirals (arvs)
to control the human immune deficiency virus that in-
habits my body.
Also, the university student services staff turned their
back on me: “They couldn’t care less.” My health and well-
being were in danger, so I had to drop out of school, and
with tears in my eyes, I renounced my future as an archi-
tect to start off on a journey on unexplored paths, full of
obstacles, pain, and frustration, but where joy, hope, and
motivation have never been lacking.
In that year, the first cannabis fairs offered some con-
fidence to people who, like me, were desperately looking
* Victoria is the project director at Agenda lgbt, a. c., the founder
of #RegulaciónRevoluciónMX, and an activist in the Mexican
Cannabis Movement; you can contact her at
forocannabico@gmail.com.
Cannabis Speaks Out
Crisanta Espinosa Aguilar/Cuartoscuro.com
for a way not to die, to be able to stand the suffering more
easily, or, as in my case, to win time away from aids. There,
I met Doctors Rubén Pagaza and Raúl Porras, who recom-
mended I fight to get back my access to the arvs and use
cannabis medicinally to improve my quality of life de-
spite what I was going through. That’s how I got involved
with cannabis; later I took refuge on a remote island in the
Caribbean, a paradise where I had access to delicious flow-
ers —illegally, of course— and I shared on social media how
I was feeling and the ways I was able to use cannabis.
For example, to make a living, I would ground the seeds
left over from what I and my friends used, and I would make
cookies and sell them to show that cannabis wasn’t only
a drug, but that its nutritional elements could also be
used. That was when I got a call from the Xochipilli Can-
nabis Club inviting me to the first Prince Flor Xochipilli
Cannabis Cup that was soon to be held on Cannabis Day
(4/20) at Paraíso Beach, Guerrero.1
31
Voices of Mexico 120
I didn’t even think twice. I decided to meet these
wonderful people in Mexico City. Their names were Kari­
na, Alejandra, Beto, Hugo, Orlando, and Israel, although,
actually, the cannabis club had more than one hundred
members, all of them following the dream of its president
and founder, Jasiel Espinosa.
Jasiel, who almost immediately noticed that my sex-
ual orientation and gender identity didn’t follow the norm,
accepted me just as I was, supporting me like nobody else
ever had. The club was so open and accepting that in a
short time I was elected general secretary almost unan-
imously. That put me in charge not only of the club but
also of a medical foundation that had a group of special-
ists headed by Dr. Rubén Pagaza, who I had met at one of
the first cannabis fairs. Without my realizing it, all these
events, harmonically synchronized beautifully in tune
with each other, announced my jump from a simple can-
nabis user to a human rights defender.
We started by creating a big community where any-
one who wanted to consume, grow, transform, take on, or
develop culture by and for cannabis users could do so free-
ly. That’s how the forums, debates, alliances with other
groups, cultural events and activism began, with the par-
ticipation of families, academics, legislators, artists, etc.,
people of all sexual orientations, beliefs, races, and gender
identity, without discrimination.
In addition to what we organized inside the club, we
started to be activists, since in Mexico there’s a politiciz­
ed cannabis community with which, with Jasiel’s guidance
and with other club members, we were able little by lit-
tle to position Xochipilli’s ideals: equity and equality for
all cannabis users, with an emphasis on marihuana con-
sumers, since we were the most stigmatized.
For this reason, the club gave each member free med-
ical care, a safe place to consume marihuana without risk-
ing being attacked or extorted by police or any security
agency, workshops to learn how to grow, and legal advice
about what to do in the case of arbitrary illegal arrest.
All of this was available for a monthly dues of Mex$100,
which we used to barely cover the costs of the petition to
legally turn ourselves into a marihuana club. We also car-
ried out fundraising events and specialized workshops.
By that time, I still hadn’t recovered my hiv treatment
and all I knew was how to smoke and prepare cannabis
edibles. I wasn’t familiar with the social and scientific advanc-
es abroad, but 2017 was a year that everything chang­ed:
32
Congress surprised the whole country by legalizing the
medicinal use of cannabis, and hundreds of foreign com-
panies descended on the country like colonizers wanting
to conquer our fertile lands and use our cheap labor.
Dozens of entrepreneurs, including big sharks, tried to
convince us to work with them; most were U.S. American,
Canadian, and Spaniards. But what many of them really
wanted was to take advantage of the club. So, we decid­ed
to only work with people or companies who treated us
with dignity and as equals.
We discarded more than 90 percent of those interest­
ed and only kept a handful of allies, but they were enough
to turn the project around 180 degrees. That allowed us to
concretize the dream of the club’s one hundred mem-
bers: having our own “Marihuana House,” a place where
we could offer all the services and events for the Xochipi­
lli Cannabis Club members and support more people who
needed the plant for medicinal purposes.
We obtained more than one hundred legal stays while
in that new house so the Mexican government would al-
low us to grow our own marihuana. To celebrate 4/20 in
2017, we, plant users, entered the building of the Federal
Commission for the Protection against Health Risks (Cofe-
pris), asking for 123 growing permits. At the same time,
the members lit up a few marihuana cigarettes and smoked
inside the building until the head of the institution came
out to greet us, a bit dizzy from the smoke.
A year after that, we already had more than 500 associ-
ates. The house began to be too small for us, so we looked
for a new one. This was no easy task because we were
discriminated against, stigmatized, arrested by the police.
They tried to jail me for holding 70 grams of marihuana
that I was going to use to make Rick Simpson Oil (rso),
an artisanal marihuana extract used by people with dis-
eases treated with tetrahydrocannabinol (thc). In my
case, it helped reduce the undesired effects of the arv
treatments. However, thanks to the support of lawyers,
defenders, associations, and activists, I didn’t go to jail.
We faced a lot of challenges when we wanted to move
house, making visible the nightmare thousands of marihua­
na users go through every day, harassed by family, neigh-
bors, or authorities for trying to access our right to
housing. But, even so, with perseverance, we were able
to find a new headquarters; we were happy and excited
about preparing everything for the reinauguration when
an unprecedented event shot down all our plans: the

After three years, our camp outside
the Senate was removed. So, we’re
regrouping to carry out the largest
demonstration of cannabis users in the
history of Mexico to show that we’re not
giving up: for each cannabis plant
they take away from us, we’ll grow two.
Covid-19 pandemic confined us to our homes. From then
on, we partners tried to stay active, servicing the public,
but we lost the space for collective consumption due to
health restrictions. But even so, we managed to preserve
patient care and the online radio station. The good news
was that after a year, a court ordered Cofepris to respond
to our permit applications for growing marihuana, and
that finally turned the users club into a growers club.
But time wasn’t on our side: As a way of saying good-
bye, Jasiel, who had been living for years with kidney
failure sent a very moving message to all of us thanking us
for the efforts and the years dedicated to the club, asking
me to seek out my colleagues, in reference to lgbttti+
activism. That was the last time I spoke with my best friend,
my mentor, my first guide in human rights defense. His
leaving made the club disintegrate and frustrated the aim
of getting the growing permits. So, I decided to dry my tears
to deal with an old demon that tormented me: my re-
sentment of the lgbttti+ milieu because of the vulnerabil-
ity I had felt since I was very young.
To a certain point naively, but very sure of myself, I
approached the committees that organize the lgbttti+ mar­
ches to explain the delicate situation of sexually diverse
people in the cannabis world, like the discrimination,
invisibility, and attacks motivated by their ignorance of
the right to gender identity and sexual orientation. They
reacted negatively, but a handful of lgbttti+ activists sup-
ported us and later offered me a job as the project direc-
tor for the Agenda lgbt civil society organization.
My first politicized act was to found the #Regulación-
RevoluciónMX mobilization, together with Bárbara Orci,
to promote economic, social, cultural, and environmen-
tal rights focusing on the uses of hemp, to aid in fulfilling
the UN sustainable development goals.
This mobilization was supported by a dozen leaders
of the Mexican Cannabis Movement and a large number of
lgbttti+ activists, so we planted a hundred cannabis plants
Cannabis Speaks Out
on Mexico City’s most important avenue, where the big-
gest demonstrations are held.
As a result, the doors of the Senate opened to us and
other similar collectives to lobby for the bill that would
regulate the uses of cannabis. That was when I decided
to open up and democratize the discussion and invite all
the movement activists in order to make sure that the
law would not only favor a minority but be detrimental
to most of the population, mainly the peasants. That is,
we wanted a law that would promote repairing the dam-
age done by the call to the “war on the narcos,” since it was
the cause of the violation of human rights in our country,
above all in vulnerable communities, including indige-
nous peoples, farm laborers, and members of the lgbttti+
community, affected by this failed public policy.
It is well-known that we cannabis activists joined to-
gether to take over the outside grounds of the Senate,
sowing more than 1,000 cannabis plants to make a series
of social demands agreed upon by all the collectives and
activists. However, we still haven’t seen that law come
into being as a safe access to respect for human rights,
spaces for consumption, the right to grow our own mar-
ihuana, and regulations based on technical, scientific,
and legal knowledge.
After three years, our camp outside the Senate was
removed. So, we’re regrouping to carry out the largest dem-
onstration of cannabis users in the history of Mexico to
show that we’re not giving up: for each cannabis plant
they take away from us, we’ll grow two.
I have recovered my access to treatment. The new drug
does not cause the secondary effects that led me to use
marihuana, which is why I’ve stopped consuming it. But,
as thanks, I’ve decided to continue the struggle and do
everything possible so Mexicans can exercise their rights
based on the constitutional principles of freedom and non-
discrimination.
If cannabis is giving us a second chance, let’s take full
advantage of it.

Notes
1 “420,” “4:20,” or “4/20” are all terms used in the cannabis commu-
nity to refer to April 20, when the cultivation and consumption
of marihuana are celebrated in many parts of the world. People
also pick 4:20 in the afternoon of April 20 as the high point of the
celebration. [Editor’s Note.]
33
Voices of Mexico 120
Carlos Emiliano Derbez de la Cruz*
The Geopolitics of Illicit Crops
South-South Cooperation for
Sustainable Biocultural Development
T
he United States fosters today’s International
Drug Control Regime (idcr) to impose a hegemo­
n­ic hardline drug policy. It is intended as a tool
for political and territorial control over the traditional
producers of psychoactive plants such as peyote, can­
nabis, psylocibin mushrooms, and coca leaf in Latin Amer­
ica and the Caribbean.
This international legal framework typifies these plant
species as dangerous narcotics whose traditional, religious,
or recreational use outside the Western medical canon
must be abolished. To do this, drastic measures must be
taken, such as the massive destruction of crops, the crim­
inalization of users, and the prosecution of its sale, all
* Carlos received his bachelor’s in international relations
from the San Luis College. You can contact him at
derbezcarlos1993@gmail.com.
34
Terre di cannabis/Unsplash.com
with the supposed objective of reducing supply in the
major consumer markets of the global North.
This article proposes we reconsider the psychoactive
plants as extremely valuable genetic resources that indig­
enous peoples and local communities have traditional
knowledge of. For that reason, they should be protected
for sustainable use under the Nagoya Protocol on Access
to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of
Benefits Arising from their Utilization to the Convention
on Biological Diversity, also known as the Nagoya Proto­
col on Access and Benefit Sharing (npabs). Mechanisms of
legal harmonization, interregional cooperation, and sus­
tainable development should be created in the face of
the growing international debate about the regulation
of can­nabis, the inclusion of psychedelic drugs in Western
medicine, the multiplication of transnational interests
associated with the agri-pharmaceutical industry, and

the readjustment of geopolitical realities in the twenty-
first century.
U.S. and British Narco-imperialism
and the Geopolitics of Drugs
The international legislation that makes up the modern
International Drug Control Regime includes three UN trea­
ties: the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961;
the Convention on Psychotropic Substances of 1971; and
the United Nations Convention against Illicit Traffic in
Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances of 1988.
Each of these was influenced by the rise and consolida­
tion of the United States as the hegemonic political, eco­
nomic, and military power after World War II.
As mentioned above, this regime classifies psychoac­
tive plants considered sacred among first peoples as dan­
gerous narcotics. In addition, the norms establish a detailed
mechanism for supervising the development, provision,
and commercialization of controlled psychotropic med­
ications, emphasizing the difference between illicit drugs
and psychotropic drugs in favor of protecting the inter­
ests of the Euro-U.S.-American pharmaceutical industry.
These treaties are exclusionary, as are, for example,
the rules that smaller or weaker countries must follow
in the concert of nations. That is, these legal instruments are
not the product of conviction, but rather the imposition
of the interests of the strongest nations in the interna­
tional community. Neither do they show solidarity with
the cultural reality or the interests of Latin American and
Caribbean countries, the birthplace and historical provid­
ers of psychoactive plant genetic resources. This reflects
the imperial criteria of their greatest promotor, ignoring
and excluding the multicultural nature of indigenous peo­
ples and rural communities’ traditional wisdom, whether
it be medicinal, spiritual, religious, or other.
The prohibitionist doctrine has been used as the jus­
tification for the United States to declare its war on drugs
and promote its unilateral certification in this matter since
the 1970s. The result has been a number of security coop­
eration policies implemented since then, such as Opera­
tion Condor, Plan Colombia, or the Mérida Initiative. The
idea was to eliminate the drug supply, which is actually
an insidious cover-up of the defense of their geopolitical
interests, intervention in internal affairs, and the intrusion
Cannabis Speaks Out
After decades of demonization
and criminalization, then, psychedelic
drugs are about to take their place in
traditional psychiatry. Many researchers suggest
that these substances can help in treating
diseases such as depression, anxiety,
post-traumatic stress, and addictions
to other substances.
into the privacy of ordinary citizens. This has widespread
secondary effects such as the strengthening of criminal
organizations, human rights violations, and the diversi­
fication of the drug supply.
Similarly, despite the open declaration of war against
the supply of Latin American narcotics and the adoption
of international commitments to that end, figures from
the Latin American elites (politicians, bankers, business­
persons, members of the military, and high-ranking police
officers) have been suspected of offering protection and
financial advisory services, and even being partners in
trafficking. This is due to the extreme profitability of a seem­
ingly unending business; this was the case of Mexico’s for­
mer minister for public security, Genaro García Lu­na.1 The
emergence and strengthening of organized crime groups
has guaranteed these actors great influence in Latin Amer­
ican economies, societies, and culture, with the result that
they have consolidated themselves as com­­panies with trans­
national stature in a context of asymmetrical interde­
pendence between the global North and South.
Psychedelic Medicine and Sacred Plants
The tendency to abuse psychoactive plants and its effects
have been the main reasons for banning and stigma­
tizing them. However, in recent years, they have sparked
the interest of Western medicine. This has led to the autho­
rization of hundreds of clinical trials in universities all
over the world, and for some time now, a great deal of
evidence has been produced about the therapeutic ef­
fects of the phytocomponents found in cannabis (canna­
binoids, terpenes, flavonoids, etc.). In recent years, after
deliberations by a group of experts convened by the World
Health Organization, the UN issued a series of recommen­
dations to its Commission on Narcotic Drugs (cnd) member
35
Voices of Mexico 120
states to recognize the medicinal usefulness of cannabis
and withdraw it from the drug control lists that had cat­
alogued it as dangerous.
After decades of demonization and criminalization,
then, psychedelic drugs are about to take their place in
traditional psychiatry. Many researchers suggest that these
substances can help in treating diseases such as depres­
sion, anxiety, post-traumatic stress, and addictions to other
substances. For example, researchers at the Johns Hopkins,
Yale, and California Universities, as well as the Mount
Sinai Hospital have created research departments for
psychedelics.
The Open Society Foundation, the Multidisciplinary
Association for Psychedelic Studies (maps), the RiverStyx
Foundation, and the Aurora Foundation, among many oth­
er organizations, develop and finance multiple projects
to change society’s relationship to psychoactive plants and
foster research into their potential medicinal and thera­
peutic potential. This augurs psychedelic medications
entering into the pharmaceutical market. One relevant
example is the medical care company Compass Pathways,
which in recent years has earned US$240 million, is listed
on Nasdaq, and carries out clinical therapeutical studies
in ten countries researching the use of psilocybin to treat
depression.
Ironically, Latin America and the Caribbean have a bad
reputation because of the stigma of being the main pro­
ducers and suppliers of psychoactive plants. This distracts
attention from the fact that our region is probably the
world’s richest in genetic biodiversity useful for the trans­
national pharmaceutical industry. This highly valuable
genetic wealth, that the first peoples above all have been
building and refining into centuries-old biocultural wisdom
despite prohibitionism, deserves to be protected today,
along with the species themselves. It is the responsibility
of Latin American governments to do this using manda­
tory legal mechanisms that also guarantee sustainable,
responsible access to the monetary and non-monetary
benefits derived from their use.
What Is the Nagoya Protocol?
In the framework of the Convention on Biological Diver­
sity, the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit Sharing
(npabs) is a specialized international accord aimed at
36
regulating access to plant, animal, or fungal genetic resourc­
es associated with traditional knowledge, such as that which
leads to the genetic improvement of species. Its provi­
sions seek to combat bio-piracy2 and the plunder of germ­
plasm,3 promote sustainable use and the conservation
of biodiversity,4 together with fostering the fair, equitable
distribution of the benefits derived from enjoying those
resources by indigenous peoples and rural communities.
By signing and ratifying this protocol, states commit
to adopting legislative, administrative, and public policy
measures to ensure conditions for the fair and equitable
distribution of monetary and non-monetary benefits. To
do so, they must base their action on the main pillars of
the system of access set out in the protocol: well-found­
ed, prior consent and mutually agreed-upon conditions.
These principles aim to empower indigenous peoples’
decisions and participation in international markets through
contracts based on revaluing their millennia-old knowl­
edge, establishing a multilateral, worldwide mechanism
for access and participation in the benefits, building trans­
border bridges of cooperation, establishing national focal
points, designating competent national authorities for
raising awareness in society, and supervising the compli­
ance of the commitment to fair and equitable distribution.
Generally speaking, the Convention on Biological Di­
versity calls on states to legislate and build public policies
based on their territorial, social, economic, and other spec­
ificities. This does not preclude the possibility of binational
or multinational accords among the convention’s signers.
Transborder cooperation must be a priority for Latin Amer­
ica and the Caribbean. This region contains most of the
so-called mega-diverse countries (Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia,
Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, and Ven­
ezuela), which concentrate the greatest diversity of flora
and an enormous number of species and varieties of
fungi, lichen, and micro-organisms that can be protected
through joint legal stipulations for applying the protocol.
South-South Cooperation for
Multipolar Development
The concept of multi-polarity in international relations
refers to the concurrence of two or more dominant actors
in international organization and management in which
none becomes preponderant. For some years a debate

The absence of a harmonized
regional criterion about the use of
psychoactive plants produced in our
lands has undoubtedly been something
of geostrategic scope that favors
the appetite of extraterritorial
actors for raw materials.
has raged about the loss of U.S. world hegemony, China’s
emergence as a geo-economic power, Russia’s military
importance, and the general rearrangement of the world’s
geopolitical conditions and interests.
In this push and pull among global titans, a small win­
dow of opportunity has opened up for Latin America and
the Caribbean to reconsider the geopolitical relevance of
its immense genetic biodiversity, its importance for the
transnational pharmaceutical and agricultural industries,
and the need to establish a completely autonomous, sov­
ereign drug policy.
As mentioned above, many of these sacred plants have
been labeled diabolic, destructive to our “race,” and lack­
ing in benefits for humanity. This has been the case for a
long time without appealing to a critical view that would
analyze and consciously and sustainably take up the best
of these plant resources for humanity.
Today, private entities all over the world seek to prof­
it from the genetic diversity of first peoples’ territories and
millennia-old knowledge. Among them are may organi­
zations dedicated to developing modified varieties and
registering industrial patents. This can lead to mechanisms
for appropriating varieties that should be in the public
domain, favoring intellectual property and the economic
profits remaining in few hands.
Given this scenario, Latin American and Caribbean
governments, businesspersons, and civil society organiza­
tions must unify their efforts to redefine the Latin Ameri­
can paradigm around psychoactive plants with therapeutic
potential. Multilateral coordination among countries of
the global South must aim for the construction of a re­
gional system of cooperation and defense of territorial
biodiversity. This should be based on the inter-operation­
ality and complementariness of capabilities and joint
coordinated action for the technological development of
reciprocal benefits, which would include funding programs
Cannabis Speaks Out
for biocultural conservation projects, and advocacy and
research for fair, sustainable use in the framework of the
Nagoya Protocol.
These types of programs will be important steps for
the construction of sustainable routes toward inclusive
development, the creation of new jobs, the stimulation of
financial independence for vulnerable groups, and the
promotion of better health systems and quality education
based on the principle of restorative justice. They will also
make for the proper use of young people’s capabilities and
the power of technological development in order to promo­
te an environment of personal development and foster
creativity, both of vital importance for the world of peace,
prosperity, and inclusion we all hope for.
Further Reading
Amira Armenta, M. J., “Las convenciones de drogas de la
onu. Guía básica,” October 2015, https://www.tni.org/
es/publicacion/las-convenciones-de-drogas-de-la-
onu#5.
Jacobs, A., “Una revolución psicodélica llega a la psiquia­
tría,” July 9, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/es/2021
/05/15/espanol/psicodelicos-mdma-extasis-psilocibi­
na-salud-mental.html?auth=login-google1tap& login
=google1tap.
Secretaría del Convenio sobre la Diversidad Biológica,
“Pro­tocolo de Nagoya sobre el acceso a los recursos ge­
néticos y participación justa y equitativa de los bene­
ficios que se deriven de su utilización según el Convenio
sobre la Diversidad Biológicam” (Montreal: un Environ­
ment Programme, 2011).

