By Maureen Meehan
Vicente Fox, who calls himself a soldier in the global campaign to legalize marijuana, is joining the board of directors of High Times to advance his agenda.
Fox told The Associated Press that he foresees a day when a robust legal marketplace will produce new jobs and medicines while sharply reducing cartel violence in his country.
He also sees cannabis as one day being part of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Mexico, Canada and the U.S.
Fox’s appointment to High Times’ board is yet another example of weed’s growing acceptance, as was witnessed in April when former U.S. House Speaker John Boehner said his thinking on cannabis had “evolved” and he accepted a cushy position with Acreage Holdings.
Fox told AP that he supports legal cannabis for a variety of reasons, one of which is freedom, “which is may be the highest value that human beings have.”
“I don’t think that governments will ever have the capacity to impose behaviors, to impose conduct, to human beings. At the very end, prohibitions don’t work. What works is your own free decision.”
Then, it’s history. “The war on drugs has been a total failure” since the days of former President Richard Nixon, Fox rightly concluded.
Fox also noted that in Mexico, where tens of thousands of killings have been attributed to drug violence, could be remedied with legalization.
The trend toward legalization “is moving out of a crime activity, a criminal activity that causes death and blood on the streets, into a business, an industry, that is proving every day that it is sustainable,” Fox said.
He noted that criminals who have controlled the drug trade in the United States are still operating and, as such, all drugs should be legalized.
“This is one more reason why in the long term I think that all drugs should be legalized. … But we must educate people. We must educate consumers. We must prevent the wrong things from happening.”
