DON'T SURRENDER YET

Hillary Clinton wants to mend fences with Mexico?

How about building one first?

Throwing a bouquet to her Mexican counterparts, the secretary of state
is quick to blame America for the drug violence on the Mexican border.
And, certainly, she's right that American demand for illicit drugs is
fueling the supply.

That's a lesson for those who like to claim that drug use is a
victimless crime. Tell that to the families of some 7,000 murder
victims in northern Mexico's drug war.

You take illegal drugs, you're hurting your own country and helping
along a bloodbath in Mexico.

Still, if the Obama administration wants to adopt a
blame-America-first strategy in the war on drugs, it should look at
its own policies.

The fact is, the demand for drugs in America has been supplied
primarily over the years across an open border with Mexico.

If the government were the least bit serious about slowing down the
flow of illegal drugs, it would finish the border fence the people
wanted and beef up other interdiction efforts at border crossings.

Instead, Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano was quoted in a
story this week as saying the border fence that Americans demanded
will not be finished after all. She says the rest of the border can be
handled with "technology."

Right.

No fence alone is going to keep out illegal drugs and aliens. But it's
a logical start.

Meanwhile, the pro-legalization crowd is itching to declare the war on
drugs a failure, and call it evidence that they should be legalized.
They're starting with marijuana, which is less unattractive, shall we
say, than cocaine or heroin.

But anyone making the claim that legalizing marijuana will take the
pressure off is lying. Drug cartels aren't killing each other's
armies, government forces and innocent bystanders just in order to get
marijuana into the United States. The violence is also over drugs such
as cocaine and heroin.

We certainly wouldn't disagree if Mrs. Clinton were to argue that
interdiction can't solve this problem alone. No one ever proposed
that. But it has to be one of the weapons in the arsenal, along with
treatment and prevention programs.

To claim that we're losing without even trying to secure the border is
to give up without trying.