Washington – — Concern about a potential failed state – not Pakistan, not Somalia, but California’s neighbor Mexico – is mounting in Washington as an all-out war involving 45,000 Mexican military personnel fails to quell rising drug violence that is spilling from such Mexican cities as Tijuana into the United States.
An estimated 6,290 drug-related murders occurred in Mexico last year, six times the standard definition of a civil war, said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a leading scholar on the issue at the Brookings Institution.
Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, described beheadings of Mexican mayors and police chiefs and said Mexican drug gangs have infiltrated the cannabis fields on both public and private lands in Northern California. He said Mexican villagers are kidnapped and smuggled into the northern coastal forests to grow pot, leaving environmental wreckage in their wake.
He said a timber company employee had been held at gunpoint by a Mexican gang, and he worried that hikers could be threatened. There also have been gang confrontations with firefighters.
“This isn’t your ’60s hippie growing a little pot on the back 40 to get through winter,” Thompson said.
Unlike past battles over immigration, Mexico’s current problems are blamed increasingly on the United States: its enormous demand for illegal drugs and its availability of military-style weapons, including bazookas and grenade launchers, that are smuggled to Mexico and used to match or overwhelm the Mexican military.
“My personal view is, it’s us who is more responsible than Mexico,” said Sidney Weintraub, a leading Latin American scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “We’re providing profits of about $25 billion to the drug cartels. That’s a lot of money.”
About 40 percent of the drug sales are marijuana, he said. “We imprison more people for marijuana than any other drug. What we have to do is change our policy and decriminalize marijuana. I don’t think we can do much unless we cut back on the money. As long as they have all that money, Mexico is in a largely hopeless situation.”
It’s beginning to look like the only thing we produce and export anymore in America is destabilization and violence in other countries. Our government has pledged another $1.4 Billion (or 12.2 cannadays) to Mexico to help combat the drug gangs, because if there’s one thing we’ve learned from the drug war, it’s if what you’re doing isn’t working, do more of it with greater firepower.
America likes to smoke pot. No matter how sophisticated your Army, you cannot fight the laws of supply and demand. We want it and if you’d let us use it, buy it, and grow it, there would be no customers for Mexican drug gangs. America can grow some mighty fine domestic marijuana.
On Canadian radio today, I was asked, “Well, wouldn’t the criminal gangs turn to pushing harder drugs and other crimes?”
“Yes,” I replied, “sure, that’s what criminals do – they make their living committing crimes. However, criminals, just like our government, are subject to the laws of supply and demand. 60% of these violent drug gangs’ money comes from marijuana because Americans like marijuana. Gangs can try to push more coke, meth, and heroin, but who’s going to be buying?”
In fact, I’d argue that a legal marijuana market in America would reduce the demand for coke, meth, and heroin, just as the end of Prohibition in the ’30s brought people back to beer and reduced demand for hard liquor.
