Anti-drug ads are not why Mexico has fewer addicts

The campaigns actually make drug abuse worse and distract from the real, tough solutions.

Last week, US president Donald Trump said that he admired that Mexico isn’t “a consumer nation.” It surely wasn’t because Mexico has strong family values, because “we do too,” he said. Instead, Trump took president Claudia Sheinbaum’s other reason at face value: “She said, ‘plus we advertise a lot, and I said ‘Ooo, you mean you advertise about how bad drugs are? That’s incredible… We’re going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars advertising how bad drugs are so that kids don’t use them.”

Kudos to Sheinbaum; the Mexican president no doubt knows how to speak Trump’s language and got a small win from that conversation. She’d better not drink any of her own Kool Aid though. The evidence is clear: Anti-drug ads not only don’t work, they make addiction more probable.

The reasons for this are self-evident to anyone who has ever even met a teenager before. Just look at one privately funded campaign run by well-meaning business organisations. “Smoking isn’t cool; knowing as much as my prof is cool,” reads one of many billboards around Mexico. The ad features a teacher’s pet in a lab coat. It feels designed to put out of touch parents at ease while driving young audiences to booze and cigarettes in their droves.

But even the government’s dark and grittier campaigns—something Trump specifically lauded—aren’t as effective as they may seem. Close to 3,000 black and white billboards reading “Get away from drugs. Fentanyl kills. Choose to be happy” costing $30 million pesos (about $1.5 million dollars) have been put up during the Sheinbaum administration. It seems unduly happy with the results.

The truth is that, though fentanyl consumption in Mexico is rising, it is still far below the rates seen in the US. Yet, despite their love-in over anti-fentanyl ads, Trump and Sheinbaum are dead wrong about what makes a society less likely to take drugs.

To make matters worse, Sheinbaum’s government, under pressure from the US to perform a tough-on-drugs stance in Mexico, is undermining the policies that actually could help get problematic addiction under control.

Sheinbaum is driving blind on drug policy

Public policy under the two Morena party government’s of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018-2024) and Sheinbaum have made it difficult to have a proper debate about problematic drug use in Mexico. The country has gauged its eyes out through austerity.

To start with, nobody really knows what the state of addiction in Mexico actually is. The latest nationwide poll of drug consumption was conducted in 2015. An update was done recently, but through insufficient staffing due to a lack of funding the end results were deemed too poor to publish. What we do know comes from civil society’s much more modestly funded efforts.

It is from these surveys that experts have come to understand that ad campaigns are doubly misled:

They don’t work on one level because people quickly find that the hyperbole meant to “scare them straight” doesn’t reflect their lived experiences. Taking hard drugs, it turns out, won’t necessarily kill you immediately. And then, on another level, if and when users do end up hooked, the campaigns serve to ward them away from rehabilitation. “Since they are based on fear and stigma, people won’t reach out for help because they are pictured as immoral and delinquent failures,” Lisa Sánchez, director at México Unido Contra la Delincuencia, a non-profit advocating (among other things) for sensible drug policy, told The Mexico Political Economist.

And it’s not just teens. Mexico’s different local context from the US makes for different sorts of consumption and addiction. Information from treatment centres shows that Mexicans do have a substance abuse problem, particularly with meth and alcohol.

When it comes to booze, the problem is often cultural. There is a culture of peer pressure and machismo, alongside the religious importance of alcohol that can often be taken to extremes. When it comes to meth, the exploitative state of Mexican labour is to blame, as workers in maquilas or truck drivers turn to it in order to complete arduous shifts. Same goes for the use of over the counter inhalants, like paint thinner, which the homeless use to suppress hunger or the cold.

Consumption of opioids and fentanyl are miniscule compared to these legal and illegal drugs. “That fentanyl is the main issue in the US-Mexico relationship, but it isn’t the main issue in Mexico,” Zara Snapp, the director of Instituto RIA, a non-profit public policy advocacy, told The Mexico Political Economist. Tellingly, Chihuahua, Sonora, and Baja California are the states where opioids and fentanyl are most used. All of them sit along the US border where deportees are left to their fate.

The issue is clearly north of the border and Sáchez is under no illusions as to why. “People in the US predominantly use opiates, starting with legal sedatives like OxyContin,” she said. There is a clear line connecting the fentanyl crisis and the overprescription of these sorts of drugs all across the US.

