Drug violence reaches into U.S.; time to act

Responding to fears of escalating violence in Mexico that could spill over the border into Texas and other states, the U.S. government has stepped up law enforcement.

Border Patrol and Drug Enforcement Administration agents were sent to shore up local law enforcement, and to their credit the violence has not spread to those communities and regions. In fact, El Paso — just across the border from Ciudad Juarez, which ranks as one of the most dangerous places in the world — is ranked as one of the safest cities in the United States.

Unfortunately, the stepped-up enforcement in border cities hasn’t kept Mexican drug-cartel violence from the United States. It simply moved it.

Today, cities far afield from the southern border face increasing violence from the cartels. As far north as Sioux Falls, S.D., and Anchorage, Alaska; east to Atlanta; west to you name it, the drug cartels have taken up residence. The Justice Department’s National Drug Intelligence Center says that 230 U.S. cities are home to drug cartel activity.

The United States has not yet seen the beheadings and police executions that are commonplace in many Mexican cities, but the violence is escalating.

Phoenix experienced more than 300 kidnappings last year resulting from cartel drug activity. Five men in Birmingham, Ala., were found with their throats slit after obvious torture by electric shock. The incident list goes on and on.

Mexican authorities have stepped up their interdiction efforts, as have U.S. agencies, but it hasn’t been enough. In fact, the U.S. Joint Forces Command issued a report in recent days that places Mexico on the same level as Pakistan in terms of the risk of potential collapse of the government.

Investigative agencies have determined that the Mexican cartels, at war with each other as well as law enforcement, have ties to Italian organized crime.

All this is fed, of course, by the demand for drugs in this country. At stake for the cartels is $28.5 billion in drug sales in this country.

With that much money at stake, and with nothing to lose back home, the cartels are likely to do anything to hold onto their turf. The cartels have now armed themselves with everything from automatic weapons to rocket launchers.

The answer, of course, is multifaceted. Demand for drugs must be reduced. Law enforcement resources including people and equipment must be augmented. And international cooperation must be continued and improved.

Yet the alternative — all-out warfare in the streets of the nation’s cities — is not something that can be permitted to occur.

“According to the ONDCP these Mexican cartels are the subject of this thread only make about $370 million a year from heroin sales to Americans out of a total of about $13.8 billion they make from all drug sales to Americans.”

Those are interesting figures.
Now what does it cost US, I mean when you add up the cost of the drugs, the crime caused by it, the deaths, the hospitalizations of victims, the law enforcement cost, the cost of drugs corrupting politicians and police, the breakup of families, the cost of jailing the user, pushers, dealers.
The cost of lost futures of our youth.....
I’ll bet it’s a lot more than $13.8 Billion...a lot more!

Think about it!

So I don’t buy that specious (bogus) argument for Legalization!

Here’s a poison that kills a country but not everybody in it...we can’t stop some people from using it... so let’s legalize it... (what if it’s someone in your family?)

Poison is poison.

Many of the costs you list exist or are higher because drugs are illegal. I’m not for legalizing all drugs though. I think the costs, financial and other costs, would be much higher if we were to legalize drugs like meth, cocaine and heroin. The only drug I think it does make sense for us to legalize is marijuana. I think most people who would use that drug are already using it. It’s easily available everywhere in this country and already cheaper than beer on a per use basis in most cases. It is not harmless, but it really doesn’t cause a lot of crime and death and mayhem like you were describing. We aren’t accomplishing anything good trying to keep up the ban on marijuana. We’re wasting a fortune, contributing to many of the problems you list like corruption of officials, filling up our prisons and so on, and we are making it such that organized crime, especially Mexican organized crime, can make most of the money they are making now. What we are doing makes no sense. We should have legalized marijuana a long time ago.

De-criminalize for possession of small amounts, maybe.
Like many a college town, where possession of a small amount? results in confiscation and a fine, like that for a traffic violation.

