WRONG PRESCRIPTION FOR MEXICAN DRUG VIOLENCE

Administration Makes Mexico The Villain When It's Really The Victim

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, 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. More than 20,000 Mexican
troops and federal police are struggling against the private armies
of rival drug lords.

About 6,000 officials and police have been murdered in the struggle
in the last 21/2 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 U.S.! We share a
2,000-mile border with Mexico, our second-largest trade partner.

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 the notoriously unaccountable, often corrupt, 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 -- about $23 billion a year by U.S. Government
Accountability Office estimates? And is the problem Mexico or our
demand for drugs?

More rational steps There are three much smarter steps that a
rational United States would take.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. 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 U.S. ban on assault gun purchases that Congress let
expire in 2004.

A second smart move: Reduce U.S. demand for drugs through treatment
for addicted individuals. 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 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
trafficking gangs quickly regroup elsewhere. Prohibition hurts
society 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 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 Merida
Initiative -- fueling the drug wars, foisting the consequences of our
misguided prohibition onto an already beleaguered neighbor. Will we
never learn?