This project analyzes drug use in Mexico City between 1960 and 1980, the decades when the Mexican state began criminalizing common drugs like marijuana, and prosecuting the consumers of legal drugs such as toxic inhalants. In order to explain this contradiction, this dissertation assesses more than 3,000 Juvenile Court records, police files, health department and hospital documents, journal articles, drug legislation, and personal anecdotes. It argues that consumption and prosecution trends largely corresponded to socioeconomic class. Furthermore, these class-based consumption trends affected Mexican drug policies. According to the Mexican health department and penal reports examined in this dissertation, the Mexican state responded to the rise in drug use by pushing legislation to further criminalize marijuana. Yet the inner workings of that legislation tell a different story. Police records and Juvenile Court cases expose a rise in the detention and arrest of children who consumed toxic inhalants, a legal substance. The Mexican state found it more difficult to punish the children of middle-class government employees and professionals than the poor. In criminalizing poor, young drug users, the government could demonstrate its active efforts to address rising drug use. Consequently, the state created a new criminal class out of lower-class children who inhaled toxic legal substances in Mexico City. From a criminal and health perspective, this dissertation emphasizes the need to consider the impact of Mexican drug use trends on drug policy from the 1960s to the 1980s.

Looking primarily at the social and political trends in South Africa over the course of the last century and a half, this thesis explores how these trends have contributed to the establishment of the southern Africa cannabis complex. Through an examination of the influence which the colonial paradigm based on Social Darwinian thinking had on the understanding of the cannabis plant in southern Africa, it is argued that cannabis prohibition and apartheid laws rested on the same ideological foundation. This thesis goes on to argue that the dynamics of cannabis production and trade can be understood in terms of the interplay between the two themes of ‘prohibition’ and ‘resistance’. Prohibition is not only understood to refer to cannabis laws, but also to the proscription of inter-racial contact and segregation dictated by the apartheid regime. Resistance, then, refers to both resistance to apartheid and resistance to cannabis laws in this thesis. Including discussions on the hippie movement and development of the world trade, the anti-apartheid movement, the successful implementation of import substitution strategies in Europe and North America from the 1980’s, and South Africa’s incorporation into the global trade, this thesis illustrates how the apartheid system (and its collapse) influenced the region’s cannabis trade.