Notes
1 Member of the cabinet of former President Felipe Calderón Hino­
josa (2006-2012) of the right-wing National Action Party (pan). [Edi­
tor’s Note.]
2 Bio-piracy is the illegal use of biodiversity of developing countries
to develop products and services that lead to the unauthorized com­
mercial exploitation of genetic resources.
3 Germplasm consists of the genes that make it possible to perpetu­
ate a species or a group of organisms.
4 I use the word “sustainable” in the sense of using biological diversity
in a way that does not cause it to decrease in the long run, therefore
maintaining the possibilities of satisfying the needs of current and
future generations.
37
Voices of Mexico 120
Fernando A. Gracián de Alba*
Cannabis as
Political Subject in
Mexico: From the
Countryside to
the City and Back
T
he almost 2 million square kilometers of our coun-
try are home to a multitude of people differenti-
ated by their languages, knowledge, and ways of
life. Among them, historically, there is an identity dispute
about what it means to be born in Mexico. International
coordination, which has peaked thanks to the communi-
cations and problems shared due to industrialization, al-
lows us to understand how each decision inside and outside
our nation-state plays a role in today’s world dynamics.
To sketch a map of Mexican cultures, we can propose
superimposing two population fields and making an anal-
ogy with the image of the eagle and the nopal cactus, which
would allude to marginalized populations, the heirs of
the memory and ways of life prior to the Spanish landing,
and whose survival everywhere in the country is based
on subsistence economies.
That is, the eagle landing on the nopal to indicate
where the Mexican civilization should be founded refers
us today to the populations established at the centers that
house the republic’s branches of government. For de-
cades now, together with industrial and institutional ac-
tivities, these have marked the way toward the horizons
* Fernando is a social psychologist, a grower, and a contributor to
different civil society organizations linked to cannabis activism.
You can contact him at f.a.gracian@gmail.com.
38
Graciela López/Cuartoscuro.com
of the globalized market and filtered the political struggle
for survival through the discussions of the North Amer-
ican economic bloc.
This analogy should serve to think about a not-so-
recent political subject emerged from the coexistence of
cannabis with the inhabitants of Mexico.
Health, Security, and Prohibitionism
The United Nations took it upon itself to create interna-
tional conditions to allow for a unique specific surveillance
of plants used as a means of exchange in the public health
crises prior to the Cold War. The United Nations Confer-
ence for a Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, held in
New York in 1961, as well as the special commissions and
national bodies derived from it in the following decades,
molded the precise strategies that police and trade coor-
dination would use for fieldwork, transportation, and dis-
tribution of goods based on the experiences of contraband
over the last hundred years.
The activities involving cannabis, opium, alcohol, and
cocaine continued the Mexican and U.S. governments’
prohibitionist approach in the early 1920s. Public policies
on the use of space, the determination of who had legal

The “narco-states” of the second
half of the twentieth century,
which had become an articulated world
oligopoly, were one of the main
reasons for changing the way the drug
problem was being handled.
standing, the relationship between the state and the coun-
tryside (which would culminate a century later with the
UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other Peo-
ple Working in Rural Areas, approved in New York in De-
cember 2018), and the broad spectrum of public health
were completely molded by what would thereafter be
called “the drug problem.” Persons involved with these
species would be classified as criminals and accused of
poisoning people and degenerating the human race.
Mexico would be the first to deal with this issue ex-
perimentally, linking it to public health. President Lázaro
Cárdenas’s administration (1934-1940) gave Dr. Leopoldo
Salazar Viniegra, the head of the Office of Drug Addiction
and the Drug Addicts’ Hospital to write the first Federal
Drug Addiction Regulation. The focus was on prophylaxis:
that is, the prevention and treatment of addictions, orient­
ing the use and distribution of the substances and the
treatment of consumers toward a strict medical follow-up
by the government. Nevertheless, U.S. foreign policy would
push the initiative back into the field of prohibition, put-
ting an end to the experiment.1
The local confrontation became international. Due
to the accusation of providing resources to organizations
deemed terrorists, the fight against drugs became the
slogan of the Cold War in the Americas. This would be
the starting point for Operation Condor, during which the
hemisphere’s governments would use police and military
forces against opponents to the economic plan they had
agreed upon. This period would also be known as the
“Dirty War” in Mexico in the 1970s; much later, the Mérida
Initiative or “War against Drugs” would extend this con-
flict to other territories and the next generations in the pre­s­
idential periods begun in 2006 and 2012.
Specialists mention three effects of the war against
drugs in Latin America.2 First of all, the so-called “bal-
loon” effect, a kind of cat-and-mouse hunt expanded the
territory of the organized crime linked to the black mar-
ket. This would give rise to the “membrane” effect, which
Cannabis Speaks Out
would push crops and transportation toward borders
between countries. The third was the “mercury” effect,
which mobilized the crops of the banned species toward
the basins and micro-basins in natural areas that were
difficult to access. These three effects, together with the
arms race and its informal market, gave rise to clusters
of businesses, authentic mini-cartels, that made the in-
ternational conflicts proliferate, feeding the need for
recruitment and the speed with which the market has
radicalized.
When the globalized world began to visualize what
ultra-prohibitionism was causing, regulatory plans began
to unfold seriously and effectively. The “narco-states” of the
second half of the twentieth century, which had become
an articulated world oligopoly, were one of the main reasons
for changing the way the drug problem was being handled.
Just like in the case of alcohol and opium, the weapons-
based approach progressed to one linked to the pharmaceu­
tical industry and agribusiness. At that point, the United
States and Canada began to develop regulatory strategies
for products derived from cannabis and the work linked
to them and quality, safety, and health standards.
Cannabis Activism and
The Promised Regulations
These new attitudes allow us to see in retrospect the most
conflictive points about the security and economic deci-
sions for North America. It is no coincidence that migration,
border policies, militarization, and the weapons market
are among the priority issues at meetings of the three
countries’ leaders. The speeches and discussions about
the role of the cartels, military authorities and former au-
thorities that form part of this network, and the ex-chang-
es of agricultural products that enter this economic bloc
indicate the rhythms proposed for coordinating the
bloc with regard to including the industry of consumer
products (ranging from medications to potato chips). Sub-
stances previously known as drugs have been added to this
list, as well as the agreements about the populations that
are part of their market flow.
This is how cannabis-related public policies, as well
as those involving other species from which psychoactive
substances are extracted, are a sensitive nerve for the cit-
izenry’s legitimate condition. So, understanding the
39
Voices of Mexico 120
activism associated with it as an actor in the new century
is also approaching the feeling the population has about
the experiences and complaints of our time.
The self-styled Mexican cannabis activists use the re-
view of international experiences about what has been
called “the drug problem” to demonstrate the main reason
for the need to replace a security approach with a public
health approach. Thanks to civil society participation, the
experiences show how every act of resistance pressured
the government to begin to work on this.
The discussion about drugs is not moving toward the
human rights terrain. With the ferment of organized coun-
terculture as the basis for the emergence of civil society as
an international actor, non-governmental organizations,
their associated entrepreneurial projects, and the protest
culture that grew in times of authoritarianism firmly con-
vened the plurality of groups to position themselves in the
face of the new century’s different crises. Their claims,
successively integrated into the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights and the bodies born of it, today recognize
the right to the free development of the personality, to ac-
cess to health, and to a decent life. The very same rights
that would be demanded by the organizations fighting for
the leisure and medicinal use of cannabis.
In Mexico, this came to fruition with the appearance
of the Mexican Association of Cannabis Studies (Ameca)
and the first international march in favor of cannabis con-
sumers. To this can be added the foundation of civil orga-
nizations such as the Collective for a Comprehensive Drug
Policy, Mexico United Against Crime (mucd), the Mexican
Society of Responsible, Tolerant Self-consumption (smart),
and the Collective for a Comprehensive Drug Policy, as
well as an incipient group of legislative bills in the early
2000s. Finally, after the establishment of the Center for
Economic Research and Teaching (cide) Drug Policy Pro-
gram, and with the support of the Transform Drug Policy
international non-governmental organization, studies that
looked to create regulatory policies with a comprehen-
sive and multidisciplinary perspective were disseminat-
ed in the Mexican government.
In 2017, with support from the U.S. embassy, the Mex-
ican government implemented the National Survey on
Drug, Alcohol, and Tobacco Consumption (Encodat), 2016-
2017.3 Later, the National Bioethics Commission and its
council’s president at the time, Manuel H. Ruiz de Chávez,
together with the National Council of Science and Tech-
40
The Tetecala Plan, signed November
28, 2021, would back cannabis activism,
already fostered by establishments
authorized by Cofepris permits, and many
ejido collective farm owners and
peasants in their right to grow cannabis
to improve their living conditions.
nology (Conacyt), would coordinate the compilation Bioéti­
ca y salud publica en la regularización de la marihuana (Bioethics
and Public Health in Regularizing Marihuana). To prepare
the compilation, they convened a consulting technical
committee made up of professionals from different key
national and international research and development
bodies. Among them were the Council of Europe Interna-
tional Cooperation Group on Drugs and Addiction, also
known as the Pompidou Group, the United Nations Office
Against Drugs and Crime (unodc), the different Mexican
government ministries involved in the problem, and the
institutes and autonomous universities with academic
production around this issue.
Following a multidisciplinary, comprehensive analysis,
this work formulates the following recommendations,
among others:
• Transform the “vicious cycle” into a “virtuous cycle”
that would develop treatment and rehabilitation pol-
icies for individuals and communities using a distrib-
utive justice approach that recognizes all persons who
are already part of the economic activities linked to
the plant, based on the effort to create a balance be-
tween individual freedoms and collective obligations.
• Monitor the interrelated dimensions of supply, demand,
context, and policies: there is a risk related to the im-
plementation of public policies that regulate the
adult and medicinal consumption of the plant. This
implies the production of infrastructure for systems
for information, traceability, control, and follow-up.
• The profit margin that marihuana offers the oligop-
olies of legal drugs makes it necessary to include
in the discussion about regulation and public poli-
cies the aspects of the culture of illegality and orga-
nized crime that permeate the entire population
and the way that the new market dynamics should

help the so-called “vulnerable sectors,” affected his-
torically by the drug problem.4
From the Countryside to the City
The changes in the General Health Law recognize the
plant’s therapeutic value and its presence in the market
is tolerated given that it is an herbal remedy according
to the Health Inputs Regulations, supervised by the Fed-
eral Commission for the Protection against Health Risks
(Cofepris). However, a federal law has still not been passed
to deal with the therapeutic value or the adult and/or
leisure uses of the plant.
The pro-cannabis ngos jointly presented the legal pe-
titions needed for jurisprudence to establish the historic
2018 second Declaration of Unconstitutionality handed
down. This decision ended the ban on activities related to
the production and consumption of cannabis, leaving its
legislative future in the hands of the courts and the Con-
gress. The Cofepris was also authorized to issue special
permits based on the decision.
The 2017 bioethical recommendations would be re-
ferr­­ed to the institutions created specifically to deal with
the plant or to the National Commission against Ad-
dictions (Conadic) in each of the proposals that went
through the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies. At that
point, the Covid-19 pandemic concentrated all attention
regarding public health.
Cannabis activism then reinforced its activities with
civic and cultural peace participation: the Mexican Can-
nabis Movement, born in February 2020 in Mexico City’s
downtown area, would organize the 420 Sit-in, a peaceful
protest that set up a tent encampment and cannabis cul-
tivation right next to Mexico’s Senate.
Cultivation as social protest has made it possible for
people linked to the cannabis market to participate in this
form of exercise of civil rights. The production of items
like corn, tomatoes, and vegetables in general was coordi-
nated with imports and exports, leaving to one side food
autonomy and sustainability. One hundred ten years af-
ter the signing of the Ayala Plan, which returned the land
to its legitimate owners, the peasants, marihuana was on
its way to following the same road.
Inspired in the living memory of that Zapatista struggle,
the Tetecala Plan, signed November 28, 2021, in Tetecala
Cannabis Speaks Out
de la Reforma in the state of Morelos, would back can-
nabis activism, already fostered by establishments au-
thorized by Cofepris permits, and many ejido collective
farm owners and peasants in their right to grow canna-
bis to improve their living conditions.5
Exercising the rights to freely grow, do scientific re-
search, and foster a culture of peace and online transpar-
ency are now the basis for the different crops being grown
as protest in northern and central Mexico. The interac-
tions among civic associations fostering this new social
movement and the Mexican government should be close-
ly watched; until now, they have begun communicating
in a climate of tolerance.
Thus, cannabis activism in favor of a plant persecut­
ed for more than a century, together with people who were
previously considered junkies, dealers, or criminals in the
broad sense of the word, would close the gap that may
remain between political protest, urbanized civil society,
and social participation to promote life in the country-
side, a central activity for consolidating nations.
The presence of cannabis in the political sphere and
its dynamic in different circles of Mexican society (the
peasantry, the legislature, commerce, health, and a broad
etc.) is at a turning point because of the announced “free-
dom to cultivate.” Once again, we are before a different
paradigm from that of other parts of the world, implicit in
cultivating the land and at the same time surviving based
on the fruits of that labor.

Notes
1 For more about this issue, see Secretaría de Cultura, “En 1940 Lá­
za­ro Cárdenas legalizó las drogas en México,” Segob, May 6, 2019,
https://www.gob.mx/cultura/articulos/en-1940-lazaro-cardenas-
legalizo-las-drogas-en-mexico?idiom=es#:~:text=En%201940%
2C%20%C3%BAltimo%20a%C3%B1o%20de,de%20drogas%20
como%20un%20delito. [Editor’s Note.]
2 Guillermo Garat, El camino. Cómo se reguló el cannabis en Uruguay se­gún
sus actores políticos y sociales, (Montevideo: Manosanta Desarro­llo Edi-
torial, 2015), pp. 40-41.
3 Comisión Nacional contra las Adicciones, “Encuesta Nacional de
Consumo de Drogas, Alcohol y Tabaco, Encodat 2016-2017,” Gobier­
no de México, November 28, 2017, https://www.gob.mx/salud%7C
conadic/acciones-y-programas/encuesta-nacional-de-consumo-de
-drogas-alcohol-y-tabaco-encodat-2016-2017-136758. [Editor’s Note.]
4 Manuel H. Ruiz de Chávez, Érika Salinas de la Torre, and Gustavo
Olaiz Barragán, comps., Bioética y salud pública en la regularización de la
marihuana (Mexico City: Fontamara, 2017), pp. 23-38, 59-70, and 81-92.
5 Nathaniel Janowitz, “Mexico’s Cannabis Growers are Going Rogue,”
Vice World News, https://www.vice.com/en/article/akewjg/mexico-
rogue-cannabis-growers, June 15, 2022, accessed January 25, 2023.
41
Voices of Mexico 120
Christian Herrera Medina*
The Consequences of Marihuana
Legalization in the United States for
Mexico’s Illegal Drug Economic System
Introduction
This article describes some characteristics of the illegal
drug market, criminal organizations’ profits from mari­
huana sales in the United States, and this lucrative busi­
ness’s collapse after the legalization of cannabis in some
U.S. states. I also offer some reflections about the ongoing
violence in Mexico despite legalization, the ongoing prob­
lems of the illegal drug market, and the need for an al­
ternative to current policy.
* Christian is a technical research assistant at the unam
Institute for Economic Research (iiec) and an assistant
professor in the unam School of Economics, you can contact
him at chris.iiec@comunidad.unam.mx.
42
Cuartoscuro.com
The Economic Consequences of Prohibition
and the Illegal Drug Economic System
The prohibition of certain drugs has caused the emergence
of a series of social problems that link up with others. To
poverty, marginalization, inequality, and social exclusion
in Mexico are added the violence associated with the com­
petition between criminal organizations dedicated to the
production and trade of illegal drugs. As if that were not
enough, added to this are the cases of poisoning and deaths
by overdose.
In the productive sphere, the ban implies that tech­
nological and sanitary conditions are not applied. It means
that the commercial price is profitable even for drugs pro­
duced in the worst conditions, leading to the criminals not
following quality standards designed to protect their

clients’ health. Rather, this circumstance leads to clandes­
tine production, and, when difficulties arise in the United
States for processing these substances, international
manufacture and trafficking increases in order to supply
the U.S. market.
In the commercial sphere, prohibition also creates a
criminal barrier for legally established businesses. In­
creased demand for drugs is not reflected in increased
supply, thus maintaining this market in constant disequi­
librium. In addition, disinformation prevents consumers
from easily tracing drug suppliers, who take advantage
of this by arbitrarily selling their products in segmented
monopoly markets.
As a result, the permanent imbalance between supply
and demand for forbidden drugs creates, in turn, an imba­
lance between the real value and the prohibition-linked
market price. This means that the problem of illegal drugs
is not simply that they are expensive —rather, they are
very cheap to produce if compared to the final price to the
consumer—, but that they also generate disproportion­
ate prices of illegal substances between the United States
and other countries.
For example, the United Nations Office on Drugs and
Crime (unodc) estimated that in 1994, the price of pure
heroine in Pakistan was US$900/kilo, while its street val­
ue in the United States was US$725,000. In 1997, the U.S.
Drug Enforcement Agency (dea) stated that a kilo of pure
cocaine cost US$1,050 in Peru, while on the street in the
United States, it was US$188,000.
Prohibition fosters artificially maintaining a market
price for these products, so that trade in them becomes
a profitable business if other actors are prevented from
participating, meaning they are sold for much more than
their real value. This disparity is the main source of crim­
inal organizations’ profits; they use their high incomes
—much higher than those obtained in other, legal econo­
mic activities— to hire security forces, which are also illegal
(including hitmen), bribes (to authorities, for example),
arms purchases, etc. This explains the connivance of cer­
tain authorities responsible for Mexico’s security with
criminal organizations to guarantee these drugs’ produc­
tion and circulation.
All this makes for a very profitable business, since it
maintains a continual flow of money and constitutes a
process of capital accumulation that implies sui generis
expenditures for circulation. Although these sorts of crim­
Cannabis Speaks Out
inal organizations do not pay taxes or give employees
benefits, they do pay to remain in the market.
Mexican Criminal Organizations’
Participation in the U.S. Illegal Marihuana
Market before Legalization
Prohibition causes illegal drugs to be sold at a much
higher price than their value, and this is also the case of
marihuana. Mexico was the main provider to the United
States in the twentieth century due to the drop in produc­
tion there because it was banned, the resulting increased
price, the proximity and length of the border between the
two countries, and the facilities for growing it in Mexico.
The discrepancy in price from its real value was exac­
erbated in the United States, both because it was banned
and because demand was higher than supply, limited be­
cause it was illegal. For example, in 1969, the price per kilo
in Mexico oscillated between US$25 and US$30, while in
the United States, it was between US$80 and US$175. In
1970, a kilo was selling in Sinaloa for between US$35 and
US$50, while in the United States, it cost between US$100
and US$200. By 1974, while in Mexico it sold for between
US$35 and US$100, in the United States it had reached
US$500.1
In 2002, researcher Sergio Aguayo estimated that a kilo
of marihuana cost between US$100 and US$500 in Mexico,
while in the United States, it cost US$2,300.2 It is imme­
diately evident that the main driving force for the illicit
cannabis trade when it was banned was the dispropor­
tion between the commercial prices in the two countries,
and also the inexistent legal supply in the United States,
which was replaced by illegal Mexican marihuana.
Consequences of the U.S. Legalization
Of Marihuana on Mexico’s
Illegal Drugs System
Marihuana has not been legalized uniformly in the Unit­
ed States since every state that has legalized recreational
or medicinal consumption has done so through amend­
ments to the federal ban. Today, thirty-seven states allow
medicinal consumption and twenty-one, recreational use.
The dea recognizes that legal marihuana production has
43
Voices of Mexico 120
displaced illegal U.S. production, not only quantitatively,
but also qualitatively. While legal U.S. marihuana is 24 per­
cent to 26 percent tetrahydrocannabinol (thc), Mexican
marihuana’s concentration is only 4 percent to 6 percent,
according to the May 2001 National Drug Intelligence Cen­
ter (ndic) California Central District Drug Threat Assessment.3
The unodc points to a fall in per-kilo price of illegal
marihuana in Mexico, since from the US$80 it cost in
2009, it dropped to US$56.64 in 2019. In the United
States, it has plummeted even more, from an average of
US$10,000 in 2015 to as low as US$2,000 in 2020 accord­
ing to the dea.4 In the last few years, marihuana growers
in Sinaloa receive Mex$400/kilo, when before they were
getting Mex$1,200 for the same amount.5
As part of the global productive chain, the drop in the
illegal demand for Mexican marihuana due to the legal­
ly offered U.S. cannabis on the market reduced the income
not only of those producers, but also of the traffickers and
the holders of the capital derived from illicit marihuana.
Decline in Illegal Mexican Marihuana Exports
The drop in prices for that marihuana is accompanied
by the drop in supply, and this trend is reflected in the
seizures along the U.S. border: while in 2009, 1.5 million
kilos were confiscated, by 2020, the number had dropped
to 230,000 kilos according to the dea.6
On the Mexican side, the drop in marihuana produc­
tion for export is mentioned in President Andrés Manuel
López Obrador’s third annual report: while in 2010 the
federal government reported having seized 112.3 tons of
marihuana, in 2019 the number would drop to 26.9 tons
and to 0.5 tons in 2020.7 While in 2003, the government
had identified and destroyed 36,585.3 hectares of mar­
ihuana fields, by 2020, the number had dropped to
2,903.7 hectares.
One might think that a drop in the area of marihuana
fields eradicated and the seizures were the result of the
armed forces focusing more on fighting synthetic drugs
like fentanyl. However, temporarily, these figures came
after the legalization of marihuana in U.S. territory. This
means we can also conclude that, together with a decline
in demand for Mexican product there, its dropping price
has meant lower profits, thus unleashing a decline in the
illegal production of Mexican marihuana for export.
44
The drop in the illegal demand for Mexican
marihuana due to the legally offered U.S.
cannabis on the market reduced the income
not only of those producers, but also of
the traffickers and the holders of the capital
derived from illicit marihuana.
On the other hand, the ban of the rest of illicit drugs
continues, which means that the market conditions con­
tinue, making for a discrepancy, as we have seen, be­
tween the real value and the price of drugs like opioids,
cocaine, or methamphetamines.
Today, the United States is suffering from an upward
trend in both illegal drug consumption and in overdose
deaths. Despite the legalization of cannabis, which mar­
ginalizes the criminal organizations from the lucrative
business of marihuana and its derivatives, the underlying
essential conditions of the economic system of banned
drugs continues. That is, the enormous disparity between
the real value compared to the commercial value of the
drugs that continue to be illegal in the United States. This
maintains both the flow of cash that leads to the accu­
mulation of capital from illegal drug trade and the dif­
ferent forms of violence that accompany it.
Conclusions
The legalization of marihuana allows people more inde­
pendence in the exercise of their own individuality; this
involves an increase in economic activity due to the de­
velopment of markets for cannabis derivatives.
This legalization also reduces the social costs of at­
tempting to eradicate its consumption: earmarking part
of the public budget to strengthen punitive drug policy,
upping the number of shipment seizures, eradicating pro­
ductive units, and arresting and incarcerating traffickers
and consumers. Replacing illegal marihuana supply with
legal cannabis supply, plus the drop in prices, makes illegal
cannabis sales unprofitable; with this, at least for this
kind of drug, the criminals stop obtaining the substantial
benefits they received under prohibition.
However, as long as the rest of illegal drugs continue
to be banned in the United States, in Mexico, the social
problems associated with the capital accumulation based

on the traffic of banned drugs will continue to exist, as will
the economic system and the hegemonic power networks
derived from the cooperation between criminals and peo­
ple in powerful government positions.
In this sense, it is more important to look for alterna­
tives in this area. More than one hundred years of prohi­
bition have shown that, at least regarding health and
safety concerns, it has been a resounding failure. It is also
true that this policy is limited to U.S. geopolitical dynam­
ics, which makes the problem more complex, raising it to
spheres linked to national security and the armed forces.
Although marihuana has not been completely legal­
ized in Mexico, now is the time to reiterate that our country
already has significant experience in the decriminaliza­
tion of illegal drug consumption. During the administration
of President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940), a legal change
was made to classify addicts as persons with an illness
and not criminals. Public hospitals were opened specializing
in addiction, where drugs were administered at low cost,
making drug trafficking unprofitable, at the same time
that traffickers continued to be prosecuted. This same
policy, an international landmark at the time, is again
Aura Pérez*
Holy Mary
God save thee, Mary,
from prohibitionist decrees
political parties
war, blood, death, disease.
Hail Mary, full of grace,
both mirth and remedy.
Holy Mary,
a mother sexed as female
mother of us all
bearing the original sin.
Aura is a poet; you can contact her at transformacion05@gmail.com.
Cannabis Speaks Out
necessary today, not only to control the U.S. drug-related
health crisis, but also to alleviate the generalized vio­
lence in Mexico.

