Natchitoches, LA (8/14/2010) – The first casualty of war is truth. Proponents of the “war on drugs” claim that it makes us safer and more secure. That’s a lie. Drugs are available in my city’s grade schools, the drug war has eroded our civil liberties, and now it threatens to create a huge failed state on our border and spill violence into our country. Drugs are bad; war is evil; this war is also stupid.
In a recent article on the legalization of marijuana I alluded to security issues rising from the war on drugs and noted, "I do know that legalizing drugs would be devastating to Mexican drug dealers and the Taliban. It would make travel to Tijuana safer and gut the financial resources of most of our urban gangs." The growing sense of crisis in Mexico combined with recent comments by Mexico's former President Vicente Fox and current President Felipe Calderon add some urgency to our need to rethink the drug war.
In the last decade the Mexican government has cracked down on drug cartels. The cartels were protected for decades by Mexico's ruling party, the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party), which dominated the country's political and economic life for most of the last century. The PRI turned a blind eye to drug trafficking so long as the traffickers followed some simple rules - no violence against civilians, no infringing on the turf of other traffickers, pay a share of the profits to the police, the military, and officials of the PRI. The cartels became a de facto arm of the PRI and were invisible in the day-to-day life of the Mexican people. The PRI's fall from power and the new government's decision to assert its own authority over the cartels wrecked this system with the consequent violence of a drug war that has cost almost 30,000 lives in the last four years.
What does that have to do with us? Ask the people of Arizona. It has everything to do with us. It has a direct impact on our national security. It has the capacity to destroy democracy in Mexico and make of it a failed state and might thus produce a wave of immigration that dwarfs anything we've seen in recent years. It's produced violence that's cost more lives than the war in Afghanistan and it's yet another result of our own war on drugs.
The war on drugs has made drug trafficking extremely profitable, with Mexican cartel earnings estimated at $39 billion last year. It's probably reduced American drug consumption a little, but in the process it's raised prices a great deal and sent drug dealers' profits through the roof. Drugs are easy to produce; the raw materials are cheap and readily available and the technology to do it can be mastered by anyone with a grade-school education. But because of our drug policies, it takes very high prices to get producers, traffickers and dealers to produce, transport, distribute and sell their product. Some of that price pays for bribes, some for security and some to conceal operations, but a very large part of it just pays people to take the risk of dealing drugs. If they aren't caught, it looks like pure profit. It's because drugs are illegal that the leaders of Mexican drug cartels are vastly wealthy, and it's because drugs produce such vast wealth that cartel leaders are willing and able to afford their own little armies to fight against their national governments.
Drug violence is destabilizing other countries, such as Jamaica and Guatemala, but it’s the large and populous country on our southern border that’s the biggest concern. The level of violence in Mexico has reached the point that the discredited PRI is becoming popular again. Former President Fox has suggested legalizing the drug trade, President Calderon has said he's opposed but is now ready to listen to arguments in favor, and Mexican legislators are beginning to consider drug legalization one of their few viable options to deal with the violence. They understand much better than we do the consequences of illegalizing drug traffic because it's destroying their country, and they understand that there's no stopping it if no one does anything about stopping demand for the final product. Legalization in Mexico won’t end all the violence or destroy the cartels. The cartels have diversified into other markets and will remain wealthy and powerful, but legalization will end the military struggle and allow the Mexican government to start fixing the damage to Mexican institutions.
To demolish their profits and fully bring the drug cartels down, legalization has to happen here. Our war on drugs is a monster created of politics, not cool and rational analysis. It appeals to the tough-on-crime mentality that seized our country in the 70s and 80s, the same mentality that led us to explode our prison population (we’ve gone from one in 400 adults incarcerated to one in a hundred in my lifetime), create three-strike laws and throw people in prison for life for stealing pizzas, and to make long prison terms the preferred way to deal with everything from drug abuse to bad financial management to selling orchids without proper documentation. It's a policy born of fear, not calculation. The pressures to legalize the drug trade in Mexico are building – the alternatives are all worse – and we’ll have to find some response more intelligent than blocking trade with Mexico and more effective than stepping up military and police patrols on the border. The war must end. Let’s declare victory and start treating the victims. Let’s stop fighting drugs and start fighting the demand for drugs.
James Picht teaches economics at the Louisiana Scholars' College in Natchitoches, La. From the age of 6, he always knew what he wanted to be. Economist wasn't it. But after accidentally falling in to it, he found that he liked it. Now he also likes raising his two children, being a husband to Lisa and taking pictures of trees in the middle of the night. He loves Mexico and looks forward to the day when he can take his kids for a visit.
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