the year drugs were legal in mexico

Dr. Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra

The current discussions around the drug policy reform in Mexico have motivated to reconsider some events of the past and to dust off archives and family memories of personalities such as the psychiatrist Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra. Today he is recognized as a pioneer in the legalization of drugs in our country for his observations based on scientific studies on the effects of marijuana and other substances. However, this has also led to a series of erroneous interpretations about his work, his positions and his person.

Doctor, teacher, journalist, humanist, free-spirited man, witty and somewhat eccentric, Salazar was a visionary of psychiatry at the time. His fight to break down prejudices around substances such as opium and marijuana, to decriminalize the sick, and his clarity that ignorance is the precursor to prohibition brought him countless distinctions but, in the same way, a professional life plagued by surveillance and perjury. In this text, and through a brief biographical account, we seek to reflect on why it is important to rethink his figure in our sociopolitical context.

Brief history of marijuana in Mexico

The history of marijuana in Mexico is particular: the cannabis plant has suffered downturns, relapses and has been present in stimulating events in the country. Its prohibition and stigmatization seems to be one of the oldest in the world. Perhaps with a brief historical review we can understand the multiplicity of prejudices that revolve around this maligned plant and the importance of changing the prohibitionist policies that have vitiated it in recent years.

Despite the fact that Diego Rivera affirmed that smoking marijuana like the ancient pre-Hispanic peoples could achieve their excellence in the plastic arts, it has already been shown that this plant arrived in New Spain in colonial times. Apparently, at some point in the 16th century, hemp crossed the Atlantic Ocean to be cultivated and used as fiber. Soon, the indigenous people —who already had an ancestral experience in the use of psychoactive plants— integrated cannabis into their religious and medicinal practices. This type of rites and cures were prohibited by the Holy Office of the Inquisition, because they were considered superstitious actions, witchcraft and transgressed the holy Catholic faith.

Later, in the 18th century, the naturalist Antonio Alzate related the uses of hemp seeds to the "superstition of the Indians, their ignorance and malice", in which the devil supposedly intervened and said that they produced "terrible effects: some manifest a ridiculous joy, others remain stupid". Some years later the word marijuana would begin to spread, although there is no certainty of its etymology, it is a contribution of Mexican popular culture to the global language of drugs.

Later, in the 19th century, cannabis extracts were sold without further control for medicinal purposes in apothecaries, drugstores and pharmacies; along with laudanum, cocaine chloride, morphine, among other narcotic preparations. Since then, marijuana has been recommended to treat rheumatism, menstrual pain, headache, asthma, stomach disorders, and hemorrhoids. But also for more serious conditions such as gonorrhea —today better known as gonorrhea—, galactorrhea, "hallucinations of the insane" and even neurosis.

It was not until 1937, with the enactment of the Marijuana Tax Act in the United States, that the global prohibition of cannabis was consolidated. Regulation promoted by Harry J. Anslinger, the famous North American "drug czar", who linked this plant to Mexican migrants, loss of control, addiction and the commission of violent crimes. On the contrary, the following year, the legendary doctor Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra published his article The Myth of Marijuana. In this investigation, he concluded that the consumption of "Doña Juanita" did not generate unconsciousness or criminal impulses and considered the penalties for crimes against health already dictated by Mexican law to be excessive and unjustified.

A psychiatrist outside the norm

Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra was born in Pánuco de Coronado, Durango in the winter of 1897. He was the son of Leopoldo Salazar Salinas and Aurora Viniegra de Salazar. He began his university studies at what is now the UNAM and concluded them at the San Carlos Faculty of Medicine in Madrid (today the Complutense University), and during the interwar period he went to France, where he specialized in psychiatry at the Faculty of Paris Medicine.

Upon finishing his studies he devoted his life to work in a passionate and fruitful way. Upon his return to Mexico, in 1925, he joined the enigmatic asylum of La Castañeda as a doctor, where he worked for more than twenty years; and which he directed between 1945 and 1948. He worked particularly in the Neurosyphilis, Tranquilos, Insane pavilions and stood out for his contributions in the Federal Hospital for Drug Addicts.

In the hospital that was located in Mixcoac, in Mexico City, Leopoldo stood out for his humanistic treatment, which caused him to be branded as extravagant or even insane many times. His work there was “long hours, countless guards, and assiduous studies in an effort to understand and help. The alienated were not rareentities for him, objects of cold academic observation. They were his friends, his weak brothers; he talked and ate with them, took them to his house. He knew and understood them.

To his arduous days in clinical practice, his work as a professor was added, since —since 1927— he worked as a professor at the Faculty of Medicine, where he taught courses on clinical medicine and neuropsychiatry. His colleagues described him as a “clear and brilliant speaker”. In his chairs “he fled from routines and introduced numerous essays and innovations”. He didn't believe in grades and let his students put them on their own. "He was a teacher of intelligent people, the fools distanced themselves from him because they believed he was an unserious man, but his ingenious outbursts were but a small fragment of the golden peaks of his genius."

