STOPPING DRUG VIOLENCE

Back in the early '60s, I often sneaked into Mexico at the San
Diego-Tijuana border. Too young to cross legally, I'd coil up in the
trunk of Charlie Romero's '54 Merc. My buddies and I would head
straight for the notorious Blue Fox to guzzle Carta Blancas, shoot
Quervo Gold and take in the "adult entertainment" acts.

This was not all Mexico had to offer, of course. And it was sexist
and exploitative, not something I'd want my own kid doing. Yet the
frontera of Mexico felt safe, even for a 16-year-old.

But that's all changed now.

From Tijuana to Matamoros, drug gang violence along the U.S.-Mexico
border has taken the lives of thousands - cops, soldiers, drug
dealers, often their families, other innocent citizens from both
sides of the border. Even a cardinal of the Catholic Church. Many
others have gone missing and are presumed dead.

In the mid-'90s, the Arellano drug cartel ruled Tijuana, perched atop
the hierarchy of Mexico's multibillion-dollar illegal drug
trafficking industry. Using cars, planes and trucks - and an intimate
knowledge of NAFTA - the Arellanos transported hundreds of tons of
cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine into American cities.

They enlisted U.S. drug gangs. In 1993, in my last days as San
Diego's assistant police chief, "Calle Treinte," a local gang, was
implicated in the Arellano-inspired killing of Cardinal Juan JesUs
Posadas Ocampo.

The Arellanos bribed officials on both sides of the border, spending
more than $75 million annually on the Mexican side alone, to grease
their illicit trafficking. And they enforced their rule not just with
murder but with torture.

If Steven Soderbergh's gritty 2000 film "Traffic" caused you to
squirm in your seat, the real-life story of Mexican drug dealing is
even more disquieting. The brothers once kidnapped a rival's wife and
children; with videotape running, they tossed two of the kids off a
bridge, then sent their competitor a copy of the tape - along with
the severed head of the man's wife. Another double-crosser had his
skull crushed in a compression vice. And who can forget the "carne
asada" BBQs, where the Arellanos would roast entire families over
flaming tires?

Recently, the bodies of four men, three of them cops, were found
wrapped in blankets in Rosarito Beach. Their heads showed up in Tijuana.

Corruption of public officials, useful to sustain and grow illicit
drug trafficking everywhere, has always run deep in Mexico. But with
the country now having supplanted Colombia as the biggest supplier of
illegal drugs to the United States, and with annual profits topping
$65 billion a year, the numbers of federal, state and local cops on
the take has never been greater.

Drug criminals have an unlimited supply of high-powered weapons at
their disposal. Kingpins pay mules, usually impoverished, always
expendable, to travel to the states and pick up a firearm or two at a
gun show. Using the Brady Bill "loophole" (and congressional and
presidential failure to extend the ban on assault rifles), all it
takes is a phony stateside driver's license and a handful of cash to
walk out with semi-automatic Uzis, AR-15s, and AK-47s.

Last June in Nuevo Laredo, across the border from Laredo, Texas,
Alejandro Dominguez was sworn in as the city's police chief. That
same day, three dark Chevy Suburbans with tinted windows pulled up to
his office. Moments later, Dominguez, a reluctant top cop who only
took the job at the pleading of a terrified citizenry, was dead.
Police recovered 35 to 40 casings from an AR-15 assault rifle.

Mexico's drug dealers, including the "Zetas" (elite military
commandos assigned to fight drugs but who've gone over to the other
side), are among the most organized, proficient and prolific killers
in history.

The violence does not end with the capture or the killing of major
players such as the Arellano boys. (Ramon was shot and killed by the
federales in February of 2002, brother Benjamin was captured a month
later. Francisco has been in prison for years.) As with the illicit
drug scene in the United States, thousands of low-level drug-dealing
wannabes are marking time - waiting for today's kingpin to fall so
they can move up.

And the violence grows, and grows.

Virtually every analysis of the Mexican "drug problem" points to the
themes raised here: the inducements of big money and wide fame; the
crushing poverty of those exploited by drug dealers; the
entrepreneurial frenzy of expanding and protecting one's markets; the
large, unquenchable American demand for drugs; and the complicity of
many in law enforcement. But something's missing from the analysis:
the role of prohibition.

Illegal drugs are expensive precisely because they are illegal. The
products themselves are worthless weeds - cannabis (marijuana),
poppies (heroin), coca (cocaine) - or dirt-cheap pharmaceuticals and
"precursors," used, for instance, in the manufacture of
methamphetamine. Yet today, marijuana is worth as much as gold,
heroin more than uranium, cocaine somewhere in between. It is the
United States' prohibition of these drugs that has spawned an
ever-expanding international industry of torture, murder and
corruption. In other words, we are the source of Mexico's "drug problem."

The remedy is as obvious as it is urgent: legalization.

Regulated legalization of all drugs - with stiffened penalties for
driving impaired or furnishing to kids - would bring an immediate
halt to the violence. How? By (1) dramatically reducing the costs of
these drugs, (2) shifting massive enforcement resources to prevention
and treatment, and (3) driving drug dealers out of business: no
product, no profit, no incentive.

In the ideal world, Mexico and the United States would move to repeal
prohibition simultaneously (along with Canada). But even if we moved
unilaterally, sweeping and lasting improvements to public safety and
public health would be felt on both sides of the border.

(Tragically and predictably, just as Mexico's parliament was about to
reform its U.S.-modeled drug laws, the Bush administration stepped
in, pressuring President Vicente Fox to abandon the enlightened
position he'd championed for two years.)

With drugs stringently controlled and regulated by our own
government, Mexico would once again become a safe, inviting place for
American tourists - and for its own citizens, who pay the steepest
price of all for our insistence on waging an immoral, unwinnable war on drugs.