Notes
1 Juan A. Fernández Velázquez, El narcotráfico en los Altos de Sinaloa
(1940-1970) (Xalapa, Veracruz: Biblioteca Digital de Humanidades,
2018), pp. 47-48.
2 Sergio Aguayo, Almanaque México-Estados Unidos (Mexico City: Fon­
do de Cultura Económica, 2007), p. 246.
3 ndic, “California Central District Drug Threat Assessment. Mari­
huana,” May 2001, https://www.justice.gov/archive/ndic/pubs0/668
/marijuan.htm#Top. [Editor’s Note.]
4 dea, “National Drug Threat Assessment 2020”, March 2021,
https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2021-02/DIR-008-21%20
2020%20National%20Drug%20Threat%20Assessment_WEB.pdf.
[Editor’s Note.]
5 Óscar Báez Soto, Cultivos ilícitos. Estudios sobre la producción de mar-
ihuana y amapola en la sierra de Sinaloa (Mexico City: Instituto Nacio­
nal de Ciencias Penales, 2020), p. 57.
6 Ibid.
7 Andrés Manuel López Obrador, “Tercer Informe del presidente de
México, Andrés Manuel López Obrador,” Mexican Government, Sep­
tember 1, 2021, https://www.gob.mx/presidencia/documentos/tercer
-informe-presidente-andres-manuel-lopez-obrador. [Editor’s Note.]
Blessed art thou,
impregnated with terpene
and cannabinoids
and blessed are all of us women
who entreat thy power
finding in thee
wholeness and liberty.
Holy Mary
deliver and protect us
from all evil
and soothe us till the end.
45
Voices of Mexico 120
Marty Otañez*
Cannabis Workers’ Counterstories and
Stigma Reduction in Colorado
C
aroline, a former manager in a cannabis dispen-
sary in Colorado, said, “If you are interested in
cannabis, you should learn to grow it yourself.”
She shared this and other experiences with me as a par-
ticipant in a qualitative survey and videotaped interview
for a 2021 study of mine about the lived experiences of
cannabis employees during COVID-19. Her statement rep-
resents a common sentiment among cannabis supporters.
Also, it brings to light the wisdom of an individual who
spent over 10 years growing, trimming, and selling canna-
bis in both illicit and legal spaces. Caroline, through the
advice she offers on learning to grow your own cannabis,
shows the valuable role cannabis workers play to destig-
matize it. Presenting Caroline’s engagement in cannabis
work and culture may help increase public knowledge
* Marty is the Anthropology Department Chair, and associated
professor at the University of Colorado, Denver; you can contact
him at Marty.Otanez@ucdenver.edu.
46
ThaimaaOpas/Unsplash.com
about the growing social acceptability of cannabis pro-
duction and consumption in North America and beyond.
Caroline and other cannabis workers are entangled
in the process of cannabis normalization in Colorado and
globally. In 2023, the World Health Organization reports
that cannabis is the most widely cultivated, trafficked, and
abused illicit drug.1 This drug, or what some proponents
refer to as medicine and a plant teacher, is infused with
stigma, which refers to negative social views about can-
nabis and manifests in terms such as “devil’s lettuce.”
Stigma and discriminatory behavior against cannabis us-
ers and the sector are generally rooted in the perceived
harmful health consequences of cannabis, popular cul-
ture tropes such as the spaced-out laid-back stoner, and
its reputation as a so-called “gateway drug” to other harm-
ful substances for youth. The failed war on drugs is also
partially behind the stigma associated with cannabis that
persists today.

This drug, or what some proponents
refer to as medicine and a plant teacher,
is infused with stigma, which refers to
negative social views about cannabis
and manifests in terms such
as “devil’s lettuce.”
The realities of cannabis as a socially acceptable cul-
tural and economic phenomenon offer a remedy to anti-
drug sentiments. Consumers recognize the potential
health and wellness effects of cannabis and cannabis-
derived products, contributing to its normalization. Med-
ical patients use cannabis to help address conditions
related to cancer, seizures, Alzheimer’s disease, glauco-
ma, and several other conditions.2 Some practitioners in
the psychedelic sector are expanding the definition of
psychedelics —which refer to substances that bind with
5-HT2A receptors in the brain— to include cannabis, de-
spite that fact that the molecule tetrahydrocannabinol
(thc), the psychotropic ingredient in cannabis, binds with
cannabinoid receptors CB1 and CB2 in the brain.3 In 2022,
the legal cannabis sector in the United States supported
428,059 full-time jobs.4 The individuals who devote their
labor to the production, transportation and retail sales
of cannabis seek living wages, health benefits and labor
union rights while cannabis companies push down labor
costs to optimize profits and hire union avoidance consul­
tants to undermine workers who assert their collective
bargaining rights. While Caroline’s experiences as a can-
nabis employee may not represent the universe of cannabis
workers, her narratives stand as counter-stories to can-
nabis as a globally stigmatized substance.
After completing her college education in 2009, Caro-
line obtained a job at a pizza restaurant in Boulder, Col-
orado. To augment her hourly wage of US$8.00 per hour,
Caroline started working as a trimmer for an unlicensed
cannabis grower in the mountains near Boulder. The il-
licit cannabis sector was thriving partially due to the
legalization of medical cannabis in Colorado in 2000. She
earned US$25 per hour as a trimmer and had easy access
to a regular supply of cannabis for her own consumption.
A memorable moment for her was participating in the lo-
cal festival on April 20 to celebrate cannabis culture with
hundreds of other smokers in a large field at the Univer-
sity of Colorado Boulder. She brought large quantities of
Cannabis Speaks Out
weed and several large pizzas to the celebration, saying
“It was like a zombie movie, trying to get the pizzas through
that crowd because everyone was staring with big eyes
at these giant pizzas.” The weed from her trimming job
—that she brought to the festival and shared with friends—
contributed to the success of the unofficial holiday for
cannabis users.
Caroline shared a memory about an encounter with
police. During an ordinary shift at the pizza restaurant,
she exited the back door to an alley to take a short break.
One of her friends was outside and passed a cannabis
joint to Caroline. Before Caroline took a hit from the joint, a
police officer on a bicycle appeared, jumped off his bike,
and approached the two women. Her friend quickly put
the joint on Caroline’s arm and lied about her identity
in the conversation with the officer. The policeman let
her friend go and gave Caroline a ticket for cannabis pos-
session. She was fined US$500.00 and required to perform
fifteen hours of community service. After sharing this sto-
ry, Caroline said that many people at the time had views
about cannabis as being integrated in mainstream culture.
She suggested that police officers contributed to stigma
by calling cannabis “dope” and treating cannabis users like
criminals. However, Caroline’s encounter with the police
did not put an end to her support for cannabis. She be-
friended activists who advocated the legalization of rec-
reational cannabis in Colorado and, in 2021, Caroline
voted “yes” for the passage of Colorado Amendment 64,
which made the state one the first in the US to allow legal
use of recreational cannabis.
Seeking job stability, Caroline obtained employment
with a Denver-based community television station from
2012 to 2016. She continued to work periodically as a trim-
mer in illegal cannabis grow houses. In 2014, when im-
plementation of Amendment 64 in Colorado started and
recreational cannabis became available in retail dispen-
saries, she watched the sector increase in professionalism
and regulatory compliance. As the sector matured, Car-
oline recognized that the hourly rate of pay for trimming
cannabis in legal and illegal cultivation facilities stayed
at US$12.00 per hour. This amount was consistent no mat-
ter how much experience a person had trimming canna-
bis. The hourly rate of US$12.00 was above the minimum
hourly wage of US$8.31 in Colorado but below the living
wage rate of US$15.00, which is the amount per hour an
individual needed to be able to survive in Colorado in
47
Voices of Mexico 120
2016. Cannabis companies offered relatively low wages
to cannabis workers in a context where an expand­ing
pool of laborers was available as the state witnessed an
increase in individuals arriving from other territories
where cannabis was illegal to work in legal cannabis fa-
cilities. Caroline and other workers witnessed the devel-
opment of the labor union movement, spearheaded by
the United Food and Commercial Workers International
Union Local 7, with three unionized cannabis and hemp
businesses in Colorado in 2023.
In 2016, Caroline started a job as a budtender in a legal
retail dispensary in Denver and witnessed sexism in the
workplace. She saw several sexually explicit social media
posts on the company’s Instagram account. In a meeting
with the company’s top executive, she told him that the
company could not post sexually explicit advertisements
on the company’s social media accounts because custom-
ers were seeing these images and coming into the dis-
pensary and sexually harassing female employees. Male
customers were reaching over counters and groping fe-
male budtenders in their early 20s. Caroline was frustrat­
ed with the “sleazebag” in charge of the company’s social
media accounts. The executive reminded her that “sex
sells.” Also, he informed Caroline that he had a girlfriend
and a mother and that he was not a chauvinist. The execu-
tive was upset with Caroline, and she thought his reaction
was funny but inappropriate. She firmly believes that when
you see something that appears to be wrong you should
say something. Caroline understood that the executive’s
inability to see or address the problem meant that she
shot down any hope of becoming a store manager. She left
the company and became a manager of a licensed can-
nabis farm in southern Colorado.
In the next few years, Caroline worked different jobs
in both legal and illicit cannabis operations. When asked
about any concerns she had at the time about cannabis
workplaces, she said that the owner of the farm in south-
ern Colorado ran the company like a plantation. The farm
was in a desolate area and near several mountains. The
remote location, far from any towns or cities, likely con-
tributed to the owner approaching workers like he owned
them and treating them like cattle. Caroline managed sev-
eral employees, including a deaf woman who was a grand-
mother. According to Caroline, “She was the sweetest,
most hardworking person I’ve ever met in my life.” The
woman approached Caroline several times about the owner
48
The realities of cannabis as a socially
acceptable cultural and economic
phenomenon offer a remedy to anti-drug
sentiments. Consumers recognize the
potential health and wellness effects of
cannabis and cannabis-derived products,
contributing to its normalization.
refusing to pay her overtime. Caroline communicated the
concerns about overtime to the owner, who did not re-
spond favorably. He stated that he did not want to pay
Carolyn unemployment, a state economic benefit that
pays a nominal amount per week to individuals after an
employer terminates their job. The benefit begins after
90 days of working a full-time job in Colorado. The owner
also pointed out to Caroline that they did not get along
well with each other. Caroline agreed, but she believes that
they weren’t getting along because she did not like to
see the owner treat workers like cattle.
In subsequent cannabis jobs, Caroline trimmed more
weed and was exposed to trimming-related health and
safety issues such as powdery mildew (pm), a fungal dis-
ease that affects cannabis and other plants. It appears
as grayish and white spots and is associated with respi-
ratory problems and dermal contamination. Cannabis work-
ers often describe the problem of pm on cannabis plants
as an epidemic in Colorado, with workers seeking to pro-
tect their health and bosses preferring to overlook pm
and putting pm -infused weed on store shelves to increase
cannabis sales. Caroline narrated a time before COVID-19
when she was trimming with a group of co-workers and
saw a plant that was covered with pm. She requested a face
mask from the manager. Her co-workers asked, “What is
pm?” Caroline mentioned that cannabis workers receive
little or no education about pm, making them vulnerable
to asthma and skin irritation from pm covered cannabis
plants. She said that pm cannabis can be used safely if it
is hydrocarbon blasted with butane. This refers to an
extraction process to create cannabis concentrates such
as shatter and wax as well as oils for vape pens that con-
tain relatively high levels of thc.
According to Caroline, authorities in Colorado’s regu-
latory agencies failed to develop and implement canna-
bis testing policies. She described the situation as “The fox
watching the hen house.” Caroline presented details on

how everyone who grows legal cannabis in Colorado knows
that they are required to send samples of their cannabis
to third party testing companies. The process is suppos-
edly designed to protect consumers from cannabis con-
taminated by powdery mildew, pesticides, heavy metals,
and other harmful substances. In practice some growers
select a sample of cannabis and put the sample under
ultraviolet light for several days. The exposure to the light
removes mold spores, powdery mildew and any bugs in
the cannabis. The sample weed is sent to the agencies and
passes the testing requirement. Caroline said that just
because a sample of cannabis tested negative for any tox-
ic substances does not mean that the final cannabis prod-
ucts are free from pm and other contaminants.
To protect her health, Caroline avoided machines used
to trim weed because of the high chance of being injured.
One machine called D-Budder required loading stems of
cannabis plants into the machine and the machine hack-
ing the buds off the stem. According to Caroline, “There is
no faster way to lose a finger than getting anywhere near
the D-Budder machine.” Also, she spoke about the most
tedious part of trimming cannabis plants. A worker is
hunched over for most of a full-day shift, posing risks of
injury to an employee’s neck and back. She did her best
to manage the chronic pain in her neck and back from
trimming to increase her earnings. According to Caroline,
she was an effective employee, trimming two pounds of
dry cannabis in an eight-hour shift and earning US$15.00
per hour. The owner in one of the cannabis companies
where she worked paid US$12.50 an hour to trimmers but
increased the amount to US$15.00 for employees who
could trim two or more pounds in one eight-hour shift.
COVID-19 impacted Caroline and other cannabis work-
ers in diverse ways. She said safety protocols were well
implemented in Denver, and less satisfactorily in areas
outside of Colorado’s main urban center. Workers and cus-
tomers were required to wear masks according to state
health department requirements, which followed proto-
cols of the US Centers for Disease Control. This created
some tense moments in dispensaries regarding the value
of mask wearing and levels of commitment to mask wear-
ing by company owners. Some customers were angry about
the mask requirements and other protocols that were
implemented such as the installation of protective clear
shields at retail counters, and the inability to touch or
smell cannabis products, which was allowed prior to the
Cannabis Speaks Out
pandemic. Budtenders and managers expressed frustra-
tion with customers who refused to follow COVID-19 store
rules. Caroline witnessed some owners and top managers
who did not follow the protective measures required by
the state, making it difficult for her and other retail workers
to implement measures designed to protect the health
of cannabis workers and customers.
Caroline commented on the lack of health care re­
ceiv­ed by her and other cannabis workers. In retrospect,
she wished she had demanded health care from her em-
ployers. During COVID-19, in 2020, Caroline’s company
provided employees with US$50 hazard pay. She said that
“it would have been worse if the company did nothing,
but a $50 check was a step up from nothing.” Her employ-
er did not provide healthcare to workers. Caroline recall­ed
having to fire a budtender because she showed symp-
toms related to COVID and the general manager required
the budtender to obtain a doctor’s note to validate the
status of her health. The company paid workers US$12 per
hour and Caroline said, how can the company “require
someone to go to an emergency room to get a doctor’s
note that we know employees can’t afford.” In Denver, a
visit to the emergency room in a hospital costs about
US$125. According to Caroline, she wished she had pushed
for health care and a few more worker-friendly policies
because “I don’t think that a lot of things that our work-
ers were asked to do were right.”
Despite stigmas and other challenges in cannabis work­
places, Caroline remains passionate about cannabis. She
said, “I think that everyone should go and experience this
plant. I have all these seeds that I can’t wait to grow my-
self. If you are interested in cannabis you should learn to
grow it yourself.”

Notes
1 World Health Organization, “Cannabis,” Alcohol, Drugs and Addic­
tive Behaviors Unit, World Health Organization, www.who.int/teams/
mental-health-and-substance-use/alcohol-drugs-and-addictive-
behaviours/drugs-psychoactive/cannabis.
2 Stephanie Watson, “Medical marijuana FAQ,” WebMD, www.web-
md.com/a-to-z-guides/medical-marijuana-faq#091e9c5e8140f
487-2-4, 18 December.
3 James Halifax, “Is marijuana a psychedelic,” Psychedelic Spotlight,
https://psychedelicspotlight.com/is-marijuana-a-psychedelic, 2 Sep-
­­tember 2022.
4 Bruce Barcott and Beau Whitney, “Jobs Report 2022,” Leafly, www.
leafly.com/news/industry/cannabis-jobs-report.
49
Voices of Mexico 120
Liliana Cordero Marines*
The British Columbia First Nations’
Struggle around the Cannabis Act1
T
oday, the main goal of first nations living in the
territory known as Canada, and specifically British
Columbia, is to leave behind the damage caused
to their communities by the colonial period and the Indian
Act. The loss of most of their ancestral lands, the severe
limitations on their access to natural resources, the ag­
gressive segregationist and assimilationist policies, and
the violent incursions into the intergenerational transfer
of wisdom, weakening their communities’ linguistic and
cultural wealth, are only some examples of that damage.
This structural form of imposing inferiority that por­
trayed them as human beings incapable of deciding for
themselves what was best for them has led to the fact that
even today, they experience the most precarious living
conditions among the Canadian population. This means
that it is not by chance that they have the lowest levels of
* Liliana is a researcher at the cisan, unam; you can contact her
at lilianacordero@unam.mx.
50
Sabine Rønsen (wmno)/Commons.wikimedia.org
schooling, the worst housing conditions, and the highest
unemployment rate.
Despite this painful history, the First Nations have nev­
er been passive. On the contrary, they have developed mul­
tiple strategies to resist and counter the overwhelming
prejudice. Today, because of more than a century of poli­
tical work, these communities are organized as the As­
sembly of First Nations (afn), a body that coordinates the
management of matters related to treaties, rights, land
claims, and access to resources. The assembly is made up of
ten groups, one for each province. Along the west coast
of Canada, the 203 First Peoples are represented by the
British Columbia Assembly of First Nations (bcafn). This
structure, which links a national strategy with the regio­
nal one, defines the lines of action vis-à-vis the local and/
or federal governments.
The right to self-determination has become this move­
ment’s most important banner. And in accordance, they
have taken on the task of working to reconstruct their com­

