{news} Mexico's Drug Violence

[Clifford Thornton]

This is something else. Our policies are insane,
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over
again and expecting a different result.



http://www.postwritersgroup.com/features.htm<http://www.postwritersgroup.com/features.htm>

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  BUSH'S FAULTY PRESCRIPTION 
  FOR MEXICAN DRUG VIOLENCE
  
  By Neal Peirce

        Only lightly noted on this side of the border, our neighbor Mexico
is engulfed in bloody, violent combat with and between death-dealing drug
cartels.  

        In a stunning reversal for President Felipe Calderon's crusade to
subdue the drug trade and its perpetrators, Edgar Gomez, the national police
chief and lead anti-cartel crusader, was assassinated this month outside his
Mexico City home.  "This could have a snowball effect, even leading to the
risk of ungovernability," Mexico City sociologist Luis Astorga told the
Washington Post.

        Yet it's hardly unique.  More than 20,000 Mexican troops and federal
police are struggling against the private armies of rival drug lords.
Literally hundreds of officials and police have been murdered in the
struggle -- some 6,000 in the last 2½ years, far beyond U.S. casualty counts
in Iraq.  Further drenching the country in blood, mass executions and even
beheadings have been reported.

        Talk about a national security issue for the United States!  We
share a 2,000-mile border with Mexico; it's our second-largest trade
partner, especially huge in agriculture.  Millions of families are related
across the border; thousands of Mexicans regularly cross over for work.  Yet
cartel murders of police are commonplace, and 30 percent of police in Baja
California alone are estimated to be on a drug cartel payroll.

        There's a U.S. response before Congress right now.  It's President
Bush's request for a so-called Merida Initiative- a $1.4 billion three-year
program to undergird the Mexican government's anti-drug efforts with
helicopters and other military equipment, training for Mexican police
forces, plus phone-tapping, mail-inspection and Web-surveillance programs.

        But there's substantial congressional skepticism about aid that
could flow to notoriously unaccountable, frequently corrupted Mexican
military and police forces.  And then the tough, basic question -
realistically, how much could U.S. aid of roughly $500 million a year do to
stem the gargantuan illegal drug trade that now flows across the Mexican
border -- some $23 billion a year by U.S. Government Accountability Office
estimate?
        And is the problem really Mexico -- or our demand for drugs?

        There are three much smarter steps that a rational United States
would make.  

        First, face up to where the Mexican cartels get their weapons of
death.  Virtually all, including pistols, grenades, high-powered ammunition
and assault weapons such as the AK-47, are smuggled from U.S. territory,
across the border into Mexico, where the gangster elements pay premium
prices for them.

        The weapons are often purchased legally at gun shows in Arizona and
other states where loopholes permit criminals to buy guns without background
checks.  Then corrupted Mexican customs officials wink an eye at the
smuggling.

        Our obvious answer: Seal all gun show sales loopholes, requiring
checks on every purchaser.  And reinstate the United States ban on assault
gun purchases which Congress, under gun lobby pressure (and with Bush
administration acquiescence), let expire in 2004.

        A second smart move: reduce demand for drugs on the U.S. side
through treatment for addicted individuals.  Consider cocaine alone: the
RAND Corporation, in a study for the U.S. Army and White House Office of
National Drug Control Policy, found that dollar for dollar, drug treatment
is 10 times more effective at reducing its use than drug interdiction.

        Our big mistake: Making Mexico the villain when it's really the
victim.  And it's "a familiar game," notes Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug
Policy Alliance:

        "U.S. leaders blame another country for our failure to reduce drug
misuse here at home.  That country escalates its war against drugs but asks
the U.S. to pick up part of the tab. Aid is given, but it ends up having no
effect on the availability of drugs in the United States. Politicians in
Washington point their fingers again, and the cycle continues."

        Indeed, patterns of the international narcotics trade show that
whenever some source of production or smuggling route gets clamped down,
drug production and drug-trafficking gangs quickly regroup elsewhere.

        Third and most basic of all: recognize that while prohibition of
socially disallowed drugs can increase their cost, it can never halt demand.
Why?   Desire for mind-altering substances (opiates, alcohol, whatever) is
virtually built into the human psyche.

        Americans might recall the counsel of the late Nobel Prize-winning
economist, Milton Friedman, who learned the immense dangers of repressing
demand as, in his youth, he watched America's misadventure into alcohol
prohibition, and how it triggered the Al Capone-era wave of gang wars:

         "Illegality creates obscene profits that finance the murderous
tactics of the drug lords; illegality leads to the corruption of law
enforcement officials... Drugs are a tragedy for addicts. But criminalizing
their use converts that tragedy into a disaster for society, for users and
nonusers alike."

        So now comes the Medina Initiative -- fueling the drug wars,
foisting the consequences of our misguided prohibition onto an
already-beleaguered neighbor.  Will we never learn?

Efficacy
PO Box 1234
860 657 8438
Hartford, CT 06143
efficacy at msn.com<mailto:efficacy at msn.com>
www.Efficacy-online.org<http://www.efficacy-online.org/>
 
"THE DRUG WAR IS MEANT TO BE WAGED NOT WON"

Working to end race and class drug war injustice, Efficacy is a non profit
501 (c) 3 organization founded in 1997. Your gifts and donations are tax
deductible
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