Opposite a football pitch in the Mexican city of Culiacán, there is a building with blacked-out windows – To most passersby, the signage suggests that the facade conceals a sex shop. For all intents and purposes, it looks the part, but the disguise is betrayed by an unmistakable fruity aroma flooding my nostrils as I press the buzzer on the door.
Inside, a young man and woman stand behind a glass table, behind them see-through jars filled with pungent green buds are labelled with recognisable names like Tropicana and Gorilla Glue. Some of the cannabis is locally grown, while other strains are imported from Los Angeles. As well as the weed behind them, inside the glass display case pipes, grinders and other necessities for chronic consumption are all on sale.
“What do you want?”, the gorgeous female budtender asks in perfect English.
“Ah you know, something I can just relax with, watch Rick and Morty…”
“OK, well in that case I recommend you this Buba interior – we have a special offer, 5 grams for 800 pesos [£37]. Or maybe you’ll like this one…”
She shows me a plastic tube marked El Padrino Mágico – The Magic Godfather, a pre-rolled blend of kief and oil named after the Spanish dub of The Fairly OddParents.
“We have those for 250 each.” It’s a touch on the spenny side – down south in Oaxaca, I scored twice as much from a dude on the beach for half the price. Sensing my reservations she adds “It’s gonna knock you out.”
![the fairly odd parents pre-roll](https://www.leafie.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/IMG_20240526_233446.jpg)
Culiacán is a stronghold of the powerful Sinaloa Cartel, but no moustached muchachos with cowboy hats and gold-plated pistols guard the doors here – anyone can walk in. The cartel, which directly and indirectly runs the weed business in Culiacán, has invested generously in R&D, inviting specialists from the US to their state-of-the-art growing facilities to crossbreed and create new strains indigenous to Sinaloa.
I choose three of the pre-rolls and one portion of Buba. The young man takes a jar, weighs the bud on the scales, and vacuum-seals it in a plastic bag. The zoot itself is covered in a dark green, moss-like kief, unlike anything I’ve seen. As I settle down to binge Netflix back at my AirBnB I feel very light and relaxed with a slow creep of euphoria. It’s a nice high, not overpowering, despite my eyes being comically half-open. I wonder whether they had a special machine to roll them, or just a child slave from Guatemala they keep locked in a house.
Is cannabis legal in Mexico?
Is marijuana legal in Mexico? It’s complicated. Several years ago, the Supreme Court declared the marijuana ban unconstitutional, so it’s technically legal, but the government hasn’t bothered passing new laws about it, leaving it stuck in legislative limbo. In the meantime, pseudo-dispensaries such as the one in Culiacán, part of a chain across the city, are filling the gap.
“Marijuana was not widely used as an intoxicant in Mexico before 1920”
Cannabis was first introduced here in the form of hemp by Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century. Turns out, sunny Mexico had the ideal conditions for high-potency THC, an aspect which didn’t go unnoticed by the Tepehuán tribe who incorporated its inebriating haze into their rituals. They called it the Sacred Rose.
Although fear of Mexican immigrants is often cited as a reason behind the drive to ban “loco weed” in America, which is true, that also suggests a Mexican stoner culture stretching back for centuries, which isn’t strictly the case.
“Marijuana was not widely used as an intoxicant in Mexico before 1920,” explained Isaac Campos, a historian and host of the History on Drugs podcast.
“Since the 1850s, marijuana was widely believed to be a drug that produced outbursts of madness and violence. As an intoxicant, it had a very bad reputation throughout Mexican society. It was most commonly used by prisoners and soldiers in the barracks – two populations that overlapped significantly. Firstly because soldiers used to serve as the guards at prisons, and secondly, because both soldiers and prisoners were generally drawn from the most marginalized sectors of Mexican society.”
It was thanks to revolutionary leader Pancho Villa’s troops that the chronic got a shout-out in the most famous Mexican ditty of all time – La Cucaracha, poking fun at dictator Victoriano Huerta by portraying him as a pot-smoking cockroach.
Marijuana’s association with the lower classes had long made the elites feel uneasy, and in 1920 it was banned by the revolutionary government as a poison that “degenerates the race” (there was a subtext of racism here and ideas of racial purity vis-à-vis Mexico’s indigenous population).
