This video looks at how prohibition fuels corruption, crime and violence and we have the honor of speaking with Lisa Sánchez from the Transform Drug Policy Foundation in Mexico. Hello Lisa Hi, how are you? Well, thank you. Could you start by introducing yourself please? Sure, I will do it in Spanish because I think this is important for my fellow colleagues in Latin America. My name is Lisa Sánchez and I am the director of drug policy for Latin America for the Transform Drug Policy Foundation, but I am also heading the drug policy program called "Mexico United Against Crime", it is a local organisation which works in Mexico and which is really fighting and providing a considerable political work to put an end to the war on drugs. Thank you. Could you tell us about the relationship between prohibitionist drug policies and violence, crime and corruption, specifically in Mexico and perhaps in the Central American region please? Drug policies in Latin America have much in common. The first common point is that throughout the years, these policies became more and more harsh in such a way that the sentences for a drug offense are more severe, the legal framework is more and more severe and the answers of States are more and more punitive. The problem with these drug policies is that it has been shown that they are useless to reduce drug use or to change efficiently the size of illicit markets which are trafficking these substances. However, what has been shown, to our deep regret, is that these policies can easily cause a series of adverse consequences among which we find the ones you talked about: crime, violence and corruption. These drug policies have an impact on these three fields in three key manners. The first one is that it distract law enforcement, the police, general attorneys the criminal justice system in general and even the prison system from pursuing the real offence. In other words, while we are looking for drug users, while we are pursuing this so-called threat of drugs and illegal drug markets, we leave aside the prosecution of common crime and especially crimes that strongly punish society, I am talking about more serious crimes: murder, abduction, rape, bribery, human trafficking and all the other types of traffic which are not pursued anymore as we focus a large part of our efforts to persecute drugs, moreover, it is not even the big names of the drug mafia, those who are dedicated to drug trafficking, that we put in jail, we rather focus on the weakest links by criminalising drug users or those who have small amounts of drugs often for their personal use. And, in rural areas of many of our countries we did also see an overcriminalisation of farmers or farm workers who are only cultivating, not necessarily knowing to which level of the transnational crime they are taking part. The second way in which these drug policies have an impact, but now in terms of violence, is that we allowed our state officials to take part in this proclaimed war on these substances and on people linked to these substances, which for example led to a militarisation of public safety, this is obvious in the case of Mexico. In this case, confrontation between security forces and criminal forces occurs with such violence that we see a threefold increase of the murder rate for 100 000 people, compared to 10 years ago in Mexico for instance where there was a very low rate around 8 murders for 100 000 people, and today we have peaks of violence around 24-25 murders for 100 000 people. It is an instructive and significant fact that this strategy of war on drugs which comes from a very strong prohibition, generates the confrontation between different criminal gangs as we assume that with a strategy of "dislocation" of these cartels we will be able to eliminate the supply of illicit drugs but it is not the case in reality, and that moreover we allow within a legal framework, an extraconstitutional framework in most of our countries that implement the use of violence and even lethal violence as a tool of this war, which, I must insist, did not reduce the level of drug use, did not limit production and is not necessarily reducing harms linked to these substances. Finally, these policies have a third effect: so much illegal money is coming from these markets that criminal gangs or big transnational cartels end up corrupting authorities, at every level. They use bribery, they force them to accept money in order to implicate them in a criminal behaviour and avoid being prosecuted by them. We speak about municipal police, state police, federal forces, judges, attorneys, political campaigns funded by illegal money which seal the vicious circle where bribery overcomes the political will to undertake reforms which would really look into the different aspects of the phenomenon and most of all on its various expressions. Thank you very much for the important points you just raised about the situation in Mexico and in Central America.