munities and self-governments. Based on the respect for
their respective communities’ traditional and cultural con­
cepts, they develop the norms and agreements needed to
face a constantly changing world. They actively work
to build their future collectively and horizontally, appeal­
ing to unity, but respecting diversity.
In addition, the bcafn has the faculty to define its own
precepts and develop strategies and its own relations in
order to participate in Canadian political life. Its aims re­
flect the way they see the different aspects of the world
surrounding them, the relationship they have established
with the government, governance processes, the construc­
tion and reconstruction of self-governments, etc. Some of
their aims as an organization include ensuring that their
rights, culture, traditions, laws and territories are dissem­
inated, recognized, and respected; solving the problems
they face and impacting the creation of public policies; pre­
serving their cultural identity and using it as a guide for
their political work; and improving relations among their
own communities, with different parts of the government,
and with the rest of the Canadian population. At the same
time, they identify and work on priority issues such as
disasters and emergencies; the Covid-19 pandemic; man­
aging resources such as fishing and casinos; the adminis­
tration of justice; monitoring the correct implementation
of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,
gender rights, sexual diversity, children’s issues and those
of young people; the preservation of linguistic diversity;
health and well-being; job creation for members of the
First Nations; and fostering economic development.
To promote the communities’ economic development,
the bcafn’s tasks are to identify business and trade oppor­
tunities; make available information, guides, manuals, and
different tools that facilitate the creation of firms; develop
business plans, budgets, and sales and promotional strat­
egies; create business support networks; and foster pri­
vate investment in indigenous undertakings, among
other activities.
In the framework of all this, when the Cannabis Act
came into effect in 2018, it presented a big opportunity for
British Columbia’s First Nations. They think it has great
economic potential for improving the conditions of the
indigenous population, whether through the creation of
a business or participating in one. Setting up a business in
this field will create jobs and generate profits, diversify the
economy, develop skills, and offer trading options on dif­
Cannabis Speaks Out
ferent levels for these communities. They see possibilities
in the areas of working the land, processing, distribution,
sales, consumption, quality control, research, technology,
education, etc. They also think that their insertion in this
sector would require community planning to create a reg­
ulatory system in accordance with their needs, traditions,
and ways of understanding the world. This undertaking,
which includes internal training and a series of other ac­
tivities, has already begun.
One fundamental aspect that must be taken into ac­
count is that the First Nations have an ancestral relationship
to cannabis, including its medicinal, spiritual, and cere­
monial uses associated with the balance of life and well-
being. The legalization of the plant simply adds another
meaning: the possibility of improving their own economic
conditions. As a result, they think that, given their long-
standing relationship, they have the right to cultivate, pro­
cess, sell, and consume it on their lands.
One of the main arguments the bcafn bases itself on
to claim this right is the Declaration on the Rights of Indi­
genous Peoples, passed in 2007 by the UN General Assem­
bly. It should be mentioned that Canada signed this
declaration in 2010, after having rejected it when it was
first passed. However in 2019, British Columbia was the first
province to try to harmonize its local laws with the dec­
laration’s content.
Although this document is thought to have multiple
safeguards to effectively protect First Peoples’ rights, an­
alysts have also mentioned that its importance lies in
the advances regarding self-determination. Specifically, the
bcafn bases its claim to jurisdiction on cannabis on
the declaration’s following points:
• Article 3 of the United Nations Declaration on the
Rights of Indigenous Peoples (undrip) provides that
Indigenous peoples, have the right to self-determi­
nation, and the right to freely pursue their econom­
ic, social, and cultural development.
• Article 4 states that Indigenous peoples, in exercis­
ing their right to self-determination, have the right
to autonomy or self-government in matters relating to
their internal and local affairs, as well as ways and
means for financing their autonomous functions.
• Article 5 stipulates that indigenous peoples have the
right to maintain and strengthen their distinct po­
litical, legal, economic, social, and cultural institu­
51
Voices of Mexico 120
tions, while retaining their right to participate fully,
if they so choose, in the political, economic, social,
and cultural life of the State.
• Article 21 establishes Indigenous peoples’ right, with­
out discrimination, to the improvement of their eco­
nomic and social conditions.
• Article 23 provides that Indigenous peoples have the
right to determine and develop priorities and strat­
egies for exercising their right to development and to
be actively involved in development and determin­
ing economic and social programs through their own
institutions.2
Given that the national government has designed a
policy for regulating the industrialization of cannabis, a
large part of bcafn’s work provides the communities with
the information about federal guidelines, sanitary stan­
dards, strategies for overcoming the challenges on this
level, and, of course, the rights of First Peoples in this mat­
ter. However, the task has not been simple; they have
encountered many obstacles along the way.
The Cannabis Act operates within a legal framework
about possession, production, sale, and distribution of the
plant’s different varieties and derivatives. It also sets stan­
dards and rules for processing it. Enforcing the law is the
purview of Health Canada, the federal body in charge of pro­
tecting and improving all Canadians’ health and provid­ing
high quality health services. Overseeing compliance with
those regulations is a task shared by the federal, provincial,
and, to a lesser degree, the First Nations’ governments.
The federal government is responsible for issuing the
licenses for cultivation, processing, and accessing medi­
cinal cannabis; establishing producers’ obligations; and de­
fining industry guidelines and orientations with regard to
labeling and packaging requirements, promotional limi­
tations, types of products authorized, portion sizes, and
potency standards, among other things. The provincial gov­
ernments are in charge of leading the development and
implementation of procedures for ensuring that distribu­
tion and sales remain within legal limits. They must also
create measures that guarantee safe consumption, such as
setting minimum consumer age limits, the amounts they
may possess, regulating and limiting home production,
and defining rules for consumption in public places. Spe­
cifically, the British Columbia government issues permits
for small producers and acts as the wholesale distributer
52
The First Nations have an ancestral
relationship to cannabis, including
its medicinal, spiritual, and ceremonial
uses associated with the balance of life
and well-being. The legalization of the
plant simply adds another meaning:
the possibility of improving their
own economic conditions.
and administrator of the only online store. In addition, it
increased the minimum age for cultivating, purchasing,
using, and possessing non-medicinal cannabis.
In contrast with all these responsibilities of federal and
provincial institutions, the Cannabis Act stipulates that
First Nations’ self-governments, which it defines as ter­
ritorial governments, only have the faculty of restricting the
public use of the plant even more, as long as they abide
by what the public health and property law dictates. In
addition, the British Columbia government must ask for
the indigenous communities’ “support” to issue permits to
small producers. It is not clear what kind of “support” this
refers to; what is clear is that, in practice, the First Nations’
margin for action and decision-making about the posses­
sion, production, sale, and distribution of the plant is nil.
A similar situation exists with regard to the distribution
of tax monies derived from the cannabis industry. While
the federal government retains 25 percent of the income
and the provincial administration, 75 percent, the First
Nations receive nothing.
To put all this into context, it must be taken into ac­
count that the plant’s regulatory market has become a
multi-million-dollar industry. The bcafn states that in 2018
alone, once the Cannabis Act came into effect, the income
generated by commercialization came to Can$5.5 billion.
It also estimates that in 2020, total sales were approxi­
mately Can$36.9 million in British Columbia, with around
126 federal licenses operating in the province. Lastly, they
state that only a very small number of those licenses were
issued to their communities.
In addition, the bcafn working group in charge of look­
ing at Cannabis Act possibilities for economic develop­
ment has identified other kinds of difficulties that these
communities face for becoming part of the cannabis mar­
ket. One of these is access to capital, since financial bod­
ies tend to vacillate when asked for support from small

and medium-sized companies. Another is access to in­
formation, experience, and training for obtaining and de­
veloping skills. Simply the paperwork needed to ask for
a license is a challenge, not to mention its cost and the
length of the administrative process.
For all these reasons, the British Columbian First Na­
tions think that, despite the fact that the federal and pro­
vincial governments have followed the Declaration on
the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, they have not included
these peoples in creating the laws, regulations and tax
frameworks for the cannabis industry. While the UN dec­
laration gives them the right to self-determination and
to economic development, the Cannabis Act does not in­
clude or create the these communities’ jurisdiction. By con­
trast, it confers the exclusive responsibility to the federal
and provincial governments. That is to say, in this, as in
other issues, they continue to treat them as they did in the
colonial period, in the segregationist and assimilationist
phases. This means that they treat them as if they were
incapable of deciding for themselves, of participating
Cannabis Speaks Out
actively in the construction of their own future and in the
situations that come up continually as the world changes.
Until now, despite the bcafn commission’s work to deal
with these difficulties and the different recommendations
that have been made to the institutions in charge, neither
the federal nor the provincial government has offered a
resolution to any of this. The First Nations of British Co­
lumbia think that their jurisdiction under the Cannabis
Act should be included by both provincial and federal gov­
ernments as a sign of a real interest in combatting these
communities’ precarious situation, but, above all, as rec­
ognition of their rights as indigenous peoples.

Notes
1 The main information source for this article is “Cannabis Tool Kit,”
developed in 2021 by the British Columbia Assembly of First Nations
(bcafn), available at https://www.bcafn.ca/priority-areas/cannabis/
cannabis-toolkit.
2 Ibid., p. 122.
53
Voices of Mexico 120
Édgar Ramssés Pahua Quezada*
One Hundred Years of
Clandestine Medicine in Mexico
What Do One Hundred Years of Cannabis Mean in Mexico?
Clearly, these have been one hundred years of illegal-
ity, one hundred years of prohibition, of black markets,
of persecution, drug trafficking, and laws that have at-
tempted to stop cannabis cultivation. But, they have also
been more than one hundred years of cannabis in Mex-
ican traditional medicine and of families who for gen-
erations have cultivated the forbidden plant, the so-called
evil plant.
In late 2022, the peasants in one of Mexico’s mountain
ranges asked themselves what they would do to celebrate
the year’s end, there, with their plants, their space, their
dreams, their nerve, and their life choice, because they
* Édgar is a photographer, scriptwriter, and film director as
well as a cannabis activist and the director of the Guaca-
mole Hemp organic products shop, you can contact him at
guacamolehemp@gmail.com.
54
Freepik.com
are families who for generations have had to cultivate
marihuana to be able to put food on the table, educate
their children, pay for the gas, water, and lights, and cov-
er all their everyday expenditures. But, at the end of the
day, they’re just like the peasants who grow sugarcane,
avocado, limes, oranges, broccoli, corn, chili peppers, cilan­
tro, tomatoes, and onions, the daily food for a large per-
centage of Mexico’s population. These are the peasants who
for one hundred years have been growing cannabis under
the hot sun, in the fields, sweating every day, just as ag-
ricultural work, working the land, requires. “I do it be-
cause my grandfather taught me, and I can say that now
that I’m seventy years old, I’ve seen all the cycles of the
cannabis flower, all the stations of the plant, perhaps all
the forms, sizes, and colors. And we’ve also tried all the
solutions that we know for the pests of this place,” one
peasant told me on the way to his mountain plot.

They’ve spent one hundred years growing in secret,
thinking that they were criminals and that they were
harvesting something illegal. This way of thinking makes
them live a lifestyle ruled by the simplest customs and,
at the same time, the most superficial luxuries. Perhaps
because of the lack of understanding of the world around
them, life becomes simple, guided by the brands of the
moment and the lifestyles of the famous.
On the other hand, there are the traditional doctors
in Mesoamerica, who have not been around for one hun-
dred years, but much longer, and have been using can-
nabis in their day-to-day lives. We could see this during
the recently commemorated 500 years of the arrival of
the Spaniards to the Purépecha Empire’s lands, when we
realized it had been they, the Europeans, who introduced
the plant to this native culture. The latter used what na-
ture provided for their food, their ceremonies, and their
medicine. That culture continues to exist and to cultivate
its own medicines.
Why do we speak of one hundred years of recreation-
al use? Because this plant relaxes, it makes you feel good,
it helps you sleep and fight stress. What are 100 long years
of presidents in a country that has to deal with social
problems every day? Presidents who haven’t paid atten-
tion to a never-ending problem: that of the pursuer and
the persecuted. But it wasn’t always that way.
For a very long time we could find fabulous formulas
at the drugstores and apothecary shops all over the coun-
try, in addition to those imported from the countries of
the North, where people learned very well how to use plants
and developed them industrially, giving rise to the big brands
that now lead the multimillionaire pharmaceutical mar-
ket the world over.
It’s difficult to believe that we don’t see something that
has been among us for one hundred years, that touches
the lives of our grandchildren who now live in the Unit-
ed States or Canada, and who in their time did nothing
more than accompany their grandfathers to the fields,
perhaps to shift the hose for watering or to clean the area
or perhaps plant seeds. That thing that some child, in
his/her innocence, experienced is today a way of life, a
decent job, one that supports a family, although far from
his/her birthplace he/she has suffered a lifetime of yearn-
ing. In Mexico, we marginalize the grower, treating him
like a delinquent, a criminal, or a drug trafficker because
he chose to plant marihuana instead of limes.
Cannabis Speaks Out
There are the traditional doctors in
Mesoamerica, who have not been around
for one hundred years, but much longer,
and have been using cannabis in their
day-to-day lives.
Those peasants decided to prepare a trap to catch what
the land wanted to give them, accompanied by the veg-
etables and legumes also produced in their plots because
the closest town was five or six hours away in a car, be-
cause they lived hidden in the hills in extreme conditions
and passed their days as peasants, but also because when
they planted cannabis, they became people without rights,
without a pension, without a stable future because we
have decided that their crops affect society.
Their children will undoubtedly end up working in
our neighboring country because that will be easier, saf-
er, because they pay you and it’s legal, because it’s what
there is, what’s best for you, what some Mexicans have
within reach and/or is their only option. But, how have
Mexico’s traditional healers produced their medicines?
One hundred years ago surely there was more of it in Mex-
ican homes, because the tea has never been found absent
there, neither rue tea nor cinnamon tea nor arnica infu-
sion. But if we’re going to talk about medicine, we have
to talk about other plants that are also sacred, that are
medicinal for true Mexican culture and have not been
around for centuries but millennia. How ironic that what
cures us is persecuted and misunderstood.
On the other hand, we have to think about the fact
that what is persecuted is what produces, what generates
a profit, wealth, and this leads to privatizing it, monopo-
lizing it, and industry completely unbalances the plants’
natural cycle, their uses and customs, and distorts free,
clean, natural thinking. And I ask myself, where did we
get lost? Even though Mexico’s countryside, cities, and all
the corners of the nation have smelled like marihuana
for decades, we try to ignore that, erasing traditions and
customs that are more than one hundred years old,
thinking that repeating a discourse enough times will
make it true. This makes me think that we know the
formula for getting lost along our path very well.
But not everyone. Many people live today under the
starry sky, without stress, taking the risk that the army will
55
Voices of Mexico 120
come to take away their work, burn their labors of months,
without caring about the sweat exuded in the hours of
labor in the fields, the real work that ties the peasant to
the land, that is worthless if it’s cannabis (that plant called
marihuana or weed), which they unfortunately have been
cultivating. Meanwhile, the children run among the aro-
ma of the recently cut plants that are beginning their
drying process, without seeing the evil with which we in
society stigmatize them.
What are one hundred years? Customs founded on
tradition, unity, community, work, and resistance. One
hun­dred years that turn into oblivion, new laws, new
paths; one hundred years that strengthen or lead a so-
ciety astray; one hundred years that a government has
been persecuting peasants attempting to cultivate their
future. One hundred years in which the jails have been
receiving traffickers of this plant that they say damages
society; also, one hundred years that are now emerging
with radical changes in thinking and position, that are
forming a new ethics born of a globalized position in favor
of cannabis, in favor of pleasure. One hundred years that
are turning into digital messages where expressing an
opinion is easy, since digital life takes place sitting in your
living room, office, or on the toilet. One hundred years
that will become an excuse to legalize something we’ve
forgotten all about. And also, the opportunities for grow-
ing, evolving as a society, for jettisoning prejudices and
fears about using a simple plant.
That’s what life is like in Mexico. Whan an irony that
the trade agreement among the United States, Mexico,
and Canada (usmca) doesn’t allow us to imitate the acti­
vities in our neighboring countries. What an irony that
for decades these peasants produced the plants that were
taken illegally to the North, on dirt roads, bypassing “fixed”
roadblocks (paid for with the money from those same crops),
and now the governments try to find a solution to the prob-
In these one hundred years, medicine
has had to advance silently like in the time
of the Inquisition, when traditional healers
were thought to be witches, people associated
with evil, when they were only exploring
and learning from their surroundings
and using plants as allies.
56
lem of cannabis cultivation, now that they want to write
laws to incorporate the peasants, the people who truly
know the Mexican countryside, into the world of taxes.
Where are those one hundred years of prejudices
and distorted thinking in their communities, in their own
lands? Let’s hope that the laws include these people who
for more than one hundred years have been the back-
bone of the clandestine crops of the plant that has given
us medications, fund, and many political problems. They’re
one hundred years of crowding people into jails, where
they’ve wasted their lives locked up, prevented from liv-
ing with their families and communities.
In these one hundred years, medicine has had to ad-
vance silently like in the time of the Inquisition, when
traditional healers were thought to be witches, people
associated with evil, when they were only exploring and
learning from their surroundings and using plants as
allies. Today, 500 years after its arrival from Spain, with all
that morality charged with prejudice, we continue to hide
to utilize cannabis in any of its many uses, mainly for rec-
reational purposes.
Let’s hope that another hundred years don’t have to
go by with society’s backwardness, that we not have to see
another hundred years in which we have to wait to un-
derstand that nature is our mother and father both, and
that we come from her, that our transit through life is a
simple sigh compared to the age of the Earth, that the
plants were already here when we arrived and will con-
tinue to exist when we no longer do, that they’re the med-
icine that cures the body, the mind, and the spirit.
Hopefully, another hundred years will not pass of prej-
udice and distorted information about this noble plant
that has had to bear humanity’s darkest bigotry.
Not to mention the countries that punish consumers
or possessors of cannabis with severe sentences. Where
will we go as a society? What will become of our children?
Perhaps we already have the answer and we don’t want
to see it.
What are one hundred years of a life that passes like
wind through the forest, like a ray of sunlight that glimpses
through the clouds or a river that runs and doesn’t stop
until it reaches the sea?
One hundred years are hundreds of cannabis crops that
we could use to research, learn, create community, con-
tinue, live, but that also can be the perfect trap for dying
in the attempt. One hundred years are nothing.

María Guadalupe Ramírez Ramos*
Tzö dapö: Using “Saint Rose”
In the Otomí Tepehua Mountains
M
exico is a highly evocative country because of
its many characteristics; one of these is the
religious life of its first peoples. Rituals play a
huge part in this, marking sacred time and differentiat-
ing it from the profane. Their ancestral legacy, memory,
and the related beliefs and practices, together with their
relationship with nature, have defined them as cultures
imbued with mysticism.
* María Guadalupe is a researcher specializing in the Otomí
cul­ture in Mexico’s Hidalgo state and the Mixtec culture in
the Lower Mountains of Oaxaca state, you can contact her at
albadelu7@gmail.com.
Ilustration by Fernando Ibarra, Rostro de la Santa Rosa.
Cannabis Speaks Out
We should remember that these peoples have knowl-
edge of their surroundings that dates from time imme-
morial. This allows them to interact with nature and the
divine, benevolent beings they coexist with. Therefore,
as wise people, as ritual specialists, based on their com-
prehension of that world and the dreams where these
beings and forces reside, they deal with them seeking to
maintain equilibrium and recover social well-being.
The Sacred Dimension of Plants
Mexico has extremely varied natural areas and ecosys-
tems, where a great diversity of medicinal, powerful, and
57
Voices of Mexico 120
In the Otomí Tepehua Mountains,
inhabitants co-exist with venerable entities.
Their hills, rivers, ponds, waterfalls, caves, and
animals make it a fundamental scenario for
ritual practices because it is the door to this
other sacred time and place where
“Saint Rose” manifests herself.
entheogenic plants grow (entheogenic substances are those
that grow naturally or are prepared using them that have
psychotropic properties). They are usually known and
handled by both men and women specialists in tradi-
tional medicine, who use them, and at times ingest them,
in a sacred time and place with specific aims.
Many rites and ceremonies are linked to all these plants
and entheogens; for these peoples, they are the highest
representation of the divine. For this reason, from this
perspective they are related to their natural landscape
and the places they inhabit, since they are their roots and
essence. That is why this country is considered magical.
I should mention that in the early twenty-first cen-
tury, despite this tradition, the psychoactive plant called
cannabis has become extremely polemical, both in the
legal sphere regarding its cultivation and personal and me-
dicinal use, and regarding its industrial uses. However, at
the same time, and rather contrary to the debate, in the
Otomí culture of eastern Hidalgo state, cannabis is some-
times ingested and manifests itself not only in the bodies
of the ritual specialists, but also in the world of Otomí
dreams, where it takes on the physical attributes of a little
girl, a woman, or an old woman.
Divine Image of Cannabis
The term tzö dapö (“bad weed”) exists in this world view;
it defines cannabis in its initial, wild state. However, when it
is conceived as one of the most important deities, it is
called “Saint Rose.” The plant moves through several
stages before becoming holy, and along that road, it is rep-
resented in different ways.
The specialists carry out a ritual during which they
prepare a refino (an aguardiente, distilled from sugarcane),
which they combine with the tzö dapö to make a sacred
beverage called “Saint Rose.” When ingested, it allows
58
HighInBC/Commons.wikimedia.org
the ritual specialists to see what would otherwise not be
visible, so that they are able to heal, divine, punish, and
even mediate between good and evil.
These specialists can be men or women, and they play
a very important role: they are bearers of a singular gift
based on the knowledge they have acquired, learned, or
inherited from the medicinal plants, like the interpretation
of dreams and certain techniques for cutting paper to re-
cover the health of their population. More about this later.
Both the ritual specialists and the Otomí population
of this region maintain and use “Saint Rose,” and they
know that in other contexts it is stigmatized and con-
demned. For this reason, when she enters the specialists’
dreams, she asks them to protect her, because her head
hurts when outsiders approach, and they pull her up. This
is an allusion to when the police come to the region and
pull up the specialists’ cannabis plants.
The Otomís learned through their dreams to prepare
and ingest it, but only the specialists drink the “Saint Rose”
to be able to dialogue with the entities, in a trance state.
That is how they consult with them about divinations,
although they can also read the future using copal and
sometimes using cards.
Together with the ritual specialists are the patron-
esses or godmothers who support and accompany them
for the entire process, as well as the musicians, whose mu-
sic guides them when they go into the trance after ingest-
ing the plant. This allows them to move into another time
and space where they can resolve serious problems or
requests, unleashing the battle between good and evil.

