NOTHING NEW IN HILLARY'S DRUG TOOLKIT

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has received a minor flurry of
criticism this week for acknowledging that the United States - or at
least some people in the United States - bears some responsibility
for the explosion of drug-law-related violence in Mexico that has
left more than 7,000 Mexicans dead since January 2008. The trouble is
that she doesn't seem to be prepared to follow her comments to
anything close to their logical implications.

Clearly what we've been doing has not worked," Clinton told reporters
on her plane at the start of a two-day visit to Mexico. "Our
insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade. Our
inability to prevent weapons from being smuggled across the border to
arm these criminals causes the deaths of police, of soldiers and
civilians." She added that "neither interdiction [of drugs] nor
reducing demand have been successful."

Clinton is only partially correct. It isn't "our" insatiable demand
but the demand of a small subset of the population that fuels the
drug trade, but it fuels it to the tune of $15 billion to $25 billion
a year. And while Mexican drug gangs do smuggle weapons from U.S. gun
stores to elude Mexico's strict gun laws, the current issue of
Foreign Policy magazine notes that since the beginning of Mexican
President Felipe Calderon's decision two years ago to unleash the
military against the drug gangs, the gangs' arsenals have come to
include: "sea-going submersibles, helicopters and modern transport
aviation, automatic weapons, RPG's, anti-tank 66mm rockets, mines and
booby traps, heavy machine guns, 50-caliber sniper rifles, massive
use of military hand grenades, and the most modern models of 40mm
grenade machine guns."

Clearly, these weapons are not coming from a few rogue gun shops in
Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. With the vast profits that prohibition
makes possible, the Mexican drug gangs are tapping into the
international black market in military weaponry. Inspecting a few
more vehicles crossing into Mexico won't stop that trade.

Having acknowledged the enormity of the problems created by the
effort to enforce drug laws through military methods, what is the
U.S. government prepared to do about it? Well, a waggish definition
of insanity is continuing to do what you have been doing and
expecting different results, and that seems to be what the U.S.
government has in mind.

President Obama has said the government will send a few more Border
Patrol agents to the 2,000-mile border with Mexico, step up
inspection of vehicles going both ways across the border and send
another $66 million to the Mexican government. Good luck with that.

Maybe it's time to stop the insanity.

The dynamics of efforts at prohibition of substances for which people
are willing to pay inflated prices predict precisely the outcomes we
are seeing. Those most adept at violence, concealment, bribery and
skullduggery are rewarded with enormous sums of money, respect for
law declines, and civil society is ripped apart.

Last month the former presidents of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico
called on the United States to consider legalizing at least marijuana
and focusing anti-drug efforts more on treatment than
criminalization. That's good advice. The war on drugs creates more
victims than the drugs themselves do, including plenty of innocent bystanders.

When a policy fails, it's time to consider changing it. The chaos in
Mexico, which threatens to spill across the border any time, should
be sufficient impetus.