Mr. Biden was in Mexico Monday, where he showed no sign of shifting US policy on the matter.
“It's worth discussing, but there is no possibility the Obama/Biden administration will change its policy on legalization,” he said after meeting with Mexican President Felipe Calderón and the three presidential candidates for the upcoming July race.
He will likely have to again defend that stance in Central America today. President Perez Molina has gone the furthest in the debate about legalization and has promised to rally the isthmus to question whether a focus on drugs is diverting resources from going after crime. Costa Rica has stood behind him in that call, while both leaders in Mexico (where some 50,000 people have been killed in drug violence in six years) and Colombia have also said they are open to discussions about legalization. Already Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, and Colombia have experimented with decriminalizing small amounts of drug use.
The question could arise at the Sixth Summit of the Americas to be held in Colombia in April.
US aid not enough
Latin America has long produced the drugs that are consumed in the US, and the US has spent billions trying to eradicate their source and punish the peddlers with policies like Plan Colombia, and more recently the billion-dollar aid package known as the Merida Initiative for Mexico and Central America.
Presidents on the receiving end have largely welcomed that aid, and criticized the US for being slow to deliver. But lately they are pushing for a new approach as a way to undercut profits for ever-powerful drug gangs, find a new source of tax revenue, and end the battles between illegal organizations that have contributed to historically gruesome violence.