This feminine personification (“Saint Rose”) commu-
nicates through dreams. That is where she shows the spe-
cialists how to heal using different techniques, such as
divination, trances, the interpretation of dreams, and pa-
per cut-outs that represent the entities and humans, and,
as such, act as a vehicle for achieving health. For these
cut-outs to have a will and for the ritual to work, their heart
must be activated, which is normally done with chicken
blood, although sometimes a piece of “Saint Rose” is placed
to their left.
Sacred Spaces Where
Cannabis Is Personified
Sometimes the ritual specialists see people in their dreams
—and this is the most interesting— because what they
see is not part of their daily lives. Rather, they arrive at
them through certain states of consciousness that al-
low them to experience them very realistically. For them,
these are little visions that come to them, making them feel
present and committed to their communities.
Some tell of seeing “Saint Rose” in that trance: some
describe her as a little girl; others as a very attractive young
woman. However, most agree that it is an older woman
who presents herself with that name and is related to Our
Lady of Guadalupe. When she appears as an older per-
son, she looks like the women of the region, wearing tra-
ditional local clothing, embroidered and with lace, with
a shawl and long, grey, pleated hair.
Cannabis Speaks Out
“Saint Rose” also intercedes for the well-being of the
population and that is when she acts as an ally in the ritu-
als dedicated to emotional upset. For this, the specialists
eat it to enter into the time and space of the emotions
and deal with the relationship between couples who want
to fall in love, live together, or marry or to unite a family.
This characteristic is very important because in its divine
representation, cannabis acts and is concerned about
human beings’ emotional side.
“Saint Rose,” more than a powerful entheogenic plant,
is a deity with which a constant dialogue is held. For the
inhabitants of the Otomí Tepehua Mountains, it is a word
that interprets the world. This shows that the only way
to understand the Otomí world view is to start with their
ceremonial practices.
Landscapes Where Cannabis Lives
In the Otomí Tepehua Mountains, inhabitants co-exist
with venerable entities. Their hills, rivers, ponds, waterfalls,
caves, and animals make it a fundamental scenario for
ritual practices because it is the door to this other sacred
time and place where “Saint Rose” manifests herself.
In this world view, rituals —or as they also call them,
customs— exist dedicated to the lord and the lady, the
male or female chief of the land, of water, of fire, of the air,
and to the sacred seeds that are holy in this culture. At
times, “Saint Rose” may manifest herself in the body of
other people present at these ceremonies; it is very rare,
however, because the most common oc-
Armando Olivo Martín del Campo/Commons.wikimedia.org
currence is that she only takes over the
bodies of the specialists.
Despite all their knowledge, the spe-
cialists are not able to glimpse the com-
plete scope of the regulation of cannabis
and what its use implies for people out-
side their sphere. Nevertheless, they do
take security measures and apply mod-
eration when using it. In any case, any ap­
proach to the Otomí region allows us to
understand this plant through this cul-
ture, which for millennia has safeguard­ed
this interaction with a natural environ-
ment overflowing with ancestral, mysti-
cal, fascinating traditions.
59
 A RT AND CULTURE


From Cancer to Cannabis

An Interview on the Nature of Pain with Jimena Ortega

Luis Rubén Ramírez-Montes de Oca*

Illustrations by Calavera (Paulina Vega)**
Jimena is a Mexican sociologist who, at the cusp of age thirty,
was diagnosed with breast cancer. Two years later, we are pub­
lishing this interview on her personal experience with consum­
ing cannabis as palliative care during her cancer treatment.
Our publication of this dialogue aims to mitigate the stigma
around marihuana use in the medical field. At the same time,
through this testimony, we seek to contribute to qualitative
research on the subjective experience of pain and suffering.
Today, cannabis consumption in North America is at a his­
toric juncture, with the opening of legal regulations leading
to the expansion of medicinal and recreational cannabis con­
sumption. Nonetheless, there is still little research on its me­
dicinal use for cancer treatment. We are also at a moment of
heightened societal awareness around the impacts of cancer
treatment, with more and more people taking critical positions
in the face of the global hegemony of the pharmaceutical in­
dustry. Let us now directly approach Jimena’s lived experience:
Rubén (r): Jimena, can you share how you got to know cbd
(cannabidiol)?
Jimena (j): Before I was diagnosed, I had noticed that marihua­
na was being used to mitigate cancer symptoms. The first time
I encountered this was many years ago, in a tragic movie star­
ring Susan Sarandon and Julia Roberts. In one scene, the char­
acter whom Susan Sarandon plays smokes a joint because
she has cancer and is in a lot of pain. She has terminal cancer
and isn’t getting treatment, but marihuana alleviates her pain.
That was the first time I saw someone smoking marihuana. I
was ten years old.
You know, some people argue that marihuana should be
legalized because of its medical benefits: it helps with anore­
xia treatment, bulimia . . . tons of things, including cancer pain.
That was all I knew: that cancer caused pain.
Sometime after I was diagnosed, the oncologist confirmed
that I would need chemotherapy. She said, “officially, I can’t tell
you this, because it’s not legal, but if you can get some cbd
drops, do it, because they’ll help a lot. The patients I’ve mon­
itored who’ve used marihuana in some format or other have
seen improvements in their appetites as well as with their pain
and nausea.”
* Luis Rubén is a Ph. D. student at the Postgraduate Program in
Poli­ti­cal and Social Sciences at unam; you can contact him at
Irrmdo@gmail.com.
** Paulina is a visual artist; @calaveradibuja
62
I’ve never liked taking pills or pain killers, but, listening
to the experiences that the oncologist shared with me, I
thought, “if I’m already going to be poisoning myself with
chemotherapy — because there’s no other solution — then
I’ll try something else, too.” That’s how I came upon thc (tet­
rahydrocannabinol), though it’s hard to find in Mexico, as is
pure cbd oil, because extracting the cbd is complicated and re­
quires very specific care.
r: What was your experience taking cbd like?
j: Honestly, I feel like it did help, or I’d like to think that it
helped — but up to a certain point, because there was a time
when . . . Since I got diagnosed very early on, cancer never
made me feel ill; my tumor never hurt or anything. What was
really tough was what I had to do to get rid of the cancer: the
surgery and the chemotherapy. That’s when I realized that
the cancer itself wasn’t what was getting to me.
It was the chemotherapy that made me suffer: the vomit­
ing, the nausea, losing my appetite, the shit taste in my mouth,
the incontrollable thirst (and not being able to drink water
because it tasted horrible), the pain in my bones . . . I tried
ibuprofen but it didn’t help, because I must have had all sorts
of hormonal imbalances and strange disorders affecting my
body — I could no longer sleep. I also took prednisone (a cor­
ticosteroid), and that crap would cause me horrible energy
spikes. No matter how tired I was, I’d wake up at 3:00 a. m. and
not know what to do, so I’d clean my apartment.
When I took the drops, my dose was one in the morning,
two in the afternoon, and three at night. That would keep me
stable and, if I was constant, with the three night drops, I could
get proper sleep and the pain would go away. Plus, the che­
motherapy kills all your cells. It makes them swell, and what
thc does is take down the swelling, so that would counter the
effect, to an extent. Of course, my dose was quite low, so I
wouldn’t feel high. I always felt stable.
r: How did you manage to get cbd?
j: At first, I hesitated, because I got it from a hippie in the Roma
borough of Mexico City who said her focus was on studying
the cannabinoid system and all that stuff. I’m not saying that’s
not real, it’s just that I think we should always question things,
especially since there isn’t a lot of research around cannabis.
Unfortunately, most of the things you hear as a patient, as some­
one who is sick, are purely anecdotal.
 I’m not against using medicinal plants or thc, but we have
such little information that there’s no standardized rigor
— meaning there’s no regulation either. As a sociologist, you
know that. Science of any kind is different from common
sense and from any other kind of collective wisdom because
of the rigor and systematization upon which scientific knowl­
edge is built. I think that’s the case with the study of mari­
huana. There’s still very little, which doesn’t mean it isn’t
serious, but there still isn’t a sound way of sharing knowledge
on it — it’s different from the way you know that if your head
hurts, you should take an aspirin. But it helped me. If it was a
placebo, it helped, and if it wasn’t, it also helped.
63
r: How did you know how many drops you were supposed
to take?
j: The woman who sold the cbd to me makes her own oil. It all
comes from a mini-laboratory, and she told me that she has
a lot of oncology clients to whom she recommends microdo­
ses so that they don’t end up high. If I wanted to stay stable
and not have any symptoms, or at least mitigate them, then
she recommended taking microdoses. She asked me how
much I weighed, my height, and how often I went to chemo­
64
therapy. And that’s when she recommended one, two, and
three drops. I had to take the drops sublingually. I also had
marihuana that I could smoke and cannabis butter at home,
but smoking would only make me fall asleep.
When I got those energy spikes and that terrible insomnia,
the pain, and the nausea, not even three drops were enough,
so I’d make myself a tea and go to sleep, but even then, I
never felt high. I would even have trouble waking up the next
day, since I’d be in a state of complete relaxation. That’s how
it was for the first few cycles, so for about three months. After
that, I found that if I had four or five drops, I’d get super high.
And yes, at first it was fine. I’d have a good time, I’d have fun,
but after the third cycle — each cycle lasted twenty-one days
— I’d feel okay for the first three days, but after the fourth
day, the nausea, vomiting, migraines, bone pain, thirst, and
bodily pains would hit me. It got to a point that, even if I only
took the two drops in the afternoon, I’d feel high — probably
because I was already so poisoned from the chemotherapy.
But it wasn’t a good high, I mean, it wasn’t fun. I’d truly feel
bad because it was too much intoxication at once.
Between the third and fourth cycle, I started consuming
fewer and fewer drops because I’d feel very sick. It was a
major sense of unease — really bad. By the time I got to the
fourth, fifth, and sixth cycles, my white blood-cell count
dropped so much that it fell below the minimum. At that point,
you become more prone to infection, so I’d get sick to my
stomach all the time, because chemo also destroys your stom­
ach. I’d get horrible colds and would get infections regularly.
After the fourth cycle, the oncologist prescribed filgrastim,
which stimulates white blood cells but also makes your bones
hurt. It was unbearable. I was prescribed a psychiatric medica­
tion, pregabalin, but neither that medication nor the ibupro­
fen did what thc did for me for the last three cycles, when I
had to get filgrastim shots.
And I think that the problem with these kinds of alterna­
tives isn’t that they don’t work, but that there are legal voids,
taboos, and that the degree of systematization of knowledge
on how to use thc and cbd is very low. That’s why the oncolo­
gist couldn’t prescribe them even though they had worked
for her other patients. So, I tried them just to keep myself from
getting even more poisoned, but I think that, in the end, it’s
just another kind of intoxication, but I didn’t want to be taking
pill after pill.
r: What’s your stance on these kinds of alternatives?
j: I’m usually very categorical about that kind of thing. I trust
in science. Even so, except for when it comes to cancer, I try
not to take any medication, because there are always major
side effects. For example, I try not to take antibiotics or pain
killers, unless I’m in an extreme situation and there’s no oth­
er option. The first thing I did when I was diagnosed was to
read everything I could get my hands on. Fortunately, I have
a lot of doctor friends who guided me and explained things
to me. They were the ones who told me that it’s not a good
idea to take a lot of medication, because it’s very strong. I
bought a book on the history of cancer, a huge tome that I
still haven’t finished but that helped me a lot when it came
to understanding cancer at the cellular and psychological
level. It’s a wonder, when you can understand what it is, more
or less, and when you realize that the solutions weren’t just
pulled out of a hat. There are reasons behind them, and they
aren’t plain and simple, but complex and highly specialized.
r: Beyond wanting to get informed, what did cancer mean
to you?
j: It’s very hard to say. Sometimes you have a preconception
about what an illness is and how it makes you feel pain, but
I never felt sick from it, I mean, the tumor never hurt. So, I
don’t know if it was the cancer, but now I think that, as an ill­
ness, the experience of cancer encompasses a lot of other
experiences that probably go beyond just feeling sick.
It wasn’t just that I had to deal with the bureaucracy of the
Mexican Social Security Institute (imss), even though every­
thing was fine in the end. Having cancer also meant that I had
to go through surgery, with blood tests and check-ups with
the oncologist every three weeks. It also meant that I would
feel sick from all the chemotherapy. Now, I’m not cured: even
though I’m free of cancer, that doesn’t mean that I don’t have
it, or that I’m not an ill person. Cancer made me rethink my
conceptions of health and illness—because I’m ill. The fact
that it hasn’t manifested again is a different matter.
To have cancer was also to witness my body changing. I’m
almost thirty-two years old but I feel a lot older. I feel like it
made me age, and that’s something that upsets me and makes
me very sad.
r: What experience has this process left you with?
j: Cancer didn’t change my life. I think that, because I am who
I am, I acted the way I did and was able to get through the
chemo. I was able to keep going to treatment week after week.
Because I am who I am, I have taken the medication every day
and every night. I think that, because I am who I am, I got
through that part of cancer the way I did. Of course I had my
doubts, of course I cursed, of course I was sad, overwhelmed,
wanting to thrown in the towel, but even so, I said, “screw it,
I’ll keep going.” It didn’t change my life. I don’t think I’m a dif­
ferent person. I’m the same person I’ve always been. It was
my nature that made me get through everything I had to get
through, and that’s that.
65
 Victor López García*

TEN PHOTOGRAPHS
Cannabis Culture in Victoria, and
Cannabis Counter-Culture in Mexico City

This Cannabis Boutique

is located in the
downtown streets of
the city of Victoria. There,
I met Daniel, a Chilean
who told me that one
of the boutique’s
requirements for hire
is to speak Spanish,
as the storeowners
believe that the Latinx
population is on the rise.
Victoria, November 2022.

I
n October of 2018, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau legalized and regulated recre-
ational marihuana use across Canada.1 From that moment on, the plant succumbed to
capitalist domination, and a plethora of dispensaries emerged. The essence of resistance
in its consumption, the years of prohibition, its stigma, and all the codes used by marihuana-
users seemed to go up in smoke.
Weed can now be bought at stores, with no questions asked, no drug dealers, and no fear
around its transportation. One can simply walk around and smoke. Marihuana has entered the
neoliberal Canadian development model, leading to significant sociocultural transformation
in all realms. To me, the difference has become palpable in my interactions with other migrants
from Mexico —a country in which violence has flooded the streets thanks to cannabis’s lack
of legalization— among many other consequences.

* Víctor is a Ph. D. student at the unam Latin American Postgraduate Program; you can contact him at
ruth.tcv@gmail.com.

66
 Alitzel Cannabis at Terraza
Weera. Alitzel is a biologist,
gardener, and cannabis farmer
who has grown marihuana at
the interdisciplinary collective
Terraza Weera for the last
three years. On the instagram
profile @terrazaweera, the
collective publishes
information on growing one’s
own marihuana as well as on
medicine and science.
It encourages the self-
management of people’s own
consumption. Mexico City,
May 2022.

Skwati Spayen Cannabis

is a dispensary of various
cannabis products,
with a special focus
on the plant’s sources.
The dispensary is stocked
with marihuana grown
by farmers from various
Canadian indigenous
nations. Thus, the
dispensary highlights
the art created by the
First Nations. Victoria,
December 2019.

Candela (@kndela_sc on
Instagram) is a young fighter
on the path to becoming a
professional. Like many
others, Candela does not
smoke marihuana but uses
topical cannabis. Cannabis
extract has helped relieve her
muscles after training and
fighting. Mexico City,
December 2021.

67
 After three years of being promised regularization, in Mexico, there are still many bureau-
cratic hurdles to passing legislation that prioritizes citizens who wish to freely access mari-
huana, without drug dealers as intermediaries. Most certainly, until the corporate pieces align
in such a way that the “Mexican nation” can compete with the United States and Canada, this
regulation will never materialize. Considering that the great drug cartels own the business of
grass today, that the “antineoliberal” government led by Andrés Manuel López Obrador will pass
legislation has come to seem increasingly far fetched. In fact, the government might be keep-
ing such legislation under its sleeve in order to boost the ruling party in the 2024 elections.
For two semesters —one in 2019 and another in 2022— I had the opportunity to visit the
city of Victoria, in Vancouver Island, British Columbia, where I was met with what one might
call the homogenization of cannabis culture. Simply put, all kinds of cannabis are available, in
all its forms: edibles, flowers, extracts, pre-rolls, and a plethora of other derivatives. While, at
first, I and other migrants were astounded by our ability to expeditiously acquire legal mari-
huana cigarettes, in the long run, we noticed that our spending on weed was towering. Person-
ally, I felt that by purchasing marihuana in this way, I was unraveling the essence of resistance
that this plant has historically carried. And it’s not that alternative spaces don’t exist: I was
able to talk to several marihuana-growers on the island.2 Yet, the dizzying work that being a
Latinx migrant involves, with hours of toil taking up much of our lives, makes such conversa-
tions hard to come by. Additionally, as an outsider, the cultural barrier of not being able to
fluently communicate in English made establishing ties to other organizations with critical
perspectives quite challenging.

In keeping with
Canada’s normative
character as well as
its sound social
practices, the youths
at the University of
Victoria have their
own designated
benches for smoking
cannabis. Smoking
outside of these
designated areas can
lead to fines or
reprimands, even
from the student
population. Victoria,
November 2019.

68
 Buying edible THC
gummies at Jerry’s
Dispensary on the
road connecting
several towns
between Nanaimo
and Victoria. On this
road, I found many
independent
dispensaries, which I
was told tend to offer
cannabis grown by
local farmers. Victoria,
August 2022.a

While, in Victoria, the alternative organization of Latinx cannabis users seems to be

undergoing a process of depoliticization, Mexico City is experiencing the contrary.
In the latter city, collectives, organizations, clubs, and political projects that question
the institutional orders banning marihuana use for the free development of one’s
personality are cropping up like sa­ti­va in the springtime.

Dulce Mariana (known as

Marihuanita) —a cannabis
user who has dedicated
much of the last six years
to home growing and has
become well known for her
work in disseminating
scientific knowledge—
smoking a joint at the
Global March for Marihuana
Decriminalization in front
of the Palacio de Bellas
Artes, among a multitude of
marihuana users. Mexico
City, May 2021.

69
 The clandestine
grafitti artist Gomas
(@gomasgom on
Instagram) has
become well known
not only among
the street-art
community but also
among cannabis
activists in Mexico
City. Her paintings
deploy the cannabis
aesthetic, with
the prevalence
of the color green.
Mexico City,
February 2023.

Another good
practice among the
Victoria community
is its commitment
to using designated
smoking spaces,
even at music
festivals like
Rifflandia, where I
was able to bring
my personal dose
and enjoy the music
on offer. Victoria,
September 2022.

70
 Anita is a dancer and
anthropologist from
Bogotá, Colombia.
During her last visit to
Mexico City, she gave
a few ceramics and
joint-rolling workshops,
free of charge. Mexico
City, July 2021.

While, in Victoria, the alternative organization of Latinx cannabis users seems to be under-
going a process of depoliticization, Mexico City is experiencing the contrary. In the latter city,
collectives, organizations, clubs, and political projects that question the institutional orders
banning marihuana use for the free development of one’s personality are cropping up like
sa­ti­va in the springtime. Before the pandemic, social mobilizations in Latin America were inten-
sifying, stirring up increased participation in society, as with the feminist protests that diversi-
fied across many Latin American countries in the face of the patriarchal social order.
This a selection of photographs that provides a brief sketch of the contrasting cannabis
culture in two totally different cities during the same time period. These cities are located in
two countries that have shared an economic treaty since 1994. While one has prioritized
regulating safe access to cannabis, the other is far behind in creating fair regulations for soci-
ety. In response, new ways of organizing around cannabis have sprung up in Mexico. Fortu-
nately, these have intentionally built politicized, consequential networks using feminist
perspectives to question the patriarchal social order that, in Rita Segato’s words, “is the cor-
nerstone and center of gravity of all forms of power.”3


Notes
1 We should highlight that the purchase of medicinal marihuana had been allowed since 2001.
2 The island of Salt Spring, which is nationally renowned for its marihuana farming, is located some 40
minutes from Victoria.
3 Rita Segato, “Manifiesto en cuatro temas,” Critical Times, April 2018, pp. 212-225.

71
Raúl Motta*

The devil’s
rock
Illustrations by Juan Palomino**

Light may be artificial

Only shadow is always true
Eduardo Parra Ramírez

I
remember running toward a tree to take shelter from
the downpour. It was early summer, Saint Peter and
Saint Paul’s Day. My father said it always rained that
day and told me to put on a jacket before I went out, but I
didn’t. The patter of the rain against the earth was peacefully
musical to me, and I knew that if I came home wet, my moth-
er would fling her high-heeled shoe against my back. The
dampness turned to mist and scurried up the empty waste
land. The mist looked like the quiet, heavy breath of an un-
derground beast. The rain suddenly picked up, thumping
against the creviced earth. The torrent picked up the smell of
decay, the miasma of roadkill and shit. Suddenly, a fat boy
with a shaved head showed up beside me, beneath that sol-
itary willow that had grown at the heart of the field. The boy
was soaking wet, water dripping down from his forehead to
the collar of his ratty shirt. With his chubby hands, he rubbed
his face and fixed his big, amber eyes on me, trying to figure
out what kind of animal I was: wild or domestic. The river that
ran at the field’s edge started to roar. It was the neighborhood
sewage, enlivened by the rain. Sometimes the river would
flood all the way to the lowest parts of the wasteland, where
burrs and shrubs grew untamed. All of the sewage from Inde-
pendencia county also flowed into the river. In the summer-
time the stench would grow so pungent that it’d waft all the
* Raúl is a writer who teaches creative writing; you can contact him
at @raul.mottag.
** Juan Palomino is a visual artist; @juanpalomino.ilustrador
way the avenue. I knew for a fact that that filth
could impregnate everything, even one’s thoughts.
“Don’t be creeping up on people. Where did you come
from?”
“I came from the devil’s rock.”
“What’s that?”
“I’ll take you there one day. It’s next to the bridge that
leads to Flores.”
“Why do they call it that?”
“Seriously? Why do you think? There’s a rock where they
say that, at midnight, the devil appears.”
“Only idiots people believe that.”
“Lincoln saw it once. He was drunk and had to cross the
bridge to get home. He’s my friend Pozole’s father. Pozole
told me all about it. The worst part is that he couldn’t run away
because he’s only got one leg. He had to hop his way home,
yelling his head off. He was shitting bricks,” he cackled.
“Lincoln?”
“The one who’s not all there.” We both doubled down
laughing.

