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Once Upon A Time In Mexico
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Why the US can no longer afford to fight the “War on Drugs;” at least not with Marijuana and Mexico.
The US can no longer afford to tell itself fairytales about its role in the “Mexican” drug wars. You and I, my fellow Americans, are responsible, and not even very indirectly, for over 7,000 deaths in the last two years, if the numbers from a recent University of San Diego study are to be believed. There have been myriad outcomes of Mexico’s war on the contrabandistas (traffickers), but the trail of fatalities, torture, and corruption may be its most indelible legacy.
Here’s the basic set-up: According to World Health Organization statistics, Americans have the highest levels of illegal drug use, especially sensimilla and cocaine products, in the world; 47 percent of us have used at least one illicit substance by the time we graduate high school and the number obviously only gets larger after that. We can come up with all kinds of conjectures about why this is so, but it’s pretty safe to say that drug consumption is an ingrained part of our culture (especially our youth culture) and that it isn’t going away any time soon, no matter how many punitive or restrictive laws Capitol Hill sees fit to pass.
Now, to obtain these substances, American consumers generally don’t grow their own, in part because of the high efficacy and wide-ranging powers of another group on the lookout for our welfare, the DEA. While this may be more (or less) well and good for the average American, as a result, Mexico and Central America have become our country’s greenhouses, giving rise to enormously powerful cartels, most notably based out of Ciudad Juarez, Baja California and the Sinaloa area. Forbes magazine recently listed the head of one of these cartels, Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman Loera, on its list of the world’s billionaires for 2009. Clearly, the trade is profitable, and in no danger of drying up. It may well be the ultimate recession-proof business.
In 2007, Mexican President Felipe Calderon declared an all-out war on these cartels, and they’ve been fighting back with US-bought arms and dollars. Along an approximately 2,000 mile-long border there are currently an estimated 6,700 firearms dealers currently in operation. That’s an average of more than three gun stores every mile along the entire border, and states like Texas have no waiting period for buying a gun, along with no requirement to register said guns. Can we even pretend that it’s just an unfortunate coincidence, that there’s an absurd proliferation of weapons stores right near the cities where cartel gangsters need guns to continue fighting the Mexican government? The constant back and forth of guns, money, and illicit substances is proving just how porous the border is, if not how misplaced our entire sense of the US and Mexico as isolated nations is.
In any case, one thing is becoming abundantly clear: Our high drug consumption levels, along with paradoxically harsh vice laws and incredibly lax gun control, have effectively destabilized a neighboring government. Let that be a rebuttal to anyone who says the US is losing global relevance. Which is why it was even more saddening to hear our handsome young president tell the press, after his visit with President Calderon this month, that he would not reinstate the now-lapsed ban on assault weapons, even though he promised to during his campaign, and even though 90 percent of the assault weapons currently being used in this drug war are purported to come from the United States. It was also disheartening to hear this man, who I thoroughly respect and admire, and who certainly knows of what he speaks, tell those gathered at a