Our neighbors to the south are experiencing a growing wave of violence as the Mexican government wages war against its major drug cartels, and the cartels battle each other over control of this lucrative export. Here at home our own War on Drugs has been a dismal failure. Drugs are as plentiful today as they have ever been and the lives of innocent people are being destroyed; in Mexico it's by killing people, here it's by locking them up in prison. The one common denominator is corruption, and the solution to the problem is the de-criminalization of drug use. Prohibition taught a lesson that our public officials still don't seem to grasp: prohibit something and people will find a way to profit from it. The Volstead Act benefited organized crime as it criminalized a large segment of the population, many of whom died or were permanently disabled from drinking rotgut.
The latest news from Mexico tells of gunmen breaking into a drug rehabilitation center in Ciudad Juarez and killing 17 people. The piece goes on the tell of police and soldiers being killed in this wave of violence, and people resigning from the police forces out of fear of being targeted. This is crazy! Crazier still is the policy on our side of the border of keeping the market for drugs lucrative by carrying on this stupid War on Drugs. It would be much cheaper to de-criminalize drugs and spend them money on rehabilitation, and to furnish drugs to users who are not ready to quit. That is the only way to effectively deal with the problem: illicit drugs are profit centers, take away the profits and market will collapse.
Drug abuse is a disease which must be cured, not a criminal act that needs to be punished. I advocate spending tax payer's money to buy up all the drugs produced anywhere in the world. Establish tight controls on these supplies, meting out doses to still practicing addicts, and sponsoring rehabilitation centers to treat recovering addicts. If we can structure an effective program to deal with our own drug problem, it could serve as a model for other nations and to these we could sell our surplus drugs as they come on line and adopt the same sane policy. We would end up with all the drugs anyway, as depriving the cartels of their market would take the profits away from the whole downline: acreages now devoted to growing the stuff could be converted to growing food. To do otherwise is to criminalize ourselves as a people further as accessories before the fact to cold blooded murder.
Think about it. Aren't we better than that?
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