MEXICO AND THE DRUG WAR

Incomprehensible Reactions

Daily reports of drug war violence seem to slip past our
consciousness. What are we thinking?

Gang warfare wracks Mexico from border to border. Outlaws murder
judges and police officers when they aren't busy killing each other.
The crime is beyond control in Mexico. Drugs make too much money.

In America it's the same, except it's compounded because we have a
huge crime problem related to drug use as well as drug-trafficking.
Even in a quiet town like Columbia, local drug war violence has made
enough news to fill a book. Our police do as well as one can expect,
but the drug trade simply is too lucrative to deny. The crime will
continue, and we will keep paying billions to fight a losing war on drugs.

Judging from our public attitude, we don't care. We are willing to
tolerate a situation that produces most of our community's criminal
activity. I suppose most of us believe those shootings and break-ins
and robberies will not affect us. Over on the other side of town, let
the bad guys and the cops duke it out.

We don't seem to care that our billion-dollar war is not working. In
a perverse way, the more law enforcement we deploy, the higher drug
prices become, the more lucrative the black market, the larger the
incentive for more criminal activity and the more we will spend on
enforcement. It's a vicious losing cycle only getting worse.

We could stop the violence here and in Mexico and everywhere else
where illegal drugs are produced and sold into the huge U.S. black
market. We could legalize drugs just as we did almost a hundred years
ago with alcohol, when a similar black-market crime spree threatened
our peace and tranquility.

Why won't we learn the lesson? We argue to ourselves that the
potential effects of illegal drugs are worse than the potential
effects of alcohol. We arrest for driving under the influence instead
of driving while intoxicated even though violations always involve
alcohol. If the crime implied bad driving because of drug use,
apparently arrests would cease. We spend a lot combating the effects
of alcohol abuse but nothing fighting alcohol black market crime.

We continue to push the rope, spending billions fighting a losing
drug war, creating the largest, most violent black market in the
world and underwriting criminal activity in our own communities. The
one thing the war is not doing is controlling drug use.

What are we thinking? Whatever our thoughts are, they're buried. We
will let the war rage on around the corner, out of sight. Maybe if we
look away, the shooters will miss us. Yet most of the crime in
America is drug-related.

How come we don't stop it? We think legalizing drugs with laws like
those for alcohol would lead every teenager to use more. But think of
the illegal drug sales system we have now, with sellers getting rich
pushing drugs on ninth-graders. Would it not be better for safe,
regulated drugs to be available in the drugstore? Like Bud Light.

HJW III

Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use of any other
drug with special horror.

- - WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS