IT'S TIME TO CONSIDER CHANGING THE POLICY ON THE WAR ON DRUGS

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton received a minor flurry of
criticism last 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 along the border 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 66 mm rockets, mines and booby traps, heavy machine guns,
.50 caliber sniper rifles, massive use of military hand grenades, and
the most modern models of 40 mm 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.

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, and not just because it comports with what we have
urged for decades. 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.