Mexican Drug Tourism
This particular phenomenon of Americans traveling to Mexico to purchase legal (and illegal) drugs is only a single facet of the very complicated story of the relationship between the United States and Mexico. Many of these border towns are really single towns, divided by a relatively recent political and physical line, which is the US-Mexico border (I lived for many years along the northern side). Some families, without ever having moved, became members of two different nations, just miles (and sometimes just blocks) away from each other. The histories of these Mexican border towns has only relatively recently diverged from the histories of their sister-cities to the north, the shaping of these border cities was not always so unidirectional, where one city is user while the other is used.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/arizonaglo/ / CC BY-ND 2.0
The US-Mexico border is highly militarized; there are armed guards and sniper towers, barbed wire fences and self-appointed American militiamen taking Mexican prisoners. It is a very different place than Chicago (but I have only lived on the north side). It seems to me that the only times when the US-Mexico border is brought up in conversation is in relation to crime and how the US is unwillingly importing Mexican crime in the form of illegal drugs and undocumented immigrants. The illegality of the border is an underlying part of the discourse about the border and by extension the inhabitants of the border all seem to be criminals. In fact undocumented Mexican immigrants in the US are often referred to as “Illegals”, implying that there is some basic element in their humanness that is transgressive. I only bring this up to say that the creation of American drug tourism in Mexican border towns is not solely due to the permissiveness of the Mexican government or America’s seemingly insatiable appetite for mind altering substances—but it has a great deal to do with the border as a political and cultural space and how it is negotiated by the people that live there.
The majority of the Mexican people who are engaging in drug tourism are not wealthy, highly educated, or politically connected. There are few good legal opportunities in these border towns, even for someone who is hard working and intelligent. It is this lack of other opportunity, and the holes in both American and Mexican government regulations that has created the current environment for American drug tourism to Mexico. When Romeo, at the beginning of Act V of Romeo and Juliet, goes to the Apothecary looking to buy poison, the Apothecary reluctantly sells it to him and says, “My poverty, but not my will, consents.” Romeo replies, “I pay thy poverty, and not thy will.”
Judging from the majority of the drugs that Americans buy in Mexican pharmacies (diet pills, uppers and penicillin), our symptoms are not that of a heartsick teenager, but rather that of an obese depressive with a bladder infection. Mexican pharmaceuticals are cheaper than American ones, and many poor Americans travel to Mexico to get treatment for legitimate health issues. Dentures are cheaper in Mexico and so is insulin. If drug tourism along the Mexican border effectively ceased, there would be significantly more poor Americans without any economical access to health care. And there would be many more Mexicans walking 200 miles across the Sonoran desert into Arizona to find low paying jobs to help support their families.
