Most Americans Don't Inhale; Decertify Mexico
* Drugs: The liberalizafion arguments don't wash; our kids and principles
come first.

By RICHARD ESTRADA
As drugs continue to flood America, sender countries and their
apologists stateside increasingly are arguing that the deluge across U.S.
borders is America's own fault. That message is growing in the wake
of President Clinton's recent decision to fully certify Mexico as
cooperating in the antidrug fight while continuing the decertification of
Colombia.
The wedon'tneednostinkingcertification argument goes like this: The
United States is the world's largest market for drugs. Basic economic
theory says that supply follows demand. Therefore, suggest the critics,
the drugsupplying countries deserve not censure, but understanding as
market players. Why doesn't the U.S. government wake up and smell the
marijuana?
Indeed, Latin critics have a point. Can anyone deny that millions of
Americans do engage in recreational drug use? Or that they create the
demand that drives much of the drug trade? Or that America is the great
proselytizer of free markets?
Yet such officials as Mexican Secretary of Foreign Relations Angel
Gurria ignore a. fundamental point: Most Americans deplore drugs rather
than do drugs. Most Americans want to keep drugs illegal
rather than decriminalize them. Especially for Americans raising fami
lies, the freedom to choose whether or not to use drugs is not important.
They want to keep their communities drugfree. A recently.released survey
by the Partnership for a DrugFree America found that resurgent drug use
among teens now is
influencing growing numbers of sixth, seventh and eighthgraders to use
marijuana.
Parents must do a better job of routinely discussing the dangers of
drugs with children. But that hardly argues against interdicting the supply
of cheap and readily available drugs or of pressuring sender
countries to destroy them at the source.
According to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, most young
people who abstain from using drugs do so because of parental disapproval
or fear of violating drug laws.
But what about the failure of Prohibition, ask the liberal and
libertarian critics of U.S.
drug policy? The answer is simple. If Prohibition was a failure, it was
above all a political failure. To suggest that the Drug War is doomed
because Prohibition was repealed is to ignore the difference between
political outcome and individual outcome. Experts note that it took more
than a generation after the repeal of Prohibition for the per capita levels
of alcohol consumption to mimic the levels seen before Prohibition
went into effect.
The Mexican and Colombian governments are engaged in stereotyping. In
seeking to shift blame, leaders such as Colombian President Ernesto Samper,
whom other Colombian officials have accused of accepting a $6million
campaign donation from drug interests, are trying to impute to the Ameridan
people as a whole the values of. the drugabusing minority and their
ideologically driven apologists.
(But Samper's decision on Wednesday to suspend cooperation with the United
States to eradicate drug crops calls his sincerity into question.)
The political dimensions of such arguments should not be overlooked.
Most disturbing is the implication that the laws of the marketplace shou1d
prevail over the principle of democracy and laws passed by the elected
representatives of the people. Critics of U.S. antidrug laws of
certification and interdiction are so intent upon choking the debate. over
official corruption in Latin America that they speak as if drugs are
legitimate simply because there is a market for them.
Let's consider the record. Didn't the Bush and Clinton. administrations
routinely assure the American people that official Mexican cooperation
was improving? Today the brother of former Mexican President Carlos.
Salinas is in jail and still cannot reasonably explain $120 million in
his Swiss bank account, Mexico's drug czar is under arrest for
corruption, a top money launderer has been allowed to walk out of
the Mexican drug czar's office since the drug czar's arrest, and Thomas A.
Constantine, the chief of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, is in
effect telling Congress that he trusts Mexican law enforcement agencies
as far as he can toss a lead pinata.
Against. a backdrop of facile, selfserving arguments on the part of
Mexico and Colombia and incompetent assessments of Mexican cooperation by
the White House, Congress should act. In defense of American families,
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (DCalif.) deserves support in the Senate for her
initiative to decertify Mexico. The House should follow suit.

* .Richard Estrada is a syndicated columnist in Dallas.

Contributed by,
Jim Rosenfield jnr@cinenet.net
tel: 3108360926 fax: 3108360592
Website > http://mall.turnpike.net/~jnr/jnr.htm