Vicente Fox: It's Time to Legalize Drugs

When he was president, Vicente Fox was a huge proponent of Mexico’s war on drugs. But with his nation reeling from the drug-related violence that claimed 12,000 lives last year alone, Fox has done a 180. He now believes production, transit, and distribution of narcotics—and not just marijuana—should be legalized. "Prohibition didn't work in the Garden of Eden. Adam ate the apple," Fox tells Time, following up on an August blog post in which he first aired his new views.

"We have to take all the production chain out of the hands of criminals and into the hands of producers,” he insists. Though he still believes drugs are bad, the responsibility for not taking them “is with citizens." The lengths he’s recommending go beyond any other nation’s policy; even those that have decriminalized possession are too concerned with United Nations treaties to decriminalize trafficking. But, he points out, “always, in every human action there are leaders. There are people that go ahead, that see problems before the rest, that take decisions before the rest."
(More Vicente Fox stories.)