NEAR CARTEL KILLING GROUND, EL PASO WANTS DEBATE ON DRUG LEGALIZATION

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

The tragedy is etched in daily headlines. The 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."

"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 number of Americans killed so far in the Iraq
war.

Most Mexican 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 as President-elect Barack Obama met Monday with Mexico's
President Felipe Calderon. "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. 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. 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 George W.
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 aid 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 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 money for
rehabilitation programs. Most satisfying, it would wipe a lot of
smiles off drug lords' faces.