The US is able to draw these conclusions because it has a much better statistical understanding of its consumer population. Mexico, having failed its most recent survey, does not. Just this past Monday, Sheinbaum promised that it would be redone properly. In the meantime policymakers and social organisations will be flying partially blind.

Mexico’s addiction to bad solutions

Mexico’s approach to drugs is terrible even when taking into account its lack of information. Its policy is increasingly aimed at looking tough on drugs to please the US, thus undoing much of the good that was done in the past.

This is well known when it comes to Mexico’s position as a supplier to the US. “Catching drug lords doesn’t change the supply, it just increases violence,” said Snapp. Less discussed is how US-pandering policy hurts Mexico when taken as a consumer nation. “Mexico only offers detox services but it doesn’t mitigate damages,” said Sánchez.

The US isn’t entirely to blame. Especially under former-president López Obrador, Mexican drug policy turned more punitive seemingly on the basis of the president’s own old-fashioned prejudices. A blanket ban on fentanyl and vapes was put into the Constitution making arrests the priority over rehabilitation.

Thanks to the reform, “punishments have been increased and vulnerable users have become the easiest people to scapegoat. Picking up the poor and the homeless just to put on a show for the US,” said Snapp.

Meanwhile, Mexico’s regulators are chipping away at the rights campaigners like Snapp have won around cannabis decriminalisation. “In 2018 we were very close to cannabis legalisation,” she said. Now that progressive bill has been shelved by Congress.

Again, beyond US pressure, local prejudices may be behind this backlash. It may well be pressure from the army, said sources, that forced López Obrador to do a u-turn on this campaign’s progressive stance on weed.

There is one thing drug policy experts are in no doubt about though: Neither ad campaigns, nor the degree of illegality, nor the harshness of the punishments prevent people from using drugs.

So, what does?

Tough decisions for a bad policy detox

One particularly pernicious side effect of moralising and punitive anti-drug advertising is that it trains the population to see all drug users as unambiguously bad. Sensible policy which may involve a degree of decriminalisation and humane treatment becomes tough to implement as soon as you’ve trained voters to see these approaches as “soft on crime.”

Advocates are nonetheless pushing for these very sorts of solutions:

1. Prevention—Of course you need campaigns to dissuade people from using drugs, said Sánchez. But these campaigns need to be tailored and targeted at vulnerable groups specifically. One size fits all campaigns rarely work. Maybe you don’t get teens to never try drugs, but the main aim, said Snapp, is to delay the age of initial use of both legal (like alcohol) and illegal substances. Their findings have revealed that delay, not all out prohibition, is the best way of reducing future problematic use.

2. Harm reduction—The hardest policies tend to be the most obviously beneficial. Globally enough evidence has been gathered to make it undeniable that providing safe spaces for users to consume their illicit substances can prevent overdoses and reduce the spread of diseases like AIDS through the provision of clean needles. Sánchez argues that the government must simply go ahead with programmes like this despite potential backlashes.

   This, in the age of conservative populism, is a dangerous endeavour, especially when claims that ‘the Mexican government is aiding and abetting drug use’ is only a tweet away from unleashing an international crisis. Campaigns regarding the social benefits of safe consumption spaces must therefore accompany the set up of these places; the very opposite sort of ads that the government is currently producing.

3. Professional treatment—The public sector is woefully absent from treatment centres in Mexico. At most, Sánchez said, the government co-finances Youth Rehabilitation Centres, which make up about 10% of the country’s rehab centres, with the rest being poorly regulated and few and far between.

Caring for those with addictions in Mexico will almost always have to assume there will be a plentiful supply of drugs. It is a natural consequence of being next to the largest drug consumption market on Earth.

There were 10.7 million people in the US with drug use disorders in 2019, in Mexico there were 0.7 million. Of these, 1.04% consumed opiates in the US while in Mexico it was 0.7%—a ratio of 158 to one. The numbers have spiraled in the US; in Mexico these sorts of addictions more or less track population growth.

If Mexico were to try to deal with the supply side of drug consumption, it would have to take incredibly drastic measures which would prove intolerable for the US, suggested Snapp. This would include the Mexican State taking control of drug production, and ultimately seeking a greater degree of independence from its northern neighbour by looking for partners beyond the US, she said. Impossible in the foreseeable future.

This is why Sánchez despairs at how it seems drug policy will continue to fumble forwards. “Regardless of how the Trump-Sheinbaum scoreboard stands, the ones who will continue to lose are the consumers. [Mexico] hasn’t got measurements or prevention, we just have a policy of criminalisation designed to keep the government of the United States happy.”