THE ONLY THING DRUG GANGS AND CARTELS FEAR IS LEGALIZATION

To many people, the "war on drugs" sounds like a metaphor, like the
"war on poverty." It is not. It is being fought with tanks and sub
machine guns and hand grenades, funded in part by your taxes, and it
has killed 28,000 people under the current Mexican President alone.
The death-toll in Tijuana -- one of the front-lines of this war -- is
now higher than in Baghdad. Yesterday, another pile of seventy
mutilated corpses was found near San Fernando -- an event that no
longer shocks the country.

Mexico today is a place where the severed heads of police officers
are found week after week, pinned to bloody notes that tell their
colleagues: "This is how you learn respect." It is a place where hand
grenades are tossed into crowds to intimidate the public into
shutting up. It is the state the US Joint Chiefs of Staff say is most
likely, after Pakistan, to suffer "a rapid and sudden collapse."

Why? When you criminalize a drug for which there is a large market,
it doesn't disappear. The trade is simply transferred from
off-licenses, pharmacists and doctors to armed criminal gangs. In
order to protect their patch and their supply routes, these gangs
tool up -- and kill anyone who gets in their way. You can see this
any day on the streets of a poor part of London or Los Angeles, where
teenage gangs stab or shoot each other for control of the 3000
percent profit margins on offer. Now imagine this process taking over
an entire nation, to turn it into a massive production and supply
route for the Western world's drug hunger.

Why Mexico? Why now? In the past decade, the US has spent a fortune
spraying carcinogenic chemicals over Colombia's coca-growing areas,
so the drug trade has simply shifted to Mexico. It's known as the
"balloon effect": press down in one place, and the air rushes to
another. When I was last there in 2006, I saw the drug violence
taking off and warned that the murder rate was going to skyrocket.
Since then the victims have ranged from a pregnant woman washing her
car to a four year-old child to a family in the "wrong" house
watching television to a group of 14 teenagers having a party. Today,
70 percent of Mexicans say they are frightened to go out because of
the cartels.

The gangs offer Mexican police and politicians a choice: plata o
plomo. Silver, or lead. Take a bribe, or take a bullet. President
Felipe Calderon has been leading a military crackdown on them since
2006 -- yet every time he surges the military forward, the gang
violence in an area massively increases. This might seem like a
paradox, but it isn't. If you knock out the leaders of a drug gang,
you don't eradicate demand, or supply. You simply trigger a fresh war
for control of the now-vacant patch. The violence creates more violence.

This is precisely what happened -- to the letter -- when the United
States prohibited alcohol. A ban produced a vicious rash of criminal
gangs to meet the popular demand, and they terrorized the population
and bribed the police. Now a thousand Mexican Al Capones are claiming
their billions and waving their guns.

Like Capone, the drug gangs love the policy of prohibition. Michael
Levine, who had a thirty year career as one of America's most
distinguished federal narcotics agents, penetrated to the very top of
la Mafia Cruenza, one of the biggest drug-dealing gangs in the world
in the 1980s. Its leaders told him "that not only did they not fear
our war on drugs, they actually counted on it... On one undercover
tape-recorded conversation, a top cartel chief, Jorge Roman,
expressed his gratitude for the drug war, calling it 'a sham put on
the American tax-payer' that was 'actually good for business'.

So there is a growing movement in Mexico to do the one thing these
murderous gangs really fear -- take the source of their profits,
drugs, back into the legal economy. It would bankrupt them swiftly,
and entirely. Nobody kills to sell you a glass of Jack Daniels.
Nobody beheads police officers or shoots teenagers to sell you a
glass of Budweiser. And after legalization, nobody would do it to
sell you a spliff or a gram of cocaine either. They would be in the
hands of unarmed, regulated, legal businesses, paying taxes to the
state, at a time when we all need large new sources of tax revenue.

The conservative former President, Vicente Fox, has publicly called
for legalization, and he has been joined by a battery of former
Presidents across Latin America -- all sober, right-leaning statesmen
who are trying to rationally assess the facts. Every beheading,
grenade attack, and assassination underlines their point. Calderon's
claims in response that legalization would lead to a sudden explosion
in drug use don't seem to match the facts: Portugal decriminalized
possession of all drugs in 2001, and drug use there has slightly fallen since.

Yet Mexico is being pressured hard by countries like the US and
Britain -- both led by former drug users -- to keep on fighting this
war, while any mention of legalization brings whispered threats of
slashed aid and diplomatic shunning.

Look carefully at that mound of butchered corpses found yesterday.
They are the inevitable and ineluctable product of drug prohibition.
This will keep happening for as long as we pursue this policy. If you
believe the way to deal with the human appetite for intoxication is
to criminalize and militarize, then blood is on your hands. How many
people have to die before we finally make a sober assessment of
reality, and take the drugs trade back from murderous criminal gangs?

To support the right side in the referendum to decriminalize cannabis
in California this November -- one of the most important moves on
drugs in the world at the moment -- please donate or volunteer for
the campaign here. https://secure.taxcannabis.org/page/contribute/50000