He worked as a private doctor, developed the first epilepsy clinic in the country and was in charge of the psychiatry area at the London Clinic. One of the representatives of Mexico in the Opium Convention held in Geneva in 1939 was named "because of his knowledge on drug addiction and alcoholism". In this event, the Mexican delegation disagreed with the position that the United States was leading, as the criminalization of drug addicts and stigma about the effects of marijuana based on moral and not scientific judgments. Unfortunately, before Dr. Salazar participated, this convention was interrupted by the start of World War II.

More than once his publications turned into public debates with opinion leaders, colleagues, and personalities such as Salvador Novo or Diego Rivera. In March 1938, he used his column to write a public letter to Lola la Chata, one of the most famous traffickers, who operated in La Merced. “I consider it, in effect, as a born product of our environment and of our time. For you the drug addict is a good customer and nothing more. For me he is a wretch that civilization is dragging. The fact that you as a trafficker have been more successful with them, than we who are in charge of incorporating them into social and active life”.

He also wrote in important academic journals such as the Medical Gazette of Mexico, the Manicomios magazine, the journal of the Society of Neurology and Psychiatry of Mexico and Criminalia, a publication of the Academy of Penal Sciences. One of his great contributions was the fact of putting teaching methods in check. As a result of multiple investigations, in 1951 he founded, with the help of a multidisciplinary team, the Psychopedagogical Orientation Center "La casa sin rejas". It was an educational center that was created to serve "problem" children and young people under the motto of "intelligence and love." With this school, he sought to mitigate the "excesses of school discipline" and exalt freedom, always respecting the personality of each of the students. This house remained in operation for six years, until the death of the doctor.

A solution to the problem of drug addiction

During the 1930s and 1940s, as in recent times, an intense debate took place in relation to how to deal with the consumption and distribution of drugs. And the scientific studies of Salazar Viniegra managed to influence the related public policies of the Cardenista period. The importance of him within these discussions was fundamental, to the extent that by 1938 in a press release he was called: "the man who has in his hands the solution to the problem of drug addiction."

The psychiatrist advocated seeing psychoactive substances from a health perspective, where part of the problem users were treated as patients and not as criminals. It was from this idea that he sought that the policies be based on the scientific knowledge of the time and not on prejudices, moral conceptions and even less on economic, electoral or political interests; as it happens now. It is important to clarify that Leopoldo Salazar never held the position of head of the Department of Public Health, as various journalists and researchers have recently mentioned.

This information is important, not only because a position of such magnitude would have given him greater freedom to make certain decisions and adopt other positions than those that said federal institution took at the time, but also because he has been attributed as the implementer of the political regulation of drugs during 1940, when his role was in this event was merely intellectual. In other words, his investigations served as the basis for the Federal Drug Addiction Regulations, which were enacted during the government of Lázaro Cárdenas, which, rather than legalize substances, tried to guarantee medical attention to so-called drug addicts and that health authorities and authorized doctors They will be in charge of the prescription and distribution of drugs, in order to reduce the power of the traffickers.

Unfortunately, the success or impact that this regulation could have had would never be known, since a few months after the Regulation was implemented, it was suspended due to pressure from the North American government. Salazar's scientific research, his criticism of national policies and the repressive anti-drug systems promoted by the League of Nations, today the UN, and the United States earned him multiple problems and enmities with powerful institutions. His scientific concern caused him to be investigated and a file was opened by the US Federal Bureau of Narcotics.

Obviously his innovative drive was not to the liking of drug czar Harry Anslinger, but something about the doctor's genius intrigued the agent because they maintained constant communication. Despite this, Anslinger sought to discredit Salazar Viniegra's studies, arguing that his experiments violated international law. Both his research and his implementation were permeated by his convictions and political stance. According to the descriptions of his colleagues, he was a rebellious man, "a supporter of power and tyranny" and "he hoped that the constituted tyranny would shake this structure from its roots." He was looking for freedom outside of established rules and fashions.

“He wanted absolute freedom, but the resistance of the environment repressed his desire for it. What a job it must have cost him to live in a world where almost everything is prohibited and outlawed!” Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra died in 1957 in Mexico City. He had children and many friends, most of them with a nut more or less. He also had enemies, the most sane, if we take into account that sanity seeks healing through confinement, punishment and prohibition. The doctor “was a man with sap and substance who lived deeply because he loved life and did not fear death. […] He was a fine-tuned spirit, an idealist bordering on the visionary. He was a mystic who eagerly searched for a human god.”