72

“Where do you live?” he asked, holding my gaze.
“In that white house over there,” I pointed.
“The two story one? You rich little twat. Your dad’s the
policeman isn’t he?”
“He’s a public prosecutor.”
“Same shit. He’s got a gun. I live in the first house on that
street. The one by the repair shop in front of the school. My
mom told me that your dad is a corrupt pig. And that that’s
why you have all that dough.”
“Your mom’s a moron.”
“She might be a moron, but she’s no liar. I think your dad-
dy’s probably a crook.”
“You’d better shut your mouth, boobie man.”
“What are you gonna do? You’re a bag of bones. They don’t
feed you much for being such a rich boy.”
“And you get fed all day long. That’s why you’re always
broke.”
“Alright, alright. Let’s go throw some rocks at the aban-
doned house.”
“But it’s still raining.”
“I bet your pig-ass daddy’ll beat you if you come
home dirty.”
His hair, face, and shoulders were soaking wet.
The wind made the rain pound down, thick drops swat-
ting us in the face. I crossed my arms over my chest and
started shivering from the cold. The fat boy wouldn’t budge.
He was waiting for my reply.
“Scared shitless? You’re shaking.”
“I’m cold, not scared.”
We walked through the wasteland under the rain until we
reached the side street. We started picking up stones and pool-
ing them in our t-shirts, which clung to our skin from the rain.
The abandoned house was at the end of the street. We got
there and stood before of the house. I was shaking from the
icy downpour. The two-story house had a sturdy, black door
made of metal, with bay windows in each room. The fat kid let
the rocks he’d cradled in his t-shirt fall to the ground. After a
quick survey, he picked up the biggest one. I picked another
up, emulating his every move, without really knowing what
he was up to.
“Go for the windows,” he ordered, flinging the first stone
with all his might.
The shattering window echoed like false thunder amid
the storm. I felt the weight of the stone in my hand. The lon-
ger I held it, the heavier it got. I gathered all my strength and
flung it. For a brief moment, it seemed to be suspended in
the air. It barely made it past the fence. The kid grabbed a
smaller rock and decided to test his aim, shooting for the
house’s little skylight. He missed, but then he tried again with
a smaller rock. I did my own thing—I picked up another stone
and missed again. He hit the skylight. A dry thud boomed in
the air, but the glass didn’t break.
“Third time’s the charm. The pointy ones are best, but they
don’t fly as high,” he said, handing me a stone from my own pile.
73
 I took the stone, grazed its sharp edges with my finger, “From a puddle in a pothole near my house.”
and put my entire body into my next throw, without thinking. From the back pocket of his faded denim shorts, Diego
I fell on my ass from the inertia. The master bedroom’s glass pulled out a bottle of 192-proof ethanol. He cracked it opened
shattered like flashing light, or at least that’s how it felt at the it and poured the clear liquid into the pail. From his other
time. An old man came running out of the house next door to pocket, he extracted a yellow matchbox. He took three match-
see where the noise was coming from. His wrinkled skin was es in his stubby fingers, struck them against the sandpaper,
mysterious and frightening in equal parts. He moved stiffly, and dropped the fire in the pail. The bucket erupted in flames,
probably from the cold or out of old age. The only youthful which faded away just as quickly as they’d come.
thing about him was his rage. In the middle of the street, he “What’s wrong with you? What’d you do that for? You’re
flailed his arms and yelled at us in a fury. a fucking lunatic.”
“You fecking kids. I’ll grab you and kill you.” “You can’t take shit! I just wanted to see what happened.”
The old man didn’t turn back. He kept trudging toward us. I watched the fire die down. I felt like I could hear the
We ran straight at him, each taking a different flank. He got little creatures screaming, but I knew that was impossible.
confused and couldn’t catch either of us. My house was near- When the flame had been completely consumed, we both
est. I pulled to a stop right as I reached my front door. The boy looked back inside the pail. The mud was giving off smoke. It
didn’t stop. Still running, he yelled, “The name’s Diego. I’ll ring smelled charred. Nothing moved in that black mass. The qui-
your doorbell three times tomorrow.”
I opened the white front door and went inside. My moth-
er had fallen asleep on the couch, a soap opera blaring on the
television and a half-empty cup of rum and coke in her hand.
I slipped past her, trying to make as little noise as possible. I
took a shower and tried to scrub off the stench of shit that
had clung to my skin like kitchen muck before I put on my
pajamas. Late at night, my mother came into my room to plant
a kiss on my forehead. It was one of those nights when my
father wouldn’t come home, from all the work he had to do.
My mother woke me up, but I pretended to be asleep so I could
avoid her. When she left my bedroom, I opened my eyes. It was
hot. The rain was down to a patter, but the river was still roar-
ing. My window faced the field. I poked my head out to cool
down. A few soft lights twinkled by the riverbend. They were
fireflies, flickering at the water’s edge. The frogs’ croaking in-
termingled with the sound of rushing water. I tried to imagine
what they might be telling each other, the frogs and the river.
Their voices soothed me. I went back to bed and fell asleep.
The following day, Diego did as he said he would. He came
by my house after lunch. He’d brought a tin pail with a bunch
of desperate tadpoles wriggling in their cramped quarters.
We peered at them up close. They’d open their mouths and
squirm like living mud. I drew closer to the pail, poked my head
in, and saw that some of the tadpoles had already developed
tiny legs, with four minuscule toes jutting out of them. They’d
use their legs and tails for propellers, creating ripples in the
stagnant water. They smelled like an old, damp attic, like by-
gone creatures.
“Where’d you get these, Diego?”

74
et was palpable. Diego grinned from ear to ear. I felt my stom-
ach turn and a flutter in my chest.
“You’re an idiot.”
“No, the problem is you’ve got a stick up your ass. It’s prob-
ably all the worse from those tight, new pants of yours.”
“You can’t even button up those shorts your momma lent
you.”
“You’d best shut your mouth if you don’t want to get your
ass beat.”
I dug my hand into the mud. It was lukewarm. I felt sev-
eral dead tadpoles with my fingers. I grabbed one by the tail
and fished it out of the bucket to get a better look. I drew its
little body toward me. Its legs had melted off, so it only had
little stumps left. Its eyes were like Jell-O, melting out of their
sockets. I swallowed and felt my stomach churn, but I couldn’t
peel my eyes away from that little animal. I stared at Diego,
trying to mask my rage. He jeered at me, loud and whiney as
ever. We heard someone yelling from far away. It was Diego’s
mother. “You little twat, bring that bucket back home or I’ll
shove it up your ass, Chico Che. I’m going to make you mop the
floors, you little asshole.” Diego’s eyes grew wide. He poured
out the pail in the middle of the street and handed me the
empty bottle of alcohol.
“Get rid of it. I’ll see you later,” he said as he took off running.
That night, I dreamt of the fire and of the screeching tad-
poles. They were crying for help, making signs with their min-
ute hands. I woke up at dawn, out of breath. I went to the
bathroom and came across a shadow. It was my mother, stum-
bling around and clinging to the wall with her nails. She
jumped when she saw me. She was in tears, whimpering. The
gray moonlight poured in through a round window, shining
on some of the hallway. My mother edged toward the pale light.
Her face seem­ed like that of a little girl, her eyes watery and
red. Mascara ran down her cheeks. It was as if the moon had
brought her back in time and lightened her body. I’d never
seen my mother cry before. My legs wobbled and my palms
started sweating, but at the same time, I felt as if a string were
binding us together, drawing us close.
“How come you’re up so late?” she slurred.
“I’m going to the bathroom.”
“You’re starting to look a lot like your father. Come close
so I can see you better.”
I walked toward her, stepping into the shaft of
moonlight. With her two cold hands,
she grabbed my face. I felt
75
her nails dig into my cheeks. She pulled me in and kissed me.
The taste of alcohol and very sweet perfume bore all the way
to my tonsils. A chill ran down my spine and the tips of my
fingers went numb as my head spun softly. I could feel the
rain against my body again. My mother peeled her lips away
and left behind a tang denoting something I couldn’t quite
understand. She took a few steps back and retreated into the
darkness in the hallway.
“Go back to bed. It’s late and you’ve got school in the morn-
ing. Your father won’t be coming home tonight. As usual.”
I fell speechless and forgot about going to the bathroom.
I went back to my room, smothered in drowsiness as the mug-
gy darkness enveloped me. I took my pants off so that I could
sleep in underwear, but even so, I didn’t manage to cool down.
The stench of shit wafted in from the river, biting at my nos-
trils. I tried to get rid of that sticky feeling, scratching away at
my arms and legs with my nails. The night drew on and I couldn’t
shut my eyes. I thought I might be sick. Sweat ran down my
spine. I couldn’t stop shaking.
The next day, the doorbell rang three times. I opened the
door. It was a cloudy and somewhat cold afternoon. Chico Che
was there, waiting for me. His mother had gotten the nickname
from that cumbia singer from Tabasco. It suited Diego well. He’d
shown up in a yellow, striped shirt and aviator sunglasses that
matched his t-shirt. He seemed shy that day, with a sparse
mustache that I hadn’t noticed before. The down on his upper
lip highlighted his usual smile, unfettered and mocking.
“Needed more sunshine in your life, Chico Che?”
“Where’s Waldo? You ugly, skinny dweeb.”
“You’re chubby as a newborn whale. Sing us one of your
greatest hits, like that Sirenito song.”
76
“No, dude. Sirenito’s not by Chico Che. I’ll sing you Baby
Beluga if you miss your momma. Come to my house. I’ve got a
surprise for you. My mom’s on call at the hospital and won’t
be back until tomorrow.”
I shuffled behind Diego, dragging my feet. I felt a hole in
the pit of my stomach, a fluttering of air hinting that something
would go wrong. We arrived at Diego’s still unpainted, rusty
entryway. The gate was open. We walked right in, taking our
time. The patio was all dirt, with construction materials piled
up in the corners: gray bricks, gravel, sand, a few rods. They’d
started to build another floor above the house, but it was left
unfinished when Diego’s father abandoned them, he told me,
his voice cracking as he pulled a large egg carton out from
inside an unfinished room. Those yellow sunglasses were the
only thing he had left of his father, he told me, almost in tears.
A high-pitched mew rang out from inside the box. We
walked down a dilapidated wooden staircase to make our way
back to the patio, taking care not to trip and fall. I pried the
box open. A little, black cat with its hair standing on end shot
me a feral look. It was scared to death, shaking as it mewed.
It tensed its little tail, trying to look bigger than it was. I pulled
it out with both hands, holding it by the belly. It was warm.
Its heart was pounding out of its chest. I placed it on the
ground, and it bolted behind a pile of debris to hide.
 “I know how to make it come out. Don’t let it get away.”
Diego went back inside his house. After a while, he came
back with a plastic Tupperware container packed with some
stewed chicken tinga that his mother had made. We set it
down besides the pile of debris where the cat was hiding. The
scent of chicken scampered across the patio. The aftertaste
of shit still lingering in my mouth. We crouched down, knees
on the ground, and looked the little cat in the eyes. It was tak-
ing shelter among chunks of cement. I could feel a certain
dampness in the air, a harbinger of rain, and a stab of pain
flashed through my head. I felt my temples with my fingers
and shut my eyes. When I opened them, Diego smiled genu-
inely for the first time since I met him, in an open, non-sardon-
ic gesture. We backed away from the rubble and waited for
the cat to approach the food.
“Once it’s dark out, let’s go to the devil’s rock.”
I didn’t reply straight away. I hesitated for a moment be-
cause I couldn’t remember if my father would be home. The
kitty poked its head out slowly, distrustfully, turning its head
from side to side, noting our presence. But hunger prevailed.
Pulled in by the scent of chicken, it sniffed its way to the
Tupperware. It dug its face into the food, devouring the chick-
en so quickly that it almost choked. It breathed heavily, shak-
ing from the meat greeting its palate. I thought about where
I might hide it so that nobody would find it. I thought about
the spare room full of knicks and knacks where the cat could
stay warm and comfortable. In my head, I named the cat Do-
mingo. I inched toward its makeshift bowl and the cat didn’t
even notice me. That little ball of fur seemed drunk from the
food it had just gobbled up. Then it rubbed itself against my
leg, bunting its face on me. It looked ragged, abandoned, like
it’d lived a tough life.
The sky closed in on us and the clouds swelled with dark-
ness. I extended my hand to caress Domingo. It purred as I
pet it. The cat hopped back to the Tupperware with its tail
tensed up, looking for more food, but the container was al-
ready empty. Out of the blue, Diego let a gray brick crash onto
its head. I heard a crunch. The left side of the kitty’s head was
flat against the ground, one eye and some of its brains oozing
out. Domingo was still panting. It didn’t even know what hit
him. A mixture of chicken and blood foamed in its mouth. It
twitched its legs, trying to escape whatever it was that had
happened to it, but it was too late. I was blinded by a flash of
light for a brief moment, and when I came back to myself, I
saw Diego laughing in the mist. With that crunch, a dam in me
also burst. I was overflowing, boiling over. My hand shook, my
stomach twisted, and I wanted to puke. I could feel my face burn.
My head swelled with air, and I was overcome with nausea.
“What did you do, pig tits?”
“Are you crying? You pussy.”
“Son of a bitch! This is why your father abandoned you.”
“Fuck you, asshole.”
I saw his eyes well up. I ran and grabbed an iron rod. I
struck him with all the strength I had left, which wasn’t very
much. He yelled, “Stop it man, fuck, it wasn’t that big a deal,”
huddling into a ball. I kept thrashing the rod against his back
until my arm got tired. The tears wouldn’t stop flowing. His
aviator sunglasses toppled to the floor. I stepped on them un-
til they broke. Suddenly the rain unleashed its fury upon us.
Diego picked up one of the lenses from his sunglasses and
desperately tried to stick it back into the broken frames. The
dirt got muddy with the rain. I dropped the rod and ran home,
caked in dirt, casting one final look at Domingo, now motionless.
The rain kept pounding. I woke up feeling agitated. I’d
fallen asleep hours ago, fully dressed. It was dark and cloudy
out. The alarm clock read 11:30. The rolling river hissed like
a giant snake. The door creaked open and let in a soft glow. I
77
recognized that syrupy smell, like vanilla, coffee, and dried
fruit. I heard footsteps shuffling in my direction. In the beam
of light, I saw my mother in a black robe. She lay down next
to me. I pretended to be asleep, exaggerating my breath so
it would seem like I was in a deep slumber. My mother pressed
herself up against me. The robe felt soft. She twisted my hair
with her fingers. Then she edged her face toward mine and
kissed my forehead. That scent became more pungent, sour
even. She smelled like rotten fruit. With the tip of her tongue,
Inés, my mother, grazed my earlobe and uttered my name in
her hoarse voice. “Román, are you awake?” My palms started
sweating. I tried to keep as still as possible, but my legs were
shaking. Inés kissed my neck with her wet lips. The summer
heat scurried across my entire body. She loosened her robe,
grabbed my hand with hers, and submissively placed it on
her breast. “Touch me,” she said, her voice drowning in a blan-
ket of clear water. Pressing my eyes shut in the rough shad-
ows, I felt like I was still asleep. I squeezed Inés softly, feeling
her nipple tense. Her cold hand slowly sunk into my pants,
blood erect and beating. “You’re more handsome than your
father, Román.” With her middle finger, index, and thumb, she
started moving up and down my burning flesh. My breath
quickened, my body shaking from head to toe. I feared that
my father could walk in on us at any moment. Her fingers were
moving more and more quickly. A cramp shot through my
underwear, along with a soft moan. I opened my eyes and got
up from my bed, a hidden tautness from who knows what
depth of me spurring me away. I couldn’t turn back. I heard
Inés slurring her words:
“Where are you going, Román?”
I stumbled over the furniture and walked out of our house.
I ran as fast as my legs could carry me, all the way to Diego’s
house. The gate was still open. I stag-
gered into the patio, wheez­
ing. Diego was burning trash in a fire, the embers crackling. I
grabbed an empty box and flung it into the embers. The
flames came alive, reddening Diego’s face.
“Did you pee your pants?” he asked, looking at the stain
on my leg.
“You pornographic fatty.”
“Pornographic?”
“Didn’t shit myself though, did I?”
We both bent over laughing. Chico Che tossed a gossip
magazine into the flames, tainting the flames green for a brief
moment. The smell of charred trash intermingled with the
scent of shit that the rain had stirred up. Diego glanced at his
plastic wristwatch.
“It’s almost midnight. Let’s go see if the devil comes out.”
We walked down the street, following the rumor of sew-
age under the glow of a scant few streetlights. We made our
way down to the greenery, which was pitch black at
that hour. The grass grazed my knees. It was
wet. My sneakers got soaked as we
crept up to the bellowing river,
which boomed louder and
louder. Diego was wear-

ing flip flops and shorts. He knew the path
by heart. The croaking frogs were making a rack-
et. The stench of shit seemed to be spilling over from
the swelling river. We reached a little concrete bridge that
connected the county of Independencia to Las Flores. A little
altar light that had been nailed into a tree trunk glimmered
over a boulder that was about the size of a large dog. Diego
crept toward the rock until he could touch it. He peered at his
watch and said something to me, but the roaring river
drowned out his voice. I got closer so I could hear him.
“It’s midnight and nothing’s happening. Look, those are
the hoof marks,” he whispered.
There were two clefts in the boulder, like the cloven hooves
of a goat. My palms started sweating. The cold gnawed at my
toes, which were drenched in the grassy mud. It reeked of
dead dog and shit, which made my stomach rise and my eyes
burn. “Come on and show yourself, fucking devil!” Diego cried
as loudly as he could, though I could barely hear him above
the rumble of the river. Suddenly my guts started burning, and
then a hollow in my chest seemed to steal my breath away.
“What’s wrong, Waldo? Don’t tell me you believe in this shit.”
“I’m not that dumb.”
We inched up to the water’s edge to watch the swelling
that had reached the lowest part of the marsh. The river dragg­
ed leaves, trash, clothing, and branches through the muck.
Diego picked up the largest rock he could carry and flung it into
the current. He made a little pile of good-sized rocks, inspect-
ing them rigorously as usual. I touched that rough stain on my
pants. The smell of sewage clung to my skin, climbing through
my memories. Domingo flashed through my mind, his eye jutting
out, then the screeching tadpoles and Inés’s face throbbed
inside my head. I heard Inés’s voice again. “You’re more hand-
some than your father, Román.” A queasy feeling whirled in-
side my brain. I covered my ears with my hands. Diego was
holding a rock. The folds at the back of his shaved head repuls­
ed me. It seemed to me that the stink was coming from his
body, not the river. The light on the tree blew out. Without
thinking, I pushed Diego into the giant river with all my might.
I saw his body sink into the furious darkness with that single
plunge. The water swallowed him whole. I took off my t-shirt,
sneakers, and pants to try to get rid of the fetid stench, but I
could feel it sticking to my skin, it was as if I were going to smell
of shit for the rest of my life. I was left there in nothing but my
underwear, shivering from the cold. I felt all of the strength
in my body leave me. I couldn’t breathe. The light flickered
back on, brighter than before. I stumbled toward the rock and
sat where the hooves had made their marks. I hugged my knees
in and dissolved into tears.
79
Image 1. Image 2.
Francisco Servín R.*
Cannabis in Mexican Culture and
Art as Recreated by Artificial Intelligence
I
mages are strong and influential tools. They’re kept in the
folds of the subconscious, detonating conversations with
the psyche. We may understand the way new artificial in-
telligences are storing images in a parallel fashion. To do so, we
could turn to photographer Boris Kossoy’s ideas on the socio-
cultural filter,1 that is, that through which the eye sees. In this
article, our sociocultural filter consists in our point of view
—the eye of cannabis in Mexico— as well as different aes-
thetic expressions and the newly integrated technologies of
artificial intelligence.
In the realm of photography, discussions around whether
photography is art still unfold. Yet, we do not discuss wheth-
er photographers are artists or artisans. Now that artificial intel-
ligence is here, some believe that it is threatening art, not to
mention the egos of photographers, who now perceive their craft
as being at risk. Yet, we should view artificial intelligence as a
mere amalgamation of tools to create images that can enrich the
visual dialogues between us, our psyches, and others. It is through
artificial intelligence that we can visualize social imaginaries.
The topic of artificial intelligence may be considered within
the paradigm of those machines that once emerged in society
and made incursions into the field of art. In my view, when pho-
* Francisco has a master’s in creative processes and studies in art and
design from the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez (uacj); you
can contact him at bfservin@gmail.com.
80
Image 3.
tography ushered in technology that could reproduce the
world through light, the situation was similar. Back then, there
must have been painters who perceived a threat to themselves
as artists. Yet, artists are still painting portraits, landscapes,
and murals today, and the world is being documented through
photography —though photography is no longer a mere tool
for registration but has also entered the world of art, visual
expression, and photonarrative.
We might say that the practice of making art not only con-
sist in deploying a given technique. Behind any work of art,
there is also reflection, discourse, and the author’s expression,
all of which may be expressed thanks to the soul, to borrow
Gas­tón Bachelard’s (1884-1962) term.2 The soul is necessary
to creation, the aesthetic manifestation of human expression
—and we must bear in mind that art is human.
We are now in a post-photographic world, in artist and crit-
ic Joan Fontcuberta’s words (1955),3 and in this new era of the
image, new paradigms and discourses are cropping up around
the image. On the one hand, we have the immediacy with
which the digital image came and changed the world through
massive and excessive reproduction.
In my view, studies on the specific history of drugs in Mex-
ico and their relationship to social, political, and economic pro-
cesses over time remain scarce, which is why this article seeks
to make a contribution to this end. At the same time, as artists,
Image 4. Image 5.
we are playing with artificial intelligence in order to explore a
few texts and photographs dealing with cannabis in Mexico. We
are experimenting with social imaginaries, with the psyche.
Stigmas vs. Santa Rosa: Cannabis in
Art and Indigenous Mexican Cosmogony
The term for social stigma originated in Ancient Greece, where
it was used to signal the traits of foreigners, strangers, or those
we might call “others” based on the features associated to
their religion, race, and bodily deformities. Viewing people
in terms of stigma has led societies to perceive the other as
a threat. In this sense, in Mexico, a few conservative groups, in-
cluding the business class and religious groups, see cannabis
consumers as a risk to society.
In this country, there is still criminal persecution around
cannabis consumption, even though cannabis has been used
extensively over time, starting with Indigenous groups such as
those in the state of Hidalgo who adopted cannabis and called
it Santa Rosa. Then, during the colonization period, Indige-
nous communities and Spaniards saw conflicts around their
use of this plant. Later on, cannabis started being introduced
in the world of Mexican artists —poets, illustrators, and paint-
ers who spearheaded Mexican muralism— and it was Diego
Rivera (1886-1957) who promoted consumption during the
creative process, alongside David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974),
José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949), Fermín Revueltas (1901-
1935), and other members of the of Union of Technical Work-
ers, Painters, and Sculptors.
The many discourses around marihuana have pushed us im-
age creators to reflection, inviting us to take a dive into the cre-
ative process as visual artists. We seek to share some of this
Image 6.
process and experiment around the stigmatized image of the
cannabis consumer in Mexico from the perspective of photog-
raphy and visual art, using artificial intelligence as a supplement.
This piece is based on the stigmatized image of a popular,
multifaceted character, one sometimes portrayed as a monster
before society: the cannabis consumer often referred to as a
marihuano (image 1).
It is worth mentioning that the Royal Spanish Academy
has categorized the word marihuano or mariguano within its dic-
tionary of Americanisms, rather than in its general Spanish
dictionary. We may perceive a degradation in the prestige of
the “other” starting with language itself. Marihuano is deemed
a synonym of marihuanero or mariguanero, defined as a person
who is addicted to marihuana. This is telling of the fact that
cannabis has been very little studied due to the censorship
around it: there is research showing that dependency on this
plant is usually far lower than it is with tobacco, alcohol, cof-
fee, or even chocolate.
In this text, we are revisiting the aesthetic image of can-
nabis as conceptualized through poems and songs —such as
during the Mexican Revolution— as well as short narratives
told by consumers, allowing us to understand society’s every-
day relationship to the plant.
We toy with this image, recreating it in our minds through
these brief narratives, which we will also process using the ar-
tificial intelligence program Midjourney in order to digitally in-
terpret and generate images to accompany these texts.
Image 2 deals with the ritual use of Santa Rosa, the name
given to cannabis in places including the state of Hidalgo. We
may also find this concept in the work by Lourdes Báez Cube­
ro on cannabis as a “plant of power” in Mexico.4
Through her work, we have come to know that in eastern
Hidalgo, from the high plateau to the Serrano region, the
81
Image 7. Image 8.
ritualistic use of Santa Rosa or “Holy Rose,” denoting canna-
bis indica as well as jimsonweed, is part of the practice of the
bädi (which, in the Indigenous Otomí language means “the one
who knows”). These bädi are able to enter certain states of
consciousness by ingesting medicinita, or the little medicine,
as the Otomí people of Santa Ana Hueytlalpan call marihuana,
breaking into song (zitheni in Otomí). In this process, an entity
uses its strength (nzahki) to take shelter in the shaman’s body and
“sing,” communicating with the person whose voice is being
used as a channel.
This experience turns the body into the focal point of the
shamanic praxis, as the receiver of a power that confers divin-
ity when it enters the body of the bädi, so that this person can
“see” beyond the world of phenomena and travel to various
planes of the universe, communicating with all the entities in
the “other” world. Thus, the idea of “seeing” is tied to the cog-
nitive abilities of the bädi.
“Santa Rosa” is still used by Indigenous people, and its im-
age is portrayed in embroidered pieces known as tenangos.
Image 3 was created by a group called “Corazón hñähñu,” or
“Hñähñu Heart.” In it, we may observe a man with a leaf of
cannabis, under which we may read the caption “ts’o paxi,”
which means “weed,” a reference to the personal, recreational
consumption of marihuana. In image 4, we may see a cannabis
plant embroidered in a cushion by the group “Corazón hñähñu”.
Grifa & Grifo, Baked & Stoned
In Mexican cannabis culture, stoner jargon is constituted by
broad, playful, and creative vocabulary that aims to disguise
certain topics in conversation in the face of unfamiliar outsiders.
For instance, among other words, we may note that “sheep tail”
(colita de borrego) and “tangle” (greñuda) are used for unpress­
ed cannabis flower. “Skunk” (zorrillo) refers to its characteristic
82
Image 9.
aroma; “mustard” (mostaza) is a nickname for cannabis; “brown”
(café) refers to dry cannabis; “kushara” is a variety of cannabis;
“redhead” (pelirroja) is the seedless cannabis creat­ed by the
drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero; and “rooster” (gallo) is a joint.
One of the expressions that has been used around marihua­
na consumption the most is to “have the grifa.” In The Royal
Spanish Academy, “grifo, grifa” is first defined as a person with
frizzy hair, but the fourth definition is to be under the effects
of marihuana. The seventh definition states that it denotes in-
toxication, and the tenth notes that “grifo, grifa” is another
name for cannabis indica. This word is also associated with
popular uprisings and the armies of the Mexican Revolution.
Image 5, taken from the program Midjourney, portrays Gua-
dalupe Rivas Cacho (1899–1975), a stage actress who played
a homeless woman who was well-known for smoking in excess,
which is why she was nicknamed “La Grifa.” One day, when
playing this role in the theater, she felt that something was
missing, so she decided to light up a joint onstage, just like
her character would have done. It was thus that the word grifa
took root in Mexican stoner jargon, referring to cannabis and
the state that it provokes.
Ricardo Pérez Montfort tells the tale of a commander of
humble origins who followed Zapata during the Mexican Revo-
lution, fighting against the army of Victoriano Huerta.5 His name
was Antonio Barona, nicknamed “El Grifo” due to his penchant
for cannabis. Midjourney portrays him as seen in image 6.
Verses for a Stoner President
Now, we will explore the figure of a stoner president. We are
not referring to Vicente Fox, the former president of Mex-
ico (2000-2006) who was part of the conservative PAN par-
ty, but to the aforementioned Victoriano Huerta (1913-1914)
(image 7), given his habit of smoking marihuana —so much
Image 10.
so that many poems and songs of the Mexican Revolution
mention Huerta’s love for juanita (or marihuana).
We used artificial intelligence to create image 8 and illus-
trate the following verses, an elegy to Huerta written by one
of the most famous composers of “corrido” ballads from the
Mexican Revolution, Marciano Silva (1849-1944):
The pueblos of Mexico
with sincere joy
salute, everywhere,
your urgent hiding.
Mournful marihuano,
aborted from the earth,
God desired that you not
come back and tread my Nation.6
My Mother’s Marihuana
I came across a group of youths, one of whom was telling
another about something he’d experienced the day before.
I picked up the words “marihuana” and “mom,” and I asked the
young man whether he could tell me what had happened
—I assumed that his mother had caught him in the act. Image 9,
processed by Midjourney, recreates the following story:
“Yesterday, I was hungry, and I went to the kitchen to see
what I could find. I rummaged among the drawers, where
the spoons are, and all of a sudden, I picked up a little bag,
and when I pulled it out, I realized it was my mother’s
weed . . . [laughter] Ooh! I was caught off guard. Nooo, how
can this be? . . . But it was so!”
“How come it baffled you like that? How did you feel?”
“Well, before, whenever she scolded me, I always thought
Image 11.
that she was right, but now that I found that little bag of
hers, I feel liberated from all that, you know?
“Does your mom know that you found her weed baggie?”
“No, she doesn’t know, but I do plan on saying, ‘Hey, mom!
I found this little baggie. Is it yours?’ But it was shitty weed. I
felt like telling her that I could get her better, healthier weed,
because the one she had had already gone brown.”
To conclude, we may observe how cannabis has perme-
ated Mexican culture. It has been used for everything from
the traditional rites of Indigenous groups to the military world
of the revolutionaries, with certain politicians also having ex-
perience with marihuana consumption, such as Victoriano
Huerta —that early-twentieth-century president who con-
sumed marihuana— and another president who calls himself
an entrepreneur who is interested in the subject. It has even
permeated the worlds of mothers who use marihuana recre-
ationally or due to its therapeutic properties. Yet, consumers
are still being criminalized, which is why we are seeking to en-
courage dialogue so that the rights of cannabis communities
may be recognized in our country. This includes public manifes­
tations, as recreated in images 10 and 11.

