Posted on 03/17/2010 5:44:02 AM PDT by Kaslin
A few weeks ago, I debated drug policy with Ron Brooks, president of the National Narcotics Officers Association, on John Stossel's Fox Business show. When Stossel asked him about the violence fostered by drug prohibition, Brooks replied, "Well, there certainly is some of that." Then he quickly moved on to another topic.
I thought of Brooks' blithe response as I read about last weekend's horrific violence in Mexico, which included the murders of three people tied to the U.S. consulate in Ciudad Juarez: a pregnant consular employee and her husband, both U.S. citizens, and the Mexican husband of another woman who worked at the consulate. All were shot dead in their cars shortly after leaving a birthday party with their children.
The motive for these attacks remains unclear, but Mexican police believe they were carried out by a gang linked to the Juarez drug cartel, which has been fighting the Sinaloa cartel for control of the city. The murders, which grabbed headlines in the U.S. and elicited outraged responses from the White House and the State Department, were just a small part of the bloody ordeal that our government is inflicting on Mexico by insisting that it stop drugs destined for American lungs, noses and veins.
The same weekend that Lesley Enriquez, Arthur Redelf and Jorge Alberto Salcido Ceniceros were killed in their cars as their children screamed in the back seat, nearly 50 people died in Mexico from violence related to the drug trade. In Ciudad Juarez, which is important to traffickers because it sits right across the border from El Paso, more than 2,000 people were killed last year, giving the city one of the world's highest homicide rates.
Since Mexican President Felipe Calderon launched a literal war against the country's drug cartels in December 2006, some 19,000 people have died. Mexican and American drug warriors are unfazed, saying the staggering death toll is a sign of their success.
"Mexico lives with the violent consequences of an American dilemma," writes former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda. "It is because of American demand that Mexico is 'forced' to wage a war on drugs that otherwise it would not have to fight."
It is not simply American demand for drugs that creates this situation; it is our government's refusal to let legal businesses meet that demand. Just as it did during alcohol prohibition, that refusal creates a black market in which suppliers violently contend for territory instead of peacefully competing for customers.
"As long as criminalization, its hypocrisy and serious discussions of the alternatives are banned from public discussion," says Castaneda, "U.S. drug policy will remain ... a supply-side, foreign-policy, nickel-and-dime war waged beyond U.S. borders. ... The only conceivable alternative lies in a change in U.S. drug policy: not demand reduction, or supply interdiction, but decriminalization, harm reduction, adjusting laws to reality instead of uselessly attempting the opposite."
To address the violence, decriminalization has to encompass not just possession for personal use (a policy that Mexico and several U.S. states have adopted in limited ways), but production and distribution as well. During alcohol prohibition -- when the U.S. homicide rate rose by 43 percent, peaking the year of repeal -- there were no criminal penalties for drinking. Yet by making it illegal to manufacture and sell alcohol, the government invited the likes of Al Capone to vie for control of a lucrative black market, with predictably violent results. Once alcohol was legalized, the business was no longer run by criminals and liquor suppliers stopped shooting at each other.
"We will continue to work with Mexican President Felipe Calderon and his government to break the power of the drug trafficking organizations that operate in Mexico and far too often target and kill the innocent," the White House declared after Saturday's murders in Ciudad Juarez. If the U.S. government were serious about breaking the power of the brutal gangs that profit from prohibition, it would rethink its war on drugs.
And Dick Armey derides Tom Tancredo for wanting to build a fence and not give amnesty to illegals.
Legalize all drugs and let the druggies kill themselves with them. Problem solved all around.
Legalize. Rename DEA to HCEA.
Drugs will not be legalized for this one reason. 3rd world countries rely on drug money washing through their banks to pay off debt. If drugs are legalized those countries go under.It is just that simple. ( Besides all the moral and societal reasons)
Oh...guess that makes it OK ....
Don’t forget the vast armies of US goobermint agents who make their money in enforcement, incarceration, counseling, screening, ad nauseum. Those folks have a vested interest in seeing the madness continue.
The American people are torn on this issue. I am torn on this issue.
My solution is similar to that of abortion: The federal government should withdraw from this issue and leave it for the individual states to work this out, reflecting popular will and allowing for changing local attitudes to be expressed in local laws.
this is a crime WITH victims...and sadly the victims are family and friends and complete strangers who just happen to get in the way of a freaked out druggie..
I need only point to the fact that prescription drugs are one of the biggest if not THE biggest drug problem today...
RX obtained legally or illegally are sparking crime everywhere....
a druggie needs his fix.. and he'll get it whether he has a script or not...
so if we legalize the illegal stuff,why do you think there will be anymore sensible use of cocaine, or marijuana than there is now of oxycontin and percocet?
I suppose we'll next hear that child porn should be legal because then we wouldn't have to track any of these guys down and jail them....it'll save so much money just to make it legal.../sarcasm/
I don't think that if we legalize cocaine, it will be used more sensibly than oxycontin.
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