Legalize? I say ixnay to that.
The problem is not the occasional user but the dealer he’s buying it from. There’s huge amounts of money to be made from dealing grass. Those that traffic grass also deal in cocaine, heroin, meth and other drugs.
Are we to turn a blind eye towards these high volume dealers so a few college kids can score some dope for the weekend?

There is no way around it, my friend. It is an all or nothing proposition. Our very future depends on it.

Narco-terror destroyed much of Colombia.
Narco-terror is now in the process of destroying Mexico.
We have a degree of narco-terror right here at home, would you care to push it to the level Mexico has?

“Legalize? I say ixnay to that.
The problem is not the occasional user but the dealer he’s buying it from. There’s huge amounts of money to be made from dealing grass. Those that traffic grass also deal in cocaine, heroin, meth and other drugs.
Are we to turn a blind eye towards these high volume dealers so a few college kids can score some dope for the weekend?

There is no way around it, my friend. It is an all or nothing proposition. Our very future depends on it.”

I'm not sure I understand what you are saying. The fact that Americans use more marijuana than all other illegal drugs combined and so many of the other drugs just piggy back in on the marijuana and go through the same channels and in many cases are sold to end consumers by the same people is one of the reasons I think we should legalize marijuana. The huge black market for illegal drugs is mostly just a black market for marijuana. Most of the participants in the black market for illegal drugs are users an sellers of marijuana. But you're right in saying that people who sell marijuana to end consumers will often sell other drugs too, other drugs that are coming through the same channels from the same people up the distribution line. A lot of people get their first opportunity to try these other drugs because the people that sell them or their friends marijuana will offer them these other far more addictive and dangerous drugs. If we legalize marijuana and have it be sold from licensed shops who only buy through legal channels these shops will be no more likely to sell drugs like cocaine and meth and heroin than liquor stores. Those up the illegal drug distribution line will no longer have all those marijuana dealers toward the bottom end of the distribution line to help them get their other drugs out to end consumers. The black market for illegal drugs will become fragmented and smaller. Pot smokers’ exposure to drugs drugs like cocaine, meth and heroin will be reduced and less will try them because less will have the opportunity to try them. We will deprive organized crime, particularly Mexican drug trafficking organizations of most of their income and make it harder for them to get their cocaine, meth and heroin out to end consumers.

As for the narco terror, if we want to reduce that here and in countries that supply drugs to consumers in this country, we'll take as much money out of the black market for illegal drugs as we can. That's what they are fighting over, and it is the money that makes it such that they can afford their weapons and their foot soldiers and the people they buy in government to help them. Legalizing all illegal drugs would hurt them more, but we can't legalize drugs like meth, cocaine and heroin. Only a tiny percentage of the people use these drugs. They are expensive and not nearly as easy to find in most cases as a legal drug like beer or even marijuana, an illegal drug that is almost as easy as beer to find and that is often going to be cheaper than beer on a per use basis. Most people wouldn't use drugs like heroin, cocaine and meth if we made them legal, but with so few current users it wouldn't take that many new users to double or triple or quadruple the number of hard drug addicts we have. We don't want these drugs to be cheap and easily accessible from a nice clean store. It's not worth it for us to do that even if we could shrink these organized crime groups down to little street gangs that make their money on things like prostitution and extortion.

Just taking marijuana from them would take away the biggest part of the profits from illegal drugs and make it harder for them to get the other illegal drugs to end consumers. That's going to make them smaller, less powerful and easier to contain. And it's not really going to cost us anything because more than half of all adults in this country under 60 have already tried marijuana. Most everyone who want to do it already does it. We won't make it much more available than it already is and it is already pretty cheap on a per use basis. The law isn't stopping many people who want to smoke it because the chance of getting caught is so slight and if people do get caught for most all they'll get is what basically amounts to a slap on the wrist. Marijuana use would go up some, but not tremendously and marijuana users are that much of a problem for us to begin with. We'll save a fortune we are currently spending trying in vain to keep up the ban, generate a lot of tax revenues, and put the hurt on organized crime.

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