At Phoenix cannabis expo, Vicente Fox talks marijuana legalization, Donald Trump
Jason Pohl
Former Mexican President Vicente Fox on Saturday made the case for broad-scale marijuana legalization in Arizona, telling a Phoenix crowd the days of failed drug policies were fading, despite rhetoric from President Donald Trump's White House.
Speaking to hundreds of entrepreneurs, industry leders and curious residents at the Southwest Cannabis Conference and Expo at the Phoenix Convention Center, Fox reiterated his disdain for drug wars.
“Prohibitions don’t work," Fox said. "They have never worked.”
In his far-ranging talk that included an occasional swipe at Trump — he called him a "crazy guy," Fox said it was only a matter of time before all-out legalization was reality across the United States, Mexico and Canada.
"I’m here to share with this community a future that we have ahead, a future of an economic sector that is good for people, good for health, good for the economy," Fox told reporters before his keynote speech. "But more so is good because it gives us the freedom to make our own decisions."
Focus on cannabis legalization
Fox was Mexico's president from 2000 2006.
Since leaving office, he has made far-reaching cannabis legalization a priority. Saturday's keynote address was his latest in a string of addresses pushing marijuana policy into the spotlight.
He spoke in June at a similar convention in Oakland, saying Mexico and Canada had every intention of taking the lead on medical and recreational marijuana exports. The goal, he said, was to have Mexico produce 60 percent of the legal marijuana used by Americans, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
Fox renewed those comments Saturday.
He said the ongoing discussions about renegotiating the NAFTA — Trump has threatened to pull out completely from the trade pact — needed to address the role of the cross-border marijuana trade. Tearing up the expansive policy framework would be detrimental to all industry and shove the United States and Mexico back in time, Fox said.
"Destroying what we have built with so much effort is a mistake," Fox said. "It’s out of ignorance. It’s not understanding economic processes. It’s not understanding job creation and wealth creation.”
"The proposal is to go backwards," he added. "The proposal presented by Señor Trump is to go back to the old days of nationalism, of isolation, of the same public policies that President Hoover presented 100 years ago.”
Legalization policies in Canada and Mexico have put the two countries in a position where they might be able to reap the benefits from an unlocked, multi-billion-dollar cannabis industry in North America.
Mexico has been incrementally legalizing various uses of marijuana and its derivatives for several years. In June, current Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto signed a decree legalizing medical marijuana, classifying the substance's psychoactive ingredient as "therapeutic." Medical marijuana use in Canada has long been accepted, and recreational use is widely expected to be legalized next year.
Meanwhile, checkerboard U.S. legalization laws are at odds with federal rules. Fox lauded states like Colorado and Washington for pioneering legalization and signaling the turning tide of marijuana policy in the United States.
“No nation today can survive on its own," Fox said, stressing NAFTA's value. "We all need each other.”
Arizona has legalized the use of medical marijuana only.
'I can teach him,' Fox says of Trump
Fox is known for his charisma. He has also become known as a constant critic of Trump; his unyielding criticism made him a household name during the 2016 election.
Fox has likened the Trump White House to a "really bad reality TV show with low ratings," and he has repeatedly questioned the president's ability to serve in office.
He ratcheted up that rhetoric Saturday in Phoenix, taking a swipe at Trump's ability to understand history. And at one point in his speech, he stared straight into a video camera and repeated the crowd-favorite line that made him a 2016 household name: "We are not paying for that f---ing wall."
Before Fox's speech, a reporter asked what the former president would do if he had the opportunity to sit in a room with Trump.
“I would run away,” Fox said in Spanish. “To sit with a person like him, that doesn’t have the ability to listen, that doesn’t know poverty, that doesn’t know what it means to have a disability, that doesn’t know what it is to suffer, it strikes me as a waste of time.”
However, Fox said, as a fellow former businessman-turned-president, a meeting with Trump might be productive if it took place in Mexico and not at the White House. But that meeting, Fox said, would only happen if Trump asked for forgiveness from the population of Mexico.
“We’re not rapists, we’re not murderers,” he said in Spanish. “We have dignity. Ask for forgiveness and I will teach you two or three things you need to learn.”
A former executive with Coca-Cola, Fox said he learned that not everything that works in business transfers to politics. In that way, he sympathized with Trump.
“I can teach him,” Fox said in Spanish. “He’s old, really old. He’s tired. He walks hunched. And he’s just beginning. He has a long road in front of him.
“We’ll see if he arrives alive at the end of that road.”
Organizer: Convention is about learning
The third-annual convention drew speakers on topics spanning the economics of growing to the medicinal benefits of using.
The event was billed as a chance to learn about the rapidly expanding marijuana industry, said Demitri Downing, the event's organizer and executive director of the Marijuana Industry Trade Association.
"We're not pushing the commercialization of marijuana," he said. "We're pushing the educational understanding of marijuana as medicine. That's what this conference is about."
Republic reporter Richard Ruelas contributed to this article.
Reach the reporter at 602-444-8515, at jpohl@azcentral.com or on Twitter: @pohl_jason.
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