Lead photo via Flickr user Taylor Spaulding
Vicente Fox has never been shy about his ideas. The ex-Coca-Cola executive and former President of Mexico has been out of office since 2006, but has never stepped away from the popular discourse, appearing on news programs and social media regularly to express his progressive political opinions. For the past two years, Fox has made headlines for his continued rebukes of Donald Trump’s verbal and political assaults on the country and people of Mexico, often repeating his now signature phrase, "We are not paying for that fucking wall."
When it comes to cannabis, Fox is as liberal as they come, denouncing prohibition laws across the globe while using his significant political fame to continually call for marijuana legalization in both his home country of Mexico, and in the United States.
According to USA Today's Arizona Central, Fox delivered the keynote address at this past weekend’s gathering of the Southwest Cannabis Convention in Phoenix, AZ, offering attendees of the third annual conference a vision of the future where legal weed is ubiquitous across North America, traded freely among Mexico, the United States, and Canada, providing each nation with a free market for the increasingly-mainstream cash crop.
"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 prior to addressing the convention crowd. "But more so is good because it gives us the freedom to make our own decisions."
To achieve those lofty goals, Fox is first hoping that Trump and American leadership refrain from severing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and instead use the prospective cash from legal weed to bolster international trade relations. While all three countries currently have some form of medicinal or recreational marijuana laws, none of the three allow the export of the drug. In a speech at an Oakland, California cannabis convention earlier this year, Fox suggested that in a future with legal weed across North America, Mexico could produce up to 60% of the cannabis consumed by American users, much like the fruits, vegetables and other crops we currently import.
"Destroying what we have built with so much effort is a mistake," Fox told the Phoenix crowd of Trump’s NAFTA threats. "It’s out of ignorance. It’s not understanding economic processes. It’s not understanding job creation and wealth creation… 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.”
“No nation today can survive on its own," Fox added. "We all need each other.”
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