Notes
1 See Boris Kossoy, Lo efímero y lo perpetuo en la imagen fotográfica
(Cátedra: Madrid, 2014).
2 Gastón Bachelard, La poética de la ensoñación (Mexico: fce. 1997).
3 On this matter, see “La furia de la imágenes”, video from the mas­
ter’s in photography at Universidad Politécnica de Valencia in 2016,
in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVP008ftTTs.
4 Lourdes Báez Cubero, “El uso ritual de la ‘santa Rosa’ entre los oto­
míes orientales de Hidalgo: el caso de Santa Ana Hueytlalpan,” Cui­
cuilco, vol.19, no. 53, pp.155-174.
5 Ricardo Pérez Montfort, Tolerancia y prohibición: aproximaciones a la
historia social y cultural de las drogas en México. 1840-1940 (México: De­
bate, 2016), p. 142.
6 Ibid., p. 127.
83
Voices of Mexico 120
The unam Holds Its Fifth International
University Book Fair (Filuni)*
T
he Fifth International University Book Fair
(Filuni) will boast more than 300 artistic and
cultural events as well as those designed for the
dissemination of science: walls full of books, launches of
the latest books published, talks with internationally fa-
mous authors, seminars, colloquia, film screenings, work-
shops, plays, concerts, and more. An estimated 35,000
people are expected to attend over the fair’s six days.
Different countries will meet, celebrate, and promote uni-
versity book publishing, together with new experiences
that will link up the publishing community with the
readership. The follow­ing crosscutting themes are planned
for 2023, around which most of the fair’s activities will be
organized: Society and Technology; Energy and the Envi-
ronment; Health and Well-being; and Culture and Free-
dom of Expression.
* Photos courtesy of the Universitiy of Texas in Austin and unam
Books (Libros unam).
84
Each time the fair is held, one institution of higher
learning is selected as guest of honor to strengthen ties
and explore convergences. In the past, this has included
the University of Costa Rica, the Complutense Universi­
ty of Madrid, the University of Buenos Aires, the Univer-
sity of Colombia, and the University of Salamanca. This
year, the guest of honor will be the University of Texas
in Austin (ut). The ut, founded in 1883, is considered one
of the forty best educational institutions in the world and
the second of those who have bestowed degrees on Lat-
in American students. With its main campus located in
Texas’s cultural capital, Austin, it operates as a sanctuary
for exploring “the innumerable opportunities of tomor-
row.” In addition to the ut, we will enjoy proposals that
will enrich the exchange, discovery, and cultural perspec-
tive for both readers and professionals in the fields of
publishing and the world of university books.
The Filuni is the celebration of the knowledge that
brings together students and teachers in university and
 Cannabis Speaks Out

This event is one of the pillars that

recognizes the labors of those dedicated to
research, literature and writing, teaching,
and academia, and those who disseminate
their approaches and themes.

In accordance with the Filuni spirit and its com-

mitment to raise up university publishing, from the
very first, it has bestowed the Rubén Bonifaz Núño
Award for University Publishing. Until now, the award

University of Texas in Austin.

has gone to Joaquín Díez-Canedo Flores (2022), Juan
Felipe Córdoba Restrepo (2019), Sayri Karp Mitastein (2018),
high-school-level education, specialists, and all those and Flávia Goulart Mota García Rosa (2017).
who love reading, in a space where national and inter- The Fifth Filuni will be held from Tuesday, August 29
national university publishing houses find an audience to Sunday, September 3, 2023, at Mexico City’s unam Ex-
interested in their proposals, a space that is important hibition and Conference Center. The celebration, which
for promoting their catalogues and authors, and where in only five years has become a renowned and culturally
professional contacts can be made in the areas of distri- vibrant space, will return to the volcanic soil of the Natio­
bution, sale, and positioning in the field. The fair’s pro- nal Autonomous University of Mexico. And, as it has every
gram has included book launches, workshops, talks, and time, it will promote the luminous interior of the univer-
lectures by important figures such as Vivian Gornick, Juan sity spirit with the vibrant activities that have delighted
Villoro, Cristina Rivera Garza, Carmen Boullosa, Julie­ta and amazed us in the past. Let us celebrate, promote, and
Fierro, Margo Glantz, Alberto Manguel, Miguel León Por- enjoy the labors of those who make possible not only uni-
tilla, Fernando Iwasaki, and Daniel Melero, among many versity publishing but also the dissemination of the work
others who have contributed to the enrichment of uni- by researchers, men and women, students, and profes-
versal, social, and artistic thought. In 2023, it will host the sionals, who irrigate the fertile lands of the infinite possi­
participation of, for example, Miriam Toews, Robert Darn- bilities of the future.
ton, and Gioconda Belli.
This initiative began to be thought out inside univer- For all the details about the International University
sity walls beginning in 2017 in order to fill the vacuum of Book Fair go to www.filuni.unam.mx.
the promotion of university publishing in Mexico’s capital.
It simply was not possible for the National Auto­no­
mous University of Mexico to not assume this com-
mitment as a responsibility to acade­mia and culture.
That is why the tireless efforts of the General Office
for Publications and to Foster Publishing, supported
by the Coordinating Office for Cultural Outreach, plus
the unam’s backing have been so important for con-
tinuing to add publications that strengthen us, re-
flect, and build the pathways of university publishing.
This event is one of the pillars that recognizes the
labors of those dedicated to research, literature and
writing, teaching, and acade­mia, including those who
disseminate their approaches and themes.

85
Voices of Mexico 120
Óscar Badillo Pérez*
From the Exemplary North
to the Violent South:
North American Representations
Of Marihuana in Documentaries
T
o understand the stigma that marihuana still car­
ries in U. S. American society —which, for starters,
is called by its Mexican name— we would have
to address thousands of years of continental bustle in
which marihuana went from being a sacred plant to becom­
ing a threat to Christian orthodoxy, with hemp eventually
standing as the raw material behind the industrialization
of Europe and North America. Yet, the modern history of
its defamation in the United States is much more recent
and dates to the 1930s, when the government launched a
campaign against its production, sale, and consumption
based on the medical assumptions of the time, racial con­
jectures, political calculations, and market strategies.
Though this campaign was developed from the realm
of politics, it was also deployed through the media, with
radio content as well as a vast symbolic universe of repre­
sentations in images and film. While cinema remained
an incipient industry in the United States of the time, its
pedagogical possibilities were quickly noticed by the ideo­
logues of the prohibition campaign. Fiction motion pic­
tures like Reefer Madness (dir. Louis J. Gasnier, 1936)1 and
Marihuana (Dwain Esper, 1936),2 synthesized the Federal
Bureau of Narcotics’s message under commissioner Harry
Anslinger: that marihuana is a dangerous drug that kills
the young as well as a surefire path to crime and moral
and racial degradation.
With their sensationalist tone and adherence to gov­
ernment scripts, these and many other films have been
* Óscar is studying a Ph. D. in Political and Social Science and is
the technical secretary at cisan, unam; you can contact him at
obadillop@unam.mx.
86
catalogued as propaganda, that is, as intentional and sys­
tematic communicative exercises seeking to mold the
perceptions and behaviors of spectators through coercion.
Yet, this discursive crusade was not limited to fiction films.
Especially after the Second World War, documentary
films on the dangers of drugs and alcohol proliferated. Pub­
lic and private U. S. institutions, such as the Narcotic
Educational Foundation of America and the John Birch
Society, produced their own films that sought to indoc­
trinate specific audiences.
In the 1950s, the government expanded its war on drugs
to even more spaces, including schools. Ever since the
Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-1961) administration, certain
recommendations to include education on drugs in school
curricula were issued. Propaganda shorts became ram­
pant, proving instrumental and playing an important role
in the dissemination of official discourse as well as in the
configuration of stigmas that would live on in social imag­
inaries for decades. These films, like the discourse of the
post-war era, tended to point toward the communist bloc
as an enemy of the United States in the international
terrain, and to drugs as the enemy in the domestic realm.
It is thus no surprise that some post-war short films on
drugs suggest that the increased marihuana consump­
tion in the United States was the product of a Soviet
strategy to destroy the United States from the inside out.
It was not until the 1960s that cannabis-decriminal­
ization activists started taking up documentary film to
champion their own cause. The ’60s marked one of the
most intense periods in modern U. S. political history. A
new generation that was wary of institutions —whether
religious, political, or economic— emerged in the political

scene and spearheaded fights for civil rights that would
pry open spaces that were once off limits for Black Amer­
icans, youths, and women.
These countercultural movements sparked harsh crit­
icism of the U. S. American way of life: the stage was set
for a revolution in social conventions and sexual practices.
Amid such dramatic social change, marihuana was more
than symbolic: it proved defining in creative environments
as well as in the articulation of political movements that
sought to transform public life like never before in the his­
tory of the United States. In documentary cinema, films
like the World of the Weed (1968) criticized prohibition and
made room for an unprejudiced debate around mari­
huana legalization.
Despite the aggressive propaganda campaigns behind
Richard Nixon (1969-1974) and then Ronald Reagan’s (1981-
1989) wars on drugs, by the late twentieth century, a new
perspective on marihuana had gained headway, as had
another way of documenting it. Both in fiction film as well
as in documentaries, representation of marihuana grad­
ually shifted to become more tolerant, less solemn, and
sometimes even comical. The millennium ended with one
of the most comprehensive documentary approaches to
marihuana —Grass (1999), by Ron Mann— a critical review
of the U. S. Government’s war on marihuana throughout
the twentieth century that considered the racist propa­
ganda of the Anslinger era spanning the first few decades
of the prohibition, the challenges of increased consump­
tion during and after the countercultural movements, the
symbolism of marihuana in the activism against the Viet­
nam War, and even the fact that William Clinton (1993-
2001) would become the first president in U. S. history to
publicly admit that he had consumed marihuana.3
Interestingly, this first documentary to ever broadly and
critically deal with marihuana consumption in the Unit­
ed States was in fact a Canadian production. Years later,
Ron Mann (Toronto, 1958) stated that he had feared that
the U. S. government would censure the documentary as
Amid such dramatic social change, marihuana
was more than symbolic: it proved defining
in creative environments as well as in the
articulation of political movements that sought
to transform public life like never before
in the history of the United States.
Cannabis Speaks Out
foreign political propaganda, as was the case with the Na­
tional Film Board’s Cold-War era documentary on antinu­
clear activism If You Love This Planet (dir. Terre Nash, 1982).4
Documentary Activism Around
Cannabis in the Twenty-First Century
Documentary films arguing for the legitimacy of the rec­
reational, medicinal, and industrial use of cannabis have
proliferated for the first few decades of the twenty-first
century. Since documentary representations are rhetor­
ical constructions by definition, we should highlight a few
examples that demonstrate how, in twenty-first-century
pro-cannabis documentary activism, discourses around
the fight for the legalization of marihuana in the United
States have tended to showcase nearby examples in order
to draw comparisons and lead spectators to the directors’
desired conclusions. Besides providing a foreign perspec­
tive, Ron Mann’s documentary film Grass also contrasts
the differences in marihuana-related policy in the Unit­
ed States and Canada in order to draw comparisons be­
tween Canadians’ liberal attitude and the conservativism
of their neighbors to the south.
Meanwhile, the documentary Escape to Canada (dir. Al­
bert Nerenberg, 2005) portrays the “Summer of Legalization”
when restrictions around consumption were temporar­
ily relaxed in 2003. Produced by the National Film Board
(nfb), the film portrays how, in the early twenty-first cen­
tury, soldiers, marihuana consumers, and same-sex cou­
ples were drawn toward the more permissive laws in
Canada. According to the director, the two countries evi­
dently took two different paths after September 11th, 2001:
Escape to Canada (dir. Albert Nerenberg, 2005).
87
Voices of Mexico 120
Canada is portrayed as a close and
tangible example of what can unfold if
cannabis regulation progresses, while Mexico,
in contrast, represents the risks of prologuing
prohibitionist policies: violence,
corruption, and death.
while the terrorist attacks exacerbated conservativism,
nationalism, and Christian extremism in the United States,
Canada took the opposite route.
Though the documentary deals with a specific moment
in Canada’s recent history, there’s an underlying subject
that has always permeated discussions around Canadian
identity: its differences with the United States. Yet, with
the arrival of Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper
(2006-2015) and his national antidrug strategy, the liberal
turn that Escape to Canada describes would remain on hold
until the Liberals returned to power in 2015. The film high­
lights that, “in 2001 [Canada] was the first country in the
world in to legalize medical marihuana. In 2003, the coun­
try began looking to decriminalizing all marihuana and
legalizing same-sex marriage. Canada, you might say, was
on a freedom streak, but Canada lives in the shadow of
America, the land of the free, and perhaps for the first time
and in a big way was trying to choose its own path.”
Two other Canadian films coincide in their compari­
sons of how marihuana is addressed in different parts of
the North American region. The Union: The Business Behind
Getting High (2007), a documentary by the Canadian Brett
Harvey, deals with the harvest and sale of marihuana in
Canada as well as with its traffic to the United States.5 The
documentary cites government statistics estimating that,
by 2007, thousands of British Columbian households grew
“BC Bud,” a strain of marihuana produced in domestic
spaces reaching a sky-high price per pound in the United
States, which imported more than 80 percent of this Ca­
nadian product at the time. The documentary highlights
the historical importance of hemp for the United States
and Canada but also focuses on the propaganda distrib­
uted during both of their prohibitions, with expert opinions
on legal and medical matters. Though it does describe the
illegal traffic of marihuana from one country to another,
the documentary does not portray it as violent or as a se­
curity issue. Rather, the sequences and testimonies in the
88
The Culture High (dir. Brett Harvey, 2014).
documentary suggest that there is a certain degree of per­
missiveness among the Canadian authorities regarding
the plant’s production, consumption, and traffic. Standing
in a bustling square on Cannabis Day in Vancouver, actor
Adam Scorgie asks himself why it is that the United States
arrests activists while, in Canada, the police think there’s no
point in arresting people who smoke right under their noses.
Seven years later, Brett Harvey would direct what he
called the sequel to his 2007 documentary, The Culture
High (2014), this time focusing on the United States.6 Using
archival materials, Harvey outlines the history of mar­
ihuana’s criminalization as of the 1930s followed by
Nixon and Reagan’s wars on drugs. In the second part, he
analyz­es the state of cannabis-related medical treatments
and the progress in regularization laws across several
states. Lastly, he points toward the economic motivations
behind keeping the prohibition in place, as well as to the
high costs of the U. S. penitentiary system, with Black
youths facing higher arrest and sentencing rates than
any other sector of the population.
The documentary starts with a striking scene: a team
of special armed forces storms into a house and wakes
up a family in the middle of the night. The reason: traces
of marihuana and a pipe were found in the family’s dump­
ster. From its incipience, Harvey’s documentary prepares
us for the conclusions, namely, the need to decriminal­
ize the use, production, and entry of marihuana into the
United States.
This film articulates its comparative exercise by look­
ing toward the south. While Escape to Canada portrays the
openness of Canadian society and The Union outlines the
authorities’ permissiveness around recreational produc­
tion and consumption, The Culture High focuses on Mexico
to illustrate the consequences of perpetrating prohibition.
 Cannabis Speaks Out

Highly violent images taken by the Mexican press are

shown onscreen while commentators explain the toll of
the war on drugs: homicides, kidnappings, torture, extor­
sions, impunity, and a vulnerable State. One Drug Enforce­
ment Agency officer provides context for U. S. American O ur Book s
NE W S
spectators by affirming that the casualties had already
surpassed the Vietnam War’s: “The drug war has really led
to a deterioration in the infrastructures of society, which C I SA N
means that virtually every municipal police force and
much of Mexico is corrupted by one cartel or another.”
In the comparisons posed by these documentaries,
Canada is portrayed as a close and tangible example of
what can unfold if cannabis regulation progresses, while
Mexico, in contrast, represents the risks of prologuing pro­
Claudia Maya
hibitionist policies: violence, corruption, and death.
y Monika Meireles (eds.)
With their inherent authority, persuasive abilities, and México: cisan, unam, 2022
ISBN: 978-607-30-6659-4
apparent transparency in depicting reality, documentary
representations were once used as government propagan­
da in films that put forward unidirectional and undisput­
ed messages that sought to perpetuate stigmas against
cannabis. The opening of the 1960s served to bring forward
other points of view, but it was not until the twenty-first
century that representations of marihuana consumption
emphatically transformed in non-fiction films.
Almost a century after the prohibition of marihuana
in the United States, today’s outlook seems quite differ­ Camelia Tigau,
ent. Documentaries of varying tones —ranging from hu­ Sadananda Sahoo
y William Gois (eds.)
morous to decidedly informative ones— have allowed for
México: cisan, unam, 2023
the debates between activists and the authorities to tran­ ISBN: 978-607-30-7430-8
scend the screen, endowing the broader public with argu­
ments in favor and against legalization. These films tend
to address the issue from different geographic levels: local,
when addressing state needs; national, when referring to
the history of prohibition; but also regional, when looking
to Canada and Mexico.


