DRUGS, GUNS AND A REALITY CHECK

It's an indictment of our fact-averse political culture that a
statement of the blindingly obvious could sound so revolutionary. "Our
insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade," Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton told reporters on her plane Wednesday as she
flew to Mexico for an official visit. "Our inability to prevent
weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border . . . causes
the deaths of police, of soldiers and civilians."

Amazingly, U.S. officials have avoided facing these facts for decades.
This is not just an intellectual blind spot but a moral failure, one
that has had horrific consequences for Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia
and other Latin American and Caribbean nations. Clinton deserves high
praise for acknowledging that the United States bears "shared
responsibility" for the drug-fueled violence sweeping Mexico, which
has claimed more than 7,000 lives since the beginning of 2008. But
that means we will also share responsibility for the next 7,000
killings as well.

Our long-running "war on drugs," focusing on the supply side of the
equation, has been an utter disaster. Domestically, we've locked up
hundreds of thousands of street-level dealers, some of whom genuinely
deserve to be in prison and some of whom don't. It made no difference.
According to a 2007 University of Michigan study, 84 percent of high
school seniors nationwide said they could obtain marijuana "fairly
easily" or "very easily." The figure for amphetamines was 50 percent;
for cocaine, 47 percent; for heroin, 30 percent.

At the same time, we've persisted in a Sisyphean attempt to cut off
the drug supply at or near the source. When I was The Washington
Post's correspondent in South America, I once took a nerve-racking
helicopter ride to visit a U.S.-funded military base in the Upper
Huallaga Valley of Peru. It was the place where most of the country's
coca -- the plant from which cocaine is processed -- was being grown,
and the valley was crawling with Maoist guerrillas who funded their
insurgency with money they extorted from the coca growers and
traffickers. Eventually, the coca business was eliminated in the Upper
Huallaga. But now it's flourishing in other parts of Peru, and last
year authorities there seized a record 30 tons of cocaine -- meaning,
by rule of thumb, that at least 10 times that much was probably
produced and shipped.

In Colombia, I saw how the huge, brutally violent Medellin and Cali
cocaine cartels threatened to turn the country into the world's first
"narco-state." The Colombian government, again with U.S. assistance,
managed to pulverize these sprawling criminal organizations into
smaller units, but the business continues to thrive -- and to provide
most of the cocaine that finds its way to the American market. Last
year, Colombian authorities seized 119 tons of cocaine. Money from the
drug trade sustains the longest-running leftist insurgency in the
hemisphere. Ever inventive, the Colombian traffickers have gone so far
as to build their own miniature submarines to smuggle illicit cargo
into the United States.

And now Mexico has become the focal point of the drug trade, with its
cartels blasting their way to dominance in the business of bringing
marijuana, methamphetamine, cocaine and other drugs to the American
market. Violence among drug gangs, not just along the border but
throughout the country, has reached crisis levels. The government's
strategy is to break up the big cartels, as the Colombians did. But
even if authorities succeed, the industry will live on.

In the case of Mexico, there's a complicating factor: This is a
two-way problem. While drugs are being moved north across the border,
powerful assault weapons -- purchased in the United States -- are
being moved south to arm the cartels' foot soldiers. Clinton's
statement about "shared responsibility" recognizes that if we expect
Mexico to do something about the flow of drugs, we're obliged to do
something about the counterflow of guns.

First, though, let's be honest with ourselves. This whole disruptive,
destabilizing enterprise has one purpose, which is to supply the U.S.
market with illegal drugs. As long as the demand exists, entrepreneurs
will find a way to meet it. The obvious demand-side solution --
legalization -- would do more harm than good with some drugs, but
maybe not with others. We need to examine all options. It's time to
put everything on the table, because all we've accomplished so far is
to bring the terrible violence of the drug trade ever closer to home.