Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra

Mexican physician who directed Mexico’s federal drug policy under the Cárdenas administration in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Having worked for years at the National Psychiatric Hospital and the attached Hospital for Drug Addicts, Salazar concluded that prohibition had failed — it did not prevent drug use and it enriched traffickers — and argued for a state morphine monopoly that would undercut illicit markets while keeping users in medical care.

His vision was briefly implemented on March 9, 1940, when Mexico opened its first state-run morphine dispensary in Mexico City, the first of many planned nationwide. The experiment survived four months before US pressure — from Harry Anslinger and the State Department — forced Cárdenas’s government to suspend the program. Salazar’s suppressed counterfactual is now a central reference point for scholars of Mexican drug policy and a reminder that the punitive paradigm was not historically inevitable.