Notes
Nattie Golubov
1 Reefer Madness (dir. Louis J. Gasnier, United States, George Hirliman y Gonzalo Hatch Kuri (eds.)
Productions, 1936). México: cisan, unam, 2022
2 Marihuana (dir. Dwain Esper, United States, Roadshow Attractions, ISBN: 978-607-30-7176-5
1936).
3 Grass (dir. Ron Mann, United States, Sphinx Productions, 1999).
4 If You Love This Planet (dir. Terre Nash, Canada, nfb,1982).
5 The Union: The Business behind Getting High (dir. Brett Harvey, Canada-
United States, Score G Productions, 2007).
6 The Culture High (dir. Brett Harvey, United States, Score G Produc­
tions, 2014).

89
Voices of Mexico 120
Tania Magdaleno Herrera*
Yet Another
Celebration of
The Cannabis
Film Festival1
T
he International Cannabis Film Festival (feicca)
has launched an open call for film directors and
producers to participate in its sixth edition, which
is set to take place in Mexico City.
The International Festival was born in Guadalajara,
Jalisco, in 2018, after Iván Librado and Tania Magdale­
no, who are both from Mexico City, decided to support
cannabis culture through the seventh art. The festival
focuses on films portraying the plant’s diverse social man­
ifestations worldwide.
The Sixth International Cannabis Film Festival will be
celebrated from July 28th to 30th in the Mexico City bor­
ough of Tlalpan. This year, at least twenty countries are
set to participate, including Turkey, India, France, and
Uruguay, with more than 2,500 expected short and fea­
ture film submissions — surpassing the previous festi­
val’s 1,500 submissions.
Besides showing movies, shorts, documentaries, and
web series on the big screen, feicca provides the public
with diverse cultural activities, including workshops,
talks, master classes, concerts, panic art, runways, and
more —all of which focus on film and cannabis. In this
year of heightened environmental awareness, the festi­
val’s offering includes Cinema­Cicleta (or CinemaCycle):
a series of outdoor self-sustainable screenings powered
by the audience’s bicycle pedaling.
For almost six years, the festival’s mission has been
to dignify cannabis by using film as a tool for social trans­
formation. More than 100 years ago, US authorities ac­
* Tania is the director of the Cannabis Film Festival; you can con­
tact her at feicca.mx@gmail.com.
Photos taken from @feiccamx
90
tually started using film as a medium to disseminate a
prohibition and stigmatization campaign around the use
and consumption of the plant, a campaign that affected
Mexico, too.
“Today we are fighting to break away from the stereo­
types of cannabis consumers through education, infor­
mation, and culture,” notes director general Ivan Librado
Ríos, who hopes the festival will “have an impact on the
political agenda and public opinion, raising awareness in
civil society regarding the topics that have been invisibi­
lized by the hegemonic media.”
Every year, one of the requirements for participation
in the open call is for filmmakers to narrate new stories
about mari­huana —proposing versions of reality that are
different from the ones we’ve been told— thus casting
light on medi­cinal and recreational consumers, activists
fighting for the human rights of consumers, and re­
searchers who continue to discover new properties and
health benefits through their work. These filmmakers’
stories can lead us to reflect upon cannabis and do away
with stigmas, putting a stop to discrimination against the
plant’s consumers.
The festival’s main function is to create social change,
and these changes can be found in the strong and clear
messages of film productions, and, to a large extent, in their
communications strategies. Festivals can provide spaces
to come together and screen films, but every film needs to
follow its own path in order to make a true social impact.

From 2020 to 2022, the festival received more than
3,500 film materials. After curation, some 360 pieces were
selected in four categories: animated, fiction, documen­
tary, and experimental short and feature-length films. The
participating pieces are screened throughout the festival
days, but the films are also shared year-round at festivals
like the Mexican Film Festival Network (Red Fest Mex),
Unifest Film, and the Iberoamerican Festival Network
(Red Ibero Fest), as well as at cannabis events that in­
clude feicca within their cultural programming.
The fact that cannabis festivals and events support
each other is extremely important to feicca. The more
connections emerge between cannabis experiences and
the organizations closest to cannabis consumption, the
greater the impact of a film project will be, since each ac­
tor can mirror an active part of the process. How many
times have we felt ourselves reflected in the main charac­
ter of a film? How many times have we seen a friend, fam­
ily member, or acquaintance in any given main character?
Film touches sensitive fibers of our awareness, helping us
contemplate and empathize with different stories. The
seventh art harnesses the ability to expand moral imagi­
nation, allowing us to imagine ourselves in another’s shoes,
even when our realities are very different.
Any producer or filmmaker who wishes to participate
in the Sixth Edition of the International Cannabis Film
Festival must sign up through the Film Freeway platform
and submit film materials that reflect marihuana culture
in Mexico and the world.
This year, the open call will be open for a month and
a half. Films shorter than 40 minutes will be considered
shorts. The films should be presented for selection in
their original version, with Spanish subtitles, and each
author may present as many pieces as desired.
Cannabis Speaks Out
“Today we are fighting to break
away from the stereotypes of cannabis
consumers through education,
information, and culture.”
“The festival’s selection committee will filter the sub­
mitted pieces. The committee’s decisions are final. After
the selection process is done, the results will be published
on the festival’s official website,” stated Iván Librado.
A medal forged by the National Network of Artisans,
which is charged with creating the festival’s prize year
after year, will be awarded at the festival’s close. In so
doing, feicca seeks to honor the festival’s winners with
works of art.
For its fifth edition, the festival created an artivist
mural intervened by the Mexican artist Hobbs, which
aimed to raise awareness on the right to freely develop
one’s personality —a right that’s restricted by the prohi­
bition of cannabis and its consumption.
Without a doubt, the International Cannabis Film Fes­
tival is an unusual cultural initiative, as it focuses on a
subject that unsettles societies the world over.
The year 2020 marked the festival’s first virtual cel­
ebration, which sought to overcome borders and bring
together audiences, directors, and producers. In said edi­
tion “we had the opportunity to speak with pro-cannabis
activists, who shared information on the benefits of the
plant, its legalization process, and the situation of can­
nabis in various countries,” explained feicca director
Tania Magdaleno.
The international impact of this film gathering also
stems from the alliances established with other organiza­
tions, such as the environmental foundation Colombia
Territorio Azul and the economic-development project
“Hemprendimiento por Colombia, una opción de vida”
(roughly translated as “Hempreneurship for Colombia: A
Life Option”), which have lent their support to the produc­
tion of feicca 2023 in three Colombian cities: Medellin,
Bogota, and Santander.

Notes
1 For more information on the International Cannabis Film Festival,
follow @feiccamx on Facebook and Instagram.
91
 REVIEW


David Gabric/Unsplash.com
Balazo

Romper estigmas: arte y cannabis en Norteamérica

(Breaking Stigmas: Art and Cannabis in North America)
Volume 1, Activisms
Aaraón Díaz Mendiburo and Marty Otañez, editors

T
he use, and by extension cultivation and distribu­
tion, of cannabis has been prohibited for at least the
last hundred years. This is starting to change. In ef­
fect, little by little, very gradually, pathways have open­ed
for the legalization of marihuana in several countries and
regions in some areas of interest for consumers: first, it was
authorized for medicinal use, then cultivation in small quan­
tities for personal consumption, including recreational use;
later, permission was even given to open shops and establish­
ments like cafes, where customers can purchase and con­
sume it, albeit with some restrictions, and acquire a variety
of paraphernalia used to enjoy marihuana in different forms.
Needless to say, this evolution of the legal status of
cannabis is not a spontaneous, disinterested concession
on the part of authorities and governments. On the con­
trary, it has required the involvement and active agency
of many collectives of different types with equally varied
objectives, most of which have emerged from civil society
as groups of people who value, and therefore defend, their
right of access to freely consume the substance.
Thus, marihuana legalization is a struggle, which, in
many places, has achieved most, if not all, of its goals. A
crucial issue still to be resolved is that the legal frame­
work for its production, distribution, and consumption
is insufficient to provide effective protection of the rights
of persons who engage in such activities. We still need to
overcome lingering stigmas, stereotypes, and myths, which
in some contexts have even grown more widespread, re­
garding people who use cannabis and have incorporated
it into their lifestyle and worldview.
In effect, despite legalization, regular cannabis users
are still discriminated against and socially judged as “mis­
fits” in mainstream society, and stereotypes still persist
characterizing them as potentially dangerous to social
stability and harmony. A “stoner” —used pejoratively— is
someone who, according to the social construct promoted
by the hegemonic media and dominant ideologies and
public policies, directly or indirectly disrupts social peace.
The thinking behind these views is that, according to this
archetype constructed from the de facto powers, they are
persons who easily lose self-control when they are under
the influence of cannabis, and as a result are prone to
incur in antisocial behavior that harms the interests of
others. In other words, legalization notwithstanding, can­
nabis consumption is still demonized, morally judged as
negative, and widely discouraged in most social circles.

92

The book outlined here seeks not only to combat this
kind of stigmatizing thinking but also to uncover the false
premises it rests on. For a long time now, public discourse
and medical and political advances have shown that no
provable relationship exists between marihuana consump­
tion and antisocial behavior (without engaging in the
debate on what can or cannot be considered “antisocial”).
On the contrary, for example, science has helped consoli­
date the idea that cannabis, far from being a problem for
users, offers numerous benefits. Moreover, the relevant
point is that it has confirmed multiple advantages of con­
suming marihuana, both as a medication, to relieve pain
and symptoms of disease, and for people’s psychologi­
cal and emotional well-being.
Again needless to say, it is untrue that marihuana is
a gateway to the use of other drugs; this is a fallacy used
by prohibitionists unsupported by any objective data. Nor
is it true that distribution and commercialization of can­
nabis encourage the spread of organized crime and the
formation of drug trafficking groups; rather, such phe­
nomena are products of prohibition, which in many ways
is a central pillar of the massive business that has devel­
oped around drug trafficking.
So, what are we to do to counter these discourses that
stigmatize the use of cannabis? According to the editors
of this four-volume set entitled The Arts and the Deconstruc-
tion of Stigmas Surrounding Cannabis in North America, of which
we comment on the first volume here, artistic discourse
is precisely one of the most effective means of unmasking
prejudiced, stigmatizing arguments. Throughout the col­
lection, the different contributors address the relevance
of artistic narratives in this massive effort to disprove false­
hoods. Not only do they reflect on the power of music,
literature, film, the performing arts, the visual and graph­
ic arts, and even, in a modern context, digital arts and the
use of social networks, to build awareness and, more ac­
curately, serve as a vehicle for people to interpret their
realities as multifaceted and multivocal, they also high­
light the capacity for artistic expression to influence other
legitimate forms of knowledge and self-knowledge beyond
the strictly rational. In effect, the artist’s gaze facilitates
access to forms of perception and wisdom that consider
other ways of appropriating the world: among them in­
tuition, emotions, feelings, and even serendipity.
In this first volume of the series, Activisms, we encoun­
ter a wide variety of narratives and stories that show
Cannabis Speaks Out
—more than prove— how the cannabis experience, con­
scious and responsible use of marihuana, can not only be
liberating for the individual, but can even act as a spring­
board to find and/or strengthen the meaning of their
lives. One of the book’s unquestionable merits is that it
can be classified as an academic work but without con­
forming to the traditional forms of academic prose and
discourse. In this sense, the editors have preferred to com­
bine three types of discursive approach to a common re­
ality: the article, which draws on various sources in an
attempt to offer new and original knowledge; testimony,
which achieves its aims based on the experience of the
protagonists as an original source; and finally, the semi-
structured interview, which relies on productive interac­
tion between researchers and the subjects-objects of
study. This combination works because it gives the reader
a panoramic view of the issues approached from a mul­
tidimensional, and in a certain sense panoptic, perspec­
tive in which objective and scientific reflection, based on
theory and methodology, on the one hand, and knowl­
edge drawn from the experience of those who live day to
day immersed in an existential relationship with the ob­
ject of study, and as a result undertake its defense as a
life’s pursuit, as a political program, on the other, merge to
broaden our understanding of issues related to cannabis.
Aaraón Díaz Mendiburo and Homero Mendoza Sán­
chez begin the adventure with the text “La resistencia a
través de la oralidad y las artes: las narrativas en torno a
las y los activistas de la marihuana en América del Norte”
(Resistance through Orality and the Arts: Narratives Sur­
rounding Marihuana Activists in North America), in which
they describe how certain narratives, in this case originat­
ing in the visual arts, converge to influence and partici­
pate in the struggle against the stereotypes constructed
historically around consumption of cannabis. They study
two specific cases of artistic discourse, engravers and
so-called “urban artists,” who, with their work, “intervene”
in public spaces and open them to discussion —also pub­
lic— of what cannabis use means. The debate on the
relevance of taking or “intervening in” public spaces to
influence social understanding of the meaning of canna­
bis and its uses is, unquestionably, one of the article’s
primary contributions, as it constitutes a form of social and
political action in a broader effort to unmask myths
and debunk stigmas. It also exposes us to a specific vision
that conceives art as narrative, necessarily bound to
93
Voices of Mexico 120
taking a position committed to society’s collective causes
and concerns. The authors obtain their information from
conversations with the artists themselves, giving oral
communication a privileged place in the methodology
chosen to deconstruct stereotypes, very close to what is
known as participant observation.
The first testimony presented here is by Dulce Maria­
na Tapia Aguirre and Víctor Garcia Lopez, founders and
directors of the Terraza Weera organization, devoted to
promoting and emphasizing personal cultivation of canna­
bis based on what they themselves define as “the construc­
tion of cannabis gardening and a culture of cannabis
from the Global South.” Their story is addressed on two
planes, the personal and the political. They tell us the
personal and intimate reasons that led them to assume
an active political position on cannabis consumption, and,
on another level of discourse, they describe their specific
struggles, actions, and interests. Thus, in a kind of activist
introspection, the actors dialogue with themselves about
their motivations and how they crystallized in their ac­
tivism, showing us how our convictions almost always grow
out of the challenges life poses. Concretely, Dulce Mari­
ana and Víctor have devoted their time to helping people
who want to grow cannabis using artisanal methods and
in small quantities, mainly for their own consumption.
Their work is relevant because they teach novice growers
different techniques and the most effective procedures
for producing high-quality harvests with an optimum
cost-benefit ratio.
A specific and engaging vision of the defense of can­
nabis culture is that of women consumers. They suffer
social prejudice in at least two different dimensions: their
condition as marihuana users and their gender. The chap­
ter “Mujeres Forjando Porros, Forjando Luchas: la red fem­
inista cannábica que rompe estigmas a través del arte y
la cultura” (Women Rolling Joints, Forging Struggles: The
Feminist Cannabis Network Breaking Stigmas through
Art and Culture), by Estefanía Millán, Monserrat Angulo,
and Rebeca Soto, centers on a reflection from the authors’
feminist perspective on the complexities, discriminations,
stigmatizations, and even attacks they are subject to just
by being women who smoke cannabis in our societies.
Based on their own experiences and those of their fellow
activists, who contribute multiple testimonies as part of
a methodology of semi-structured, in-depth interviews,
the authors describe a reality in which the prejudices they
94
This unprecedented Spanish-language
effort of compiling reflections and
testimonies on some of the most
representative cannabis-related struggles
makes this collection an indispensable resource
for understanding the evolution of social
awareness of cannabis consumption
and uses in North America.
face for using marihuana are compounded by the ste­
reotypes that social constructs create around being women
smokers. This is because, even within their own canna­
bis-using circles, women are regarded with suspicion and
at times are subject to discrimination by their fellow can­
nactivists, who are often incapable of shedding androcen­
tric and heteronormative behavior and attitudes rooted
in a patriarchal mindset. Thus, for example, one of the in­
terviewees mentions how hard it can be to share spaces
to smoke with men, who often confuse their shared sol­
idarity and identification as consumers with a misplaced
confidence to go further, overstepping boundaries that
they see as weakened in an atmosphere of stoner com­
radery, with actions that differ little from the harassment
or outright abuse of entrenched patriarchal norms. From
a position of theoretical and militant feminism, the mem­
bers of Women Rolling Joints, Forging Struggles assume
a commitment, precisely, to lead struggles and embrace
causes that combat not only prejudice and stigma but
also inappropriate conduct against women. And in their
work they employ multiple strategies, one of them the
practice of sisterhood among women smokers and an­
other making use of art and culture —and not any kind
of art but art that necessarily has to be committed and
subversive.
A singular chapter is “Lilushismo, una modernidad con
aroma de cannabis” (Lilushismo, Cannabis-Scented Mo­
dernity), a testimony by Alejandra Alcantar, a cannactiv­
ist known by the handle Lilush on social media, which
she uses, precisely, to participate in efforts to destigma­
tize cannabis-related practices. Her activism, primarily
on Instagram, seeks to spread information on the can­
nabis plant that helps combat the stereotypes that have
developed around it over more than a hundred years of
prohibition and illegality. “Lilas,” as she is also known,
uses art and games to reach a broad audience. She orga­

nizes a wide assortment of online dynamics to make her
information more friendly and accessible to the broader
public. A curious example were contests she organized
to choose the best design of a bong and a joint, and an­
other featuring installations alluding to growing canna­
bis in lockdown during the pandemic. With efforts like
these, she seeks to link the inherent creativity of art with
cannabis consumption to demonstrate one of its many
positive uses.
This first volume concludes with interviews with two
recognized activists for the free use and full legalization
of cannabis in Canada and the United States. They have
both also used artistic narratives as one of the most effec­
tive means of building awareness in the population at
large not only of the plant’s multiple benefits, but also of
the vast number of stigmas and criticisms that have ac­
companied its use.
The first is a conversation with the Canadian lawyer,
dramatist, and actor Russel Bennett, who has specialized
in the defense and legal representation of the interests
of small cannabis producers and distributors in Toronto,
and has also been a constant critic of cannabis legisla­
tion that has been enacted in Canada. Although it ended
historic prohibition, that legislation has also facilitated
encroachment on the market by large producers and mul­
tinational corporations to the detriment of small growers
and distributors and home growing for personal consump­
tion. It is noteworthy that Russell, who in addition to his
legal work is a professional actor, wrote, directed, and
performed in a monologue called The Reefer Man, alluding
to these issues which had a highly successful tour in Can­
ada. He also codirected the documentary Stoned: Hemp
Nation on Trial, which narrates the life and vicissitudes of
Chris Clay, the first owner of a hemp store in Canada, who
was arrested and prosecuted twice, and produces and
hosts the podcast Cannabis Law in Canada. He offers an­
other example of how artistic counternarratives can op­
pose stigmatizing narratives.
In the case of the United States, the book includes a
conversation with the activist Danny Stange, who describes
his efforts in the Denver, Colorado, area to combat not only
stigmas surrounding cannabis but also the stereotypes
used, at times with devastating effect, to negatively label
Mexican-Americans. He also discusses his struggle to raise
awareness about the devastating effects the so-called “war
on drugs” has produced in Mexico, but also in the United
Cannabis Speaks Out
States. Danny’s uses education as his primary tool to de­
sign courses and programs for the population at large, but
he is also involved in community work of construction
and reinforcement of identities, like that of Mexican-Amer­
icans, with whom he participates in traditional dance
groups like those known as concheros. Once more, the power
of artistic expression as a destigmatizing counternarrative.
This unprecedented Spanish-language effort of com­
piling reflections and testimonies on some of the most
representative cannabis-related struggles makes this col­
lection an indispensable resource for understanding the
evolution of social awareness of cannabis consumption
and uses in North America. The collection itself consti­
tutes a political manifesto, presenting a clear position
from the outset. It does not necessarily aspire to open de­
bates with other positions, much less with those espoused
by prohibitionists, but rather is based on the conviction
that legalization is an unquestionable and unequivocal
advance in the fight for individual freedoms and the free
expression of personality. However, it takes the view that
being open to debate and hearing opposing arguments
not only reinforces the democratic meaning of these strug­
gles but could also constitute a highly efficient strategy
for making truth prevail.
For example, although artistic narratives of all kinds
undoubtedly contribute a considerable critical mass of
thinking, action, and —as said before— intuition, creativ­
ity, and sensitivity to our efforts to understand the world
of cannabis with the broadest possible vision, we would be
well advised to consider, and make room for, other narra­
tives that also share such intentions. I am referring, for
example, to scientific, medical, anthropological, and poli­
ti­cal discourse, and those emanating from ancestral practi­ces
involving the use of psychoactive substances of natural
origin in general, and even what religions and worldviews
have to say on the subject. In this sense, expanding the
collection to include new volumes that focus on these
considerations could, in my view, enrich what is already
an extremely valuable research project, which, of course,
has been more or less exhaustive and highly revealing
from the standpoint of artistic discourse, and even more
so, from the commitment and taking a stance on the role
the arts should play in transforming society.
Diego Ignacio Bugeda Bernal
Editor at cisan
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