Mr. President, end this (drug) war!
Thursday, January 5, 2012 at 12:13PM
Death toll in Mexico this last year: a stunning 12,000, according to WAPO.
Yes, some will write it off as only "professionals" dying, but the same is largely true in all conflicts.
We supply the money and the guns, and then demand that the Mexicans fight it out to the last man standing.
It's a wonder that all Mexicans don't hate us all the time.
Decriminalize drug use and you deny the cartels the big money that fuels their warfare. You also stop US states from spending so much on jail time for small-time users and peddlers. You also medicalize our response, which is how the rest of the intelligent world deals with debilitating drug abuse.
End the drug war, Mr. President, and truly earn the Nobel, because that would take some political courage.
We can only hope that a second-term Obama, hemmed in domestically by a GOP House and Senate, will escape to some suitably radical foreign policy (back-dooring some sensible domestic policy changes). This would fit that scenario, but I have little hope of Obama making such a call.
Reader Comments (4)
Hi Tom, thanks for providing my weekly fix of intelligent internet.
So, we end the drug war. All the money goes to the medical profession, with a million cops out of a job?
And, do the cartels move over to kidnapping to make up for the loss of income?
Perhaps you could put Wikistrat on this one.
Ending the War On Drugs would be such a smart, humane thing to do, which is why I am not holding my breath either.
Peace and Cheers to you -
If they don't hate you today, they are likely to hate you in the near future. Trust me, I can see it coming.
Meanwhile, no one in Washington has the courage to end the War on drugs.
I normally don't comment on more than one piece at a time but his is my area of expertise. Columbia was almost destroyed by drug lords attempting to supply the needs of the addict population of the United States. Now Mexico is in a battle for the survival of governmental authority. The cartels are now dumping bodies near resort areas to threaten the tourist industry.
I have talked to police officers in Canada whose biggest fear is that some day we will actually close the border with Mexico. If we did, they anticipate that Canada will face a huge increase in drug smuggling and violence as the criminal organizations try to move product across the Northern border to feed the insatiable needs of our addicts. When I was running the Chicago Police Department's Crime Analysis Unit I wrote a white paper on the drug related violence in the city. I tried to find information on the total number of addicts in the Chicago area or in the country as a whole. I could not find an authoritative figure. We don't even know how many addicts we have.
I remember as a rookie policeman in the ghetto stumbling across bodies in stairways. Needles still stuck in their arms. As a Homicide Detective I handled the overdoses and the murders resulting from the heroine and then the cocaine trade. The year I retired we had 940 homicides in the city and literally thousands of people wounded by gunfire. All due to warfare over drug sale territory. Fourteen people were wounded by gunfire in Chicago yesterday. I await the discovery of the next tunnel in San Diego.
Erich,
Yes, drug rehab grows big time.
Cops don't go away. They work real crime instead of having so much of their time and resources diverted to counter-drugs.
Cartels stay criminal all right, just don't find the same profit opportunities.
But these are all better problems, yes?
I would like to run a sim on this.