LEGALIZATION OF DRUGS MIGHT END VIOLENCE

Before you venture into Ciudad Juarez, brace yourself to hear Texans
tell you that you're crazy.

Visiting friends in neighboring El Paso a few days before Christmas, I
was immediately warned, "Don't even think about going into Juarez."

Just across the shallow creek known as the Rio Grande from El Paso,
one of the safest cities of its size in the nation, Juarez is a city
under siege, the worst victim of Mexico's growing wars between drug
cartels.

The tragedy is etched in daily news headlines. The same day I arrived,
two Mexican police offers were ambushed, shot to death while sitting
in their patrol car. Just another bloody day in Juarez.

Hardly a day goes by without a new Juarez horror story in the El Paso Times:

"Man found dead with hands severed."

"Prominent Juarez lawyer, son, among four found dead
Tuesday."

"Man found shot to death in trash drum."

"El Paso charities afraid to cross border."

"Juarez area slayings top 20 in new year."

Murders across Mexico more than doubled last year to more than 5,600.
That's more than the total Americans lost so far in the Iraq war.

Most of those murders have been happening in border towns. More than
1,600 were killed in Juarez, Mexico's fourth largest city, with a
population of 1.7 million. The bloodbath of unspeakable brutality
includes kidnappings and decapitated bodies left in public places as a
grisly form of advertising.

"There have already been 20 murders in Juarez this year," Beto
O'Rourke, a member of El Paso's city council, told me in a telephone
interview this week as President-elect Barack Obama met with Mexico's
President Felipe Calderon on Monday. "That doesn't include the
kidnappings and extortions. Ciudad Juarez is essentially a failed city
at this point. They can't guarantee your safety."

The situation is deteriorating so fast that "Mexico is on the edge of
abyss," said retired four-star Gen. Barry McCaffrey, a drug czar under
President Clinton.

"It could become a narco-state in the coming decade," he wrote in a
recent report, and the result could be a "surge of millions of
refugees" crossing the U.S. border to escape.

Something drastic needed to be done, O'Rourke, a fourth-generation El
Paso resident, decided. A proposed city council resolution called for
more federal action on both sides of the border to reduce the flow of
guns and drugs.

But it wasn't strong enough. O'Rourke pushed things further by adding
12 words: "supporting an honest, open, national debate on ending the
prohibition on narcotics." The council passed it unanimously.

Yet even a bid to talk about drug legalization was too much for Mayor
John Cook. He vetoed the bill, at least partly out of concern that
Washington might not take the measure seriously with the drug
legalization line in it.

Nevertheless, the controversy brought what has been rare American
media attention to Mexico's crisis by turning it into radio and cable
TV talk fodder. That's a start.

Obama promised more American help to Calderon in a meeting that
focused on trade, immigration and the drug war. President Bush
successfully pushed the Merida initiative, a $1.4 billion security
package to help Mexico with high-tech equipment and anti-drug training.

The first $400 million, approved by Congress last year, has begun to
flow. But the rest of the funds could be slowed by the many other
financial pressures this country and the incoming Obama administration
faces.

And Calderon faces mounting pressures on his two-year-old campaign
against drug and gun smuggling. The campaign that actually touched off
much of the fighting between the cartels. It has also exposed
corruption that reached the highest levels of his government. Even a
member of his security team has been arrested for allegedly feeding
information to the cartels in exchange for money.

When you step back and take a broad look at Mexico's growing carnage,
it's easy to see why El Paso's city leaders think legalization doesn't
look so bad. Mexico's drug problem is not the drugs. It is the
illegality of the drugs.

Legalization is not the perfect solution. But treating currently
illegal drugs in the way we treat liquor and other legal addictive
substances would provide regulation, tax revenue and funds for
rehabilitation programs. Most satisfying, it would wipe a lot of
smiles off the current drug lords' faces.