Not everyone succumbed to reefer madness. In 1938, a doctor named Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra published an essay titled “The Myth of Marijuana”, in which he countered the crazy tales of violent outbursts and terrifying hallucinations. Leopoldo was an odd fellow. He’d inject chickens with cannabis extracts and allowed heroin addicts to shoot up in front of his students in class to discuss the effects. Somehow, Salazar was put in charge of the national drug policy, and under his direction the Mexican government attempted a bold experiment to legalise drugs, opening morphine dispensaries for addicts in Mexico City. But they were forced to back down after pressure from America’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics chief Harry Anslinger, and Mexico passed even harsher drug laws than the United States.
Rise of the Narcos
In the 1960s, the counterculture revolution in the States and American hippies’ insatiable appetite for the whacky baccy led to a boom in Mexican agriculture, producing legendary strains such as Acapulco Gold. The timing was just right, Mexico’s rural economy was crumbling and the drugs provided a much-needed boost. The business was open to anyone with the right contacts and a bit of cash. Hippies and students hid a few kilos in their cars before driving across, while more professional smugglers such as ‘Boston George’ Jung flew back and forth in light aircraft.
All these teenagers getting baked off their tits alarmed US President Richard Nixon, who shut down the border for three weeks in 1969 while customs agents searched every car passing through. Every. Single. One. Operation Intercept was a remarkable failure, finding no more contraband than if they hadn’t held up traffic for the best part of a month.
But it did push Mexico to reluctantly sign up to Washington’s war on drugs, sending soldiers to torch the ganja fields or spray them with herbicide – so much so that when the poisoned crops arrived on the US market, it prompted a health scare.
There was another incentive to play along with the drug war, too.
“In the 1970s there were significant guerrilla movements in Mexico that coincided with significant drug trafficking, often in the same areas of the country,” said Campos.
“So Mexico could cooperate with the United States in fighting the War on Drugs, gain lots of material for that fight, and then use those resources – weapons, helicopters, etc. – to fight the guerrillas simultaneously.”
American customers grew more discerning, favouring sinsemilla (seedless) marijuana, which was popularised by a fabled Jalisco weed entrepreneur nicknamed Papa Grande (real name: Ruperto Beltrán Monzón, an opium baron on the lam in the hills west of Guadalajara). Other crime bosses included Juan García Ábrego, who’d inherited his uncle’s old bootlegging outfit that once ran liquor over the Rio Grande in the Prohibition days and branched out into weed and coke, forming an organisation that would later terrorise border towns as the bloodthirsty Gulf Cartel.
But the biggest operation in those days was the Guadalajara Cartel, headed by Sinaloan expat Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo. An ex-cop from the outskirts of Culiacán, Gallardo relocated to Guadalajara where he was protected by the Federal Security Directorate, or DFS, which did very little national security and was essentially a state-run mafia. It was hard to tell where the mobsters ended and the G-men began. His lieutenant Rafael Caro Quintero, also from near Culiacán, hired engineers to design complex irrigation systems for huge ganja crops in Chihuahua and Sonora. the largest being Rancho Búfalo, a massive 2,500-acre plantation in Chihuahua. After DEA agent Kiki Camarena led the army to the site, he was kidnapped and tortured to death for three days, his mangled body dumped on the outskirts of Guadalajara.
For decades, marijuana in Mexico was dominated by these ruthless cartels. But a sisterhood of pot-smoking nuns is trying to change that.
“The community has expanded massively,” says Sister Camilla, founder of the Mexican branch of the Sisters of the Valley and part of a diverse movement to free the weed that includes campesinos (peasant farmers) and business tycoons.
“Fifteen years ago, it was nothing like today – access was different, and there was less information on social media.”
The Sisters of the Valley are an offshoot of an American organisation advocating for the health benefits of the herb. They attend events, and give workshops and presentations – all dressed as nuns.
“The Hermanas Del Valles are a group of women who work together with the cannabis plant, we are a community, we live together when possible in some parts, we work together in some way or another with the plant, all of that unites us,” explains Sister Camilla.
![sister of the valley in mexico](https://www.leafie.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/cannabis-nun-mexico.jpg)
“Our principles are spirituality, activism and service. We are not a religion, we consider ourselves progressive nuns, we have our own rules and principles. We take vows: service, obedience, simple living, activism, chastity and ecology. The veil today is our uniform, our identity as a group. It is a symbol of activism and rebellion, and at the same time it serves as protection of both identity and energy, it is a symbol of cleanliness and a common garment among women of different cultures and societies.”
