SOME FEEL AMBIVALENCE OVER NEW MEXICAN DRUG LAW

TIJUANA, Mexico -- Yolanda Espinosa's eyes darted this way and that.
Her hands trembled. For Espinosa, a cocaine and heroin addict in
desperate need of a fix, a new Mexican law decriminalizing the
possession of small quantities of drugs had a definite appeal.
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"That's good," she said in her mile-a-minute speaking style. "Real
good."

But as someone fed up with her life in Tijuana's red-light district,
where she and hundreds of other addicts live in flophouses and traipse
through the streets in search of their next dose, Espinosa also had
her doubts about what Mexico's politicians had done.

"No one should live like I live," she said. "It's an awful life. You
do anything to satisfy your urge. You sell your body. It ruins you. I
hope this won't make more people live like this."

Espinosa's ambivalence reflects her country's. Under siege by drug
traffickers, Mexico took a bold and controversial step last week when
it opted to no longer prosecute those carrying relatively small
quantities of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and other drugs. Instead,
people found with drugs for "personal and immediate use," according to
the law, will be referred to free treatment programs where they will
be considered patients, not criminals.

The decriminalization effort, which many lawmakers endorsed with
little enthusiasm, is intended to free up prison space for dangerous
criminals and to better wean addicts away from drugs. It is not the
only legislative proposal put forward that would probably never have
been considered were the country not in the midst of a bloody and
seemingly endless drug war.

Capital punishment, which has not been carried out in Mexico for
nearly 50 years, is now being offered by some lawmakers as an answer
to the nation's ills. In April, Congress debated whether to make
marijuana legal altogether, a measure President Felipe Calderon
fiercely opposes.

Under the new law, a police search that turns up a half-gram of
cocaine, the equivalent of about four lines, will not bring any jail
time. The same applies for 5 grams of marijuana (about four
cigarettes), 50 milligrams of heroin, 40 milligrams of methamphetamine
or 0.015 milligrams of LSD.

"I could have all that and they wouldn't touch me?" Espinosa asked
with surprise. She was hardly the only one who missed the government's
announcement, which was intentionally low-key. Fearful that the law
would be misconstrued, the government enacted it with little fanfare
on Thursday.

"This is not legalization," Bernardo Espino del Castillo of the
attorney general's office told The Associated Press. "This is
regulating the issue."

The battle against the drug cartels, which has resulted in more than
11,000 deaths since Calderon took office in December 2006, will
continue unabated, officials insist. Revising drug-possession laws, in
fact, will help focus the drug war more effectively, they say.

Besides taking the focus of law-enforcement officials off small-time
users, the law allows the state police to arrest those with up to
1,000 times the personal consumption amounts, people who would be
considered dealers. Anyone with larger amounts would be seen as
trafficking drugs, and they would be handed over to federal
authorities.

"With this reform we will make the combined capability of enforcement
against this crime a legal and operational reality," Attorney General
Eduardo Medina-Mora told a conference of state prosecutors last week.

Mexico's approach, which follows a similar decriminalization effort in
Portugal in 2001, won praise from organizations that consider the
jailing of users a waste of resources that does not reduce drug
consumption. In the United States, some states have decriminalized the
possession of small amounts of marijuana but not other drugs.

"The decision by the Mexican government to decriminalize the
consumption of small amounts of drugs constitutes a step in the right
direction after decades of failed policy," said Juan Carlos Hidalgo,
the Cato Institute's project coordinator for Latin America. "It is in
line with efforts by other Latin American leaders and governments who
are increasingly skeptical of Washington's prohibitionist drug policies."