The drug gangs are better funded than the Mexican government, and can buy and sell the Mexican government all day long. That means the drug war is lost before it is started.
The source of their funding is the US.
The best way to cut off that funding, besides a moral awakening here in the States, which is overdue, is to secure the border. Which we keep calling for. Nothing else will work. Anything else that might work won’t work if we don’t also secure the border. Other things are also necessary, but securing the border is fundamental.
Whining about the cost isn’t a solution. A failed state on our southern border is going to cost a whole lot more than a little barbed wire.
I agree with your premise, and and that the Fall of Man the USA might also have to legalise a host of illicit drugs to cut off the demand side of the equation.
Securing the physical movement along the border is a very expensive undertaking if the risk reward ratio is not drastically altered to reduce the rewards scenarios.
And if the USA doesn’t formalize some sort of guest worker program now, before the cartels forcibly block the pocketed Mexican Federal government from signing on, in an effort to protect the cartels human smuggling profit pipeline, it will never happen.
The USA does need the workforce in about ten years as the youngest boomer retire en masse, however the shortsighted politicians in this country care not about a decade from now, because they’ll have gotten theirs by then and retired to leave the aftermath to the next bloodsuckers to file election petitions.