In other words, the sacred gowns are deliberately transgressive, turning heads in a society which is still largely Catholic and conservative. Sister Camilla herself left home at sixteen to escape a strict religious upbringing. Until recently, she had a strained relationship with her parents, but has managed to win her mother over to the cause.
The nuns all have lives outside of the covenant. One has a job as a homoeopathic practitioner, prescribing marijuana to her patients with cancer, joint pain and insomnia. But the sisters must operate somewhat underground, harvesting Satan’s spinach in secret. First of all, to hide from the narcos muscling in, and secondly, because it’s still a grey area of the law.
In 2018 the Supreme Court ruled pot prohibition unconstitutional, ordering lawmakers to legalise it within two years. However, the policymakers never got around to it and kept asking the court for multiple extensions, so it was up to the judges again. In a majority decision in June 2021, the Supreme Court again ruled that sections of the country’s general health law banning personal consumption and cultivation at home were unconstitutional, and allowed adults to apply for a permit to grow their own.
Errr, so is cannabis legal or not?
“In Mexico it is legal medicinally and recreationally, however the current regulations are confusing and the authorities themselves don’t know how to act,” states Sister Camilla.
“Since this is still new there is still ignorance on the part of the authorities, but at least there is lawful protection for us as consumers and now we have the permission to carry.”
But still, be careful. Cops, security guards and other authority figures may try to confiscate your stash or shake you down for it. Police harass card-carrying cannabis patients even in Britain, so imagine what it’s like with Mexico’s finest.
Meanwhile, local initiatives have been taking the next step. In 2022 public smoking was permitted after protests in the southern state of Oaxaca, while certain indigenous communities have been granted permission to grow on their own soil. While the government drags its feet with legislation, dispensaries are openly selling high-grade chronic in Culiacán.
“cannabis is a business for many criminal groups, large industries and the government. Everyone wants to control the industry and squeeze it.”
The dispensaries are said to be linked to the Chapitos faction of the Sinaloa Cartel: the sons of El Chapo, whose tunnel-digging escapades date back to his time as logistics chief for none other than Gallardo – why go over the border, when you can go under it? Nepotism strikes again. But the Chapitos have been striking out as crime bosses in their own right, rumoured to feed enemies to their pet tigers (since we at Leafie are enthusiastic proponents of anatomical integrity, we should add that through their lawyers, the Chapitos have denied this vicious slander from the gringo DEA). Times have been tough for Sinaloa’s ganja and poppy farmers, as legalisation in America has crashed Mexico’s northbound weed exports by 97%. The narcos now find it easier and more profitable to smuggle fentanyl made from Chinese chemicals. Of those still in the game, the campesinos have rarely had much of a choice of whom they sell to since their areas are ruled by drug lords, who can set the buying price. But now the Chapitos are imposing a monopoly using their fearsome reputation, beating, threatening or kidnapping anyone who steps outside their supply chain.
But it’s not just in Sinaloa.
“Criminal groups control not only illegal but also legitimate businesses through extortion, destroying small agricultural economies in different towns in Mexico,” sighs Sister Camilla.
“There are countless stories as unfortunately, it’s very common. And cannabis is a business for many criminal groups, large industries and the government. Everyone wants to control the industry and squeeze it.”
Unfortunately, just like the Mob in America which grew rich and powerful during Prohibition but then prospered for decades through other rackets, so the Mexican narcos are no longer merely drug dealers but have infiltrated every sector of the economy, from shaking down avocado farmers to siphoning off oil.
Still, that’s no reason not to try. Legalisation won’t end the cartels, but it can definitely land a blow. Any idiot can sling dope, and many do but think about the skill set needed for other crimes – not everyone’s got the balls to fire a gun or the brains to pull off a scam. Drugs are largely a victimless vice whereas extortion and kidnappings are much likelier to stir public anger, and police resources could be diverted to hunting down those scumbags than kids rolling spliffs, who’d be thrown in jail and press-ganged into being narco-footsoldiers. Plus, keeping the mafia in business so they won’t break any more laws is a weird argument.