At a conference last week, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexico’s president since 2018, said, “We are not going to act as policemen for any foreign government,” as quoted by the Associated Press. “Mexico First. Our home comes first.”

As the Associated Press noted, López Obrador has, in previous years, “laid out various justifications for his ‘hugs, not bullets’ policy of avoiding clashes with the cartels.” 

“In the past he has said ‘you cannot fight violence with violence,’ and on other occasions he has argued the government has to address ‘the causes’ of drug cartel violence, ascribing them to poverty or a lack of opportunities,” the AP reported, adding that “López Obrador’s view — like many of his policies — harkens back to the 1970s, a period when many officials believed that Mexican cartels selling drugs to gringos was a U.S. issue, not a Mexican one.”

On Friday, the president “basically argued that drugs were a U.S. problem, not a Mexican one,” and he “offered to help limit the flow of drugs into the United States, but only, he said, on humanitarian grounds,” according to the Associated Press.

“Of course we are going to cooperate in fighting drugs, above all because it has become a very sensitive, very sad humanitarian issue, because a lot of young people are dying in the United States because of fentanyl,” the president said. Over 70,000 Americans die annually because of synthetic opioids like fentanyl, which are mainly made in Mexico from precursor chemicals smuggled in from China,” López Obrador said.

In February, The New York Times reported that United States “law enforcement officials spent years looking into allegations that allies of” López Obrador “met with and took millions of dollars from drug cartels after he took office.”

The Times, citing U.S. records and three people familiar with the matter, said that the previously unreported inquiry “uncovered information pointing to potential links between powerful cartel operatives and Mexican advisers and officials close to the president while he governed the country.”

“But the United States never opened a formal investigation into Mr. López Obrador, and the officials involved ultimately shelved the inquiry. They concluded that the U.S. government had little appetite to pursue allegations against the leader of one of America’s top allies, said the three people familiar with the case, who were not authorized to speak publicly,” the Times reported at the time.

More from the Times’ report at the time:

“Much of the information collected by U.S. officials came from informants whose accounts can be difficult to corroborate and sometimes end up being incorrect. The investigators obtained the information while looking into the activities of drug cartels, and it was not clear how much of what the informants told them was independently confirmed. For example, records show that the investigators were told by an informant that one of Mr. López Obrador’s closest confidants met with Ismael Zambada García, a top leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel, before his victory in the 2018 presidential election. A different source told them that after the president was elected, a founder of the notoriously violent Zetas cartel paid $4 million to two of Mr. López Obrador’s allies in the hope of being released from prison. Investigators obtained information from a third source suggesting that drug cartels were in possession of videos of the president’s sons picking up drug money, records show.”

López Obrador, responding to The New York Times’ reporting, vehemently denied the allegations and called on the United States to clear up the matter.

“It’s all completely false,” López Obrador said in February. “The U.S. government is going to have to address this.”

He even suggested that the report could damage Mexico’s relationship with the U.S.

“Does this diminish the trust the Mexican government has in the United States?” Mr. López Obrador said, as quoted by the Times. “Time will tell.”

A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Justice said there was no investigation into the Mexican president at the time.

The Associated Press, in its report on Lopez Obrador’s latest comments, has a rundown on his relatively lax view toward the cartels:

“López Obrador has argued before against ‘demonizing’ the drug cartels, and has encouraged leaders of the Catholic church to try to negotiate peace pacts between warring gangs. Explaining why he has ordered the army not to attack cartel gunmen, López Obrador said in 2022 ‘we also take care of the lives of the gang members, they are human beings.’ He has also sometimes appeared not to take the violence issue seriously. In June 2023, he said of one drug gang that had abducted 14 police officers: ‘I’m going to tell on you to your fathers and grandfathers,’ suggesting they should get a good spanking. Asked about those comments at the time, residents of one town in the western Mexico state of Michoacan who have lived under drug cartel control for years reacted with disgust and disbelief.”

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People living in a conservative state with one of the worst state policies on cannabis in the country are crossing the border to illegally obtain cannabis in Oregon. Residents of Boise, Idaho, where cannabis is illegal, simply have to drive less than an hour to Ontario, Oregon to buy pot and officials aren’t happy.

The situation is proving something in real-time: that prohibition still doesn’t work. NPR reports that the situation has reached a “flashpoint” and it adds to the pile of reasons why eastern Oregonians aren’t accepting the changes that they’re seeing in their state.

Steven Meland opened Hotbox Farms in Ontario shortly after the city approved adult-use cannabis sales. “The politicians have been able to have this scenario where they say that they don’t have legal cannabis,” Meland told NPR. “But in all actuality we all know there’s legal cannabis in Boise,” he said, hinting that it’s obvious where his customers come from.

Hotbox Farms hardly serves Ontario’s 11,600 residents when there are over 700,000 in the Boise area closeby. “There [are] over a million people within a hundred mile radius of the store,” Meland added. “Of course they are serving a broader market.”

Politico explored the cannabis border phenomenon in Ontario in 2021. Ontario was once the home of the invention of tater tots, but is now known as cannabis central. Residents of the Boise area simply have nowhere else to go to buy pot. Politico profiled Brandon St. Germain of Cannabis & Glass, who reported a similar situation in which most customers come from out of state.

Don’t expect anything to change in Idaho, any time soon. Idaho is one of only two states in the country that bans all forms of cannabis. NORML gives Idaho Governor Brad Little an “F grade” as he opposes even medical-only cannabis bills—in disagreement with 88% of Americans—and industrial hemp bills. Meanwhile things have become so divisive in eastern Oregon that people there want to secede from the state.

The Urban-Rural Divide in Idaho and Oregon

Cannabis laws in the area are shaped by local culture. There’s quite a culture shock between the dyed-in-the-wool conservative culture of most areas of Idaho versus the culture of central Boise, where nearly half of residents voted Democrat. 

Things are just as divisive comparing eastern Oregon versus the coast. Eastern Oregon, home of Ontario, is home to deeply embedded rural culture with a proven track record. A group of people on the rural eastern side Oregon attempted to petition to secede from the fiercely liberal state and join conservative Idaho.

Things haven’t slowed down for cannabis, however. According to NPR, Ontario now sells more cannabis per capita than any other city in Oregon, employing about 600 people for the tiny town.  

Eastern Idaho leaders are trying to move the border of Idaho to secede from the state of Oregon, and pot is one of the reasons for pushing to do so.

“We have a little bit of a drug problem right on the side of our border,” said Rep. Barbara Ehardt, (R-Idaho Falls) at a recent hearing over House Joint Memorial No 1., a bill that would authorize Idaho to begin discussion with Oregon lawmakers about moving the border.

“A lot of Idahoans are going there [Ontario] and getting drugs, Ehardt said, “and that will be pushed hundreds of miles away.”

People in Idaho who travel to another state to buy cannabis for medical purposes are essentially cannabis refugees.

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