WHO IS TO BLAME FOR DRUG VIOLENCE?

During her official visit to Mexico last month, Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton, on behalf of the U.S., accepted shared blame for the
barbaric violence perpetrated by Mexican drug cartels.

The conventional logic is that, because the great demand for illegal
drugs comes from the U.S., along with the weapons used by the cartels
to inflict the continuing carnage, America is to blame.

Such self-flagellation is typical of Americans prone to guilt about
- -- well, about being American. These folks blame America for the
current economic pandemic, for global warming, for Third World
poverty because we use too much of the world's resources, and now for
the drug violence in other nations.

In the case of drug violence in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin
America, Clinton is correct, America does share a great deal of the
blame, but not for the reason she gives.

If Clinton considered the real causes of Mexico's escalating drug
violence, she did not mention them. One of them is the ease with
which we have allowed our southern border to be habitually compromised.

Clinton made no public statements critical of official Mexico for
encouraging its desperately destitute populations to sneak into the
U.S. and take advantage of the bounty of El Norte, including free
education and welfare programs.

Drug smuggling is facilitated by this invasion of illegal immigrants.
In fact, the drug cartels are now taking over the trafficking in
illegal immigrants, and increasingly, forcing the immigrants to
transport drugs across the border into the U.S.

The other and, by far, the main cause of the drug violence and
corruption is America's stubborn insistence on waging a war on drugs
- -- a futile effort that mostly benefits the cash flows of those
fighting it, namely law enforcement and the illegal drug industry.

This foolish debacle continues, with all of its death, imprisonments,
collateral damage and annual expenditures of tens of billions of tax
dollars, because America seems to have a penchant for accepting false
premises maintained by popular myth, junk science and hypocritical
moralities that ignore and betray the founding principles of the
nation -- principles expressed and guaranteed by the Declaration of
Independence and the Constitution.

Most of the drugs prohibited by federal law are no more addictive or
dangerous than are the many legal drugs prescribed for various
physical and psychological pain.

Because people, even people as prominent as Rush Limbaugh, Betty Ford
and Bret Favre, have become addicted to prescription drugs has not
resulted in those drugs being banned.

Tobacco and alcohol have proven to be more addictive and bigger
health risks than has marijuana, but that has not resulted in a ban
on tobacco and booze.

America's war on drugs is a war on freedom, where the only crime is
choosing a particular anodyne that government has forbidden for
reasons that cannot be justified either by logic or under the
founding credo of this nation.

The fear and misinformation that feed beliefs that freedom of choice
in drug use will lead to savage anarchy has, ironically, caused that
very thing in Mexico and parts of the U.S. It is because of the
prohibition of the drugs, not because of their intrinsic danger, that
the butchery and corruption occurs.

The unfounded hysteria over illegal drugs and the myths that justify
it have historical precedent in America. Similar aberrant national
psychology led the nation to betray its credo with the hypocrisy of
slavery and the subsequent vicious discrimination against African-Americans.

It did so again with the disenfranchisement of women. Both of these
nonsensical national hypocrisies were sustained by false beliefs and
irrational fears that granting full constitutional freedom to certain
folks would jeopardize social stability.

Overcoming these official, social tyrannies required long, hard and
sometimes dangerous struggles. And here we are again with personal
freedom being suppressed and criminalized because the nation cannot
or will not examine the facts, think logically, or support its own
founding principles as regards the choice of drug use.

The daily carnage in Mexico and in many neighborhoods here in America
is the product of America's abdication of reason, and the selfishness
of those forces enriched by keeping certain drugs illegal.

Our packed prisons, our increasing violent crime, our drain on
beleaguered public treasuries, and our suppression of freedom are the
true and continuing costs of drug prohibition. Demand for drugs will
never be quenched by anything but the most repressive police state --
and then we will have lost America.

For all his promise as a man of reason, for the millions of inquires
he received on his White House Web site regarding a more sensible
approach to drug policy, President Obama has said he does not
consider legalization to be a wise approach.

I urge him to restudy our founding principles, examine the facts
about drugs, and work to end this irrational suppression of freedom.