IS MEXICO'S DRUG WAR A THREAT TO U.S. SECURITY?

The El Paso, Texas/Juarez, Mexico metropolitan area has a long history
of violence.

I should know. For it was out in the west Texas town of El Paso that I
was gunned down by several cowboys. They were avenging my shooting of
a dashing young stranger in nearby Rose's Cantina. Wild as the west
Texas wind he was, he challenged me for the love of wicked Feleena, an
evil Mexican maiden whose eyes were as black as night.

Prior to that, the area was a battleground for several competing
civilizations. The Spanish took the place from Pueblo Native
Americans. After Mexico became independent, an expansion-crazed United
States swooped in. The U.S.-imposed Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo forced
Mexico to surrender all land north of the Rio Grande River. For 160
years, the Rio Grande has been an international border dividing the El
Paso/Juarez metroplex into two.

El Paso is much safer today than it was back when I was a singing
gunfighter. In 2007, El Paso was the second-safest large city in the
U.S. after Honolulu. It's not a fair comparison, though. Honolulu has
Dog the Bounty Hunter.

But just south of the border, down Mexico way, El Paso's
conjoined-twin-city Juarez is experiencing an astonishing surge in
violence.

Last year, 1,800 people were murdered in Juarez. Fox News says regular
folk in Juarez are more than three times as likely to be murdered as
regular folk in Baghdad. If Fox says it, it's got to be true.

So why has Juarez turned into Hellamundo-on-the-Rio Grande, a Problemo
Gigante on our southern flank?

The answer is drugs. Or, if you prefer all-caps, DRUGS!

Northern Mexico is a narco war zone. Ruthless Mexican drug gangs are
competing for smuggling routes into the U.S. Millions of innocent
civilians, police officers and soldiers in Mexico are in the crossfire.

These drug gangs are notorious for killing anyone who publicly
criticizes them, so before I write anything else, I just want to say
that the Andisheh Nouraee who shows up in the White Pages with an
address in Decatur, Ga., is a totally different Andisheh Nouraee than
the one who writes this column. Please don't kill him. I beg you.

So far, the overwhelming majority of drug-smuggling-related violence
is on the Mexican side. If you think about it, it makes perfect sense.
The border entering the U.S. is the tightest bottleneck on the drug
supply route between the U.S. and Mexico. The violence has surged
after the border got tighter following 9/11.

U.S. coverage of the violence in Mexico has, predictably, focused on
the fear that the violence may soon "spill over" the border into the
U.S. For the most part, that hasn't happened. Though there have been
many high-profile instances of Mexican drug gangs causing problems in
regional drug-shipping hubs like Phoenix and Atlanta, there's no
evidence yet to indicate a Mexican-cartel-led surge in violent crime
in the U.S.

Instead of worrying about how Mexico's mess might affect us, we would
be better off owning up to how our policies are contributing to the
horrible violence in Mexico.

The illegal drug trade would not be as lucrative, or nearly as deadly,
if American consumers didn't have such an enormous appetite for coke,
pot and meth. Northern Mexico is as violent as it is because Americans
simultaneously demand drugs while demanding they be illegal.
Prohibition mixed with high demand means huge profits for drug
dealers. If one could assert control over Juarez's drug-funneling
infrastructure - everything from stash houses to tunnels to crooked
public officials - one could collect gazillions of dollars in shipping
and handling fees.

To top it all off, 95 percent of the recovered weapons used in Mexican
drug killings last year were traced by the U.S. government to U.S. gun
sellers. Not only are we funding the drug violence with our vices,
we're arming it, too.

Just like our War On TerrorT, our War On DrugsT produces fat profits
for a handful of assholes - and produces danger, death and misery for
pretty much everyone else.