HOW LEGALIZING DRUGS WILL END THE VIOLENCE

Back in the early 1960s, 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
Cuervo Gold and take in the "adult entertainment" acts. It wasn't
something I'd necessarily want my kid doing, but there was a certain
innocence to it: tasting freedom, partaking of forbidden adult
pleasures. The frontera of Mexico was a fun, safe place to visit.

All that has changed.

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 brothers' 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, the local gang Calle Treinte was
implicated in the Arellano-inspired killing of Cardinal Juan Jesus
Posadas Ocampo. The Arellanos bribed officials on both sides of the
border, spending over $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 his 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?

Just this week, 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 to 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 like the Arellano brothers. (Ramon was shot and killed by the
federales in February of 2002; 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 example, 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
U.S.'s 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 cost 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 an 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.