A Small Distinction with a Big Difference: Prohibiting “Drugs” but Not Alcohol, from the Conquest to Constitutional Law

This essay traces the origins, explores the context, and analyzes the consequences of a governmental campaign based on wording that appears in Article 73 of the Mexican Constitution of 1917. Article 73 was—and remains—the legal basis for a complex governmental strategy that, as of its inception, has given shape to a juridical framework that is applied unevenly and in a differentiated manner to drug and alcohol policy in Mexico. Based on an analysis of the most relevant alcohol and drugs norms promulgated during the last five centuries in what is now Mexico, this essay aims to review the historical process that led, first, to a national “campaign” and, subsequently, to a public policy that, on the one hand, attempted to control problems relating to alcoholic beverages through an administrative approach, but which, on the other, endeavored to suppress—through the implementation of a punitive juridical scheme—what the Mexican government abstractly conceptualized as drugs “that poison the individual and degenerate the race.”