More than 5,000 people will die in the Mexican drug wars this year. Many of them will be non-combatants; innocents caught in the crossfire, or the parchment on which terrorist messages are sent.
The Mexican government has promised to do something about the killing, and tens of thousands of federal troops have been dispatched in a vain effort to stop the flow of drugs and the escalating violence. Perhaps they have been successful; perhaps the situation would be much worse without the intervention, though such speculation is horrifying in itself.
Their government increasingly blames the United States for the problem, or failing to do anything about it, and the charges are not unreasonable. First, we are the market for most of the drugs; 90% of the cocaine consumed in the U.S. comes from Mexico.
Second, Mexican gangs are also producing a great deal of their methamphetamine here and that scourge is destroying tens of thousands of lives in both rural and urban America. By some estimates, ten percent of the population of Baltimore uses meth.
Third, a considerable amount of the marijuana sold by Mexican gangs is actually grown here, much on public lands, which are despoiled in the process.
Fourth, the gangs are getting their guns from American dealers. Thousands of retail gun peddlers have set up shops on the border. Sales are soaring; one Phoenix dealer was recently arrested after having sold 650 assault weapons that wound up in gang hands.
We can pour a billion dollars or more into border control but that would have little effect; the border is porous, as we know from out immigration crisis.
There is a simple solution. Decriminalize drug use. It would remove the profit and dramatically reduce the amount of smuggling, dealing, and killing, on both sides of the border. It won’t happen, of course, because our politicians are narrow-minded cowards.
The Drug of Obstinance
Posted in The WIP Talk, Uncategorized
I couldn’t agree more. Here in Arizona, once popular hiking trails are now dangerous territory as both innocent day trippers and patrols have discovered armed crops of marijuana in what would normally be considered “the middle of nowhere”.
Amen to that. Imagine the money we would save in our state budget from enforcement alone. Transfer even half of that savings into treatment programs and we’d be living in an entirely different world.
The war on drugs has proven a complete sham and yet another way to criminalize an entire segment of the population. Tragically, the cycle of criminality is passed down through the generations. And it’s not just the politicians who we should hold accountable. They’re answering to a huge lobby representing the prison industrial complex.
As the most incarcerating country in the world, with 25% or more of the prison population incarcerated for drug offenses, it’s no wonder that decriminalization remains a dream. It’s amazing that we’ve had such progress with drug courts.
With the average cost of incarceration at $30,000 per year, per inmate, we’ll be hard pressed to take that money out of the hands of those who profit. Imagine if that money were put into job development, education and vocational training.
As more and more prisons become privatized, and as they continue to mushroom in rural communities that lose viable economic streams each year, it’s simply a matter of too many people not willing to let go of a fist-full of dollars. When Campbell Soup Company celebrates the prison system as its fastest growing market, you know something is very wrong. Nothing better than a captive audience.
Profit at the expense of human lives – it’s wrong and deplorable.