The Drug Wars between the Mexican cartels have been escalating for several years, and now they’ve reached a point where people are getting shot, killed, and buried in mass graves right across the border from El Paso, Texas. In fact, some of the violence has started to spill over the border. And now Americans are saying that we need a multi-national response.
This angers me to no end. First, let’s take the drug wars out of the picture and talk about deaths and violence in Juarez. Juarez was the sight, throughout the 1990s and 2000s, of thousands of “unexplained” ‘deaths of poor women and girls. These factory workers were among the poorest of the poor in Mexico, many of them from either poorer parts of Mexico, or other parts of Latin America. They were working in the largely American owned maquilas, or factories, along the U.S. border. The police force in Juarez was infamously corrupt and never solved these murders. In fact, many of them were never reported as murders at all. Where was the U.S. while this was going on?
Now, let’s get back to the War on Drugs, started decades ago, and continued to this day. This “War” started by the U.S., has caused thousands upon thousands (if not millions) of deaths throughout Latin America (although largely in Colombia). it has ruined economies, overthrown governments, and played a huge part in Latin American politics. Meanwhile, we still have drug addicts here, and there is still drug violence there. Now we have another President who wants a “multilateral” approach to combating drug trafficking. Hopefully this time, he does not mean more of us sending military and police into Latin America, or providing money, guns and resources to their governments.
America’s current drug policies and policies toward the drug producing and transporting nations in Latin America has been a dismal failure. We have drug addicts here who, when it becomes harder and/or riskier to get drugs, do one of two things. They either turn to pharmaceuticals and domestically produced drugs (like methamphetamine), or they pay higher prices for drugs. Remember, demand for drugs is very inelastic. Addicts will do whatever it takes to get their fix. Some may start using meth instead, or start freebasing oxycotin. But others will simply pay the higher prices. Since a lot of these people’s income is not enough to support themselves, their families, and their drug habits, they will wind up a) homeless, and costing the public money; b) neglecting their children, and costing the public money; or c) stealing or committing other (possibly violent) crimes in order to feed their habit.
In the meantime, it is becoming harder and harder to get drugs into the U.S. This may be a detriment to some people, but it also means that people are willing to pay more money for the drugs that do get through. Which means that while the risk is growing, so are the rewards. There is more incentive than ever to find new ways to smuggle drugs into the United States. With improving globalization and technology, there are new ways to do it all the time. Drug traffic, the sex trade, and human trafficking can and often are all linked. People are putting other, desperate people at risk by using “mules” to smuggle drugs inside their bodies.
The same effect is going on in South America. With U.S. help, some governments are cracking down on people growing cocaine. While this may seem effective, these are people who have very little to lose, and very few other options to sustain their families. Now, those who are brave and/or desperate enough to continue growing drugs are looking at even larger rewards for doing so. Moreover, some Latin American countries have resisted outlawing coca production for the legitimate reason that it has cultural significance to the indigenous populations. Violence is now spilling out of Colombia into neighboring areas where coca is legally grown in order to traffic it through Colombia and Mexico into the United States.
What is the alternative, though? What can the U.S. do but continue to tighten the chains around the international drug trade?
First, on a domestic front, we need (especially with the current economic conditions) to focus on drug programs that work. We need to focus less on punishing and more on rehabilitating both drug users and drug dealers. It is far more expensive to incarcerate a drug offender than it is to provide them with serious and effective treatment and rehabilitation. This seems the right thing to do, especially for non-violent first offenders. In terms of dealers, we can lock them up over and over again. They don’t have the skills they need to succeed in another career, especially one where their income could compete with what they made as dealers. Many of them also don’t have roll models other than drug dealers, gang bangers and pimps. These are the people they saw with nice cars and pretty girls when they were growing up. We need to train these people for entry into the professional world, and provide them with a real alternative to the drug trade. We need an effective P.R. campaign to teach children the dangers of drug addiction. To really educate them, not just tell them no. As entertaining as the “this is your brain” and “D.A.R.E. to say no” commercials were, they obviously didn’t work. Try an experiment if you have a toddler. Give them a crayon and a piece of paper next to a white wall. Say “Don’t draw on the wall.” Watch them carefully for five minutes, and then leave them unsupervised for ten. You’re going to have a painted wall. Kids are rebellious. They need to be taught WHY they shouldn’t do drugs, not just told not to.
On an international front, we need to drop subsidies on domestic agricultural products which compete with products from drug-producing nations. We also need to stop giving some foreign country favored nation status and economic aid. Colombia can no longer compete with Thailand in the coffee market because of the support that the U.S. government gave Thailand’s coffee industry. Similar things have happened with sugar, bananas, and several other tropical products which used to be the staples of U.S.-Latin American trade. We need to provide economic aid to agricultural training and supply programs in Latin America, and make sure the money is being used effectively. We need to make growing something other than Coca a viable option for South and Central American farmers.
This was a really long post, but this has really got me going. We need to get over the assumption that the U.S. military can fix the drug trade, and start looking at this from the parties’ perspectives. We need to create viable alternatives to drugs for users, dealers, traffickers and producers before we can expect any real progress in our so-called “War on Drugs.”
