Thwart Some Coke
Mexicans enjoy a nice, cool bottle of soda. In fact, it’s possible that they enjoy it more than any other humans on Earth — their top three daily sources of caloric intake are all some form of sugary drink (they also lead in the area of chronic diseases related to that liquid intake pattern). The Guardian’s Tina Rosenberg puts this drinking problem into perspective: “Excessive consumption of soda kills twice as many Mexicans as trade in the other kind of coke that Mexico is famous for.” As you’d suspect, Mexico is an incredibly important market for the soda industry and its web of lobbyists and marketers. It’s also a country that recently passed a soda tax that is cutting consumption. How did the world’s biggest consumer of soda become a petri dish for testing the effectiveness of a tax that the industry went to great lengths to prevent? Here’s the story of how one of the most obese countries on earth took on the soda giants.
+ Mexico also just took a huge step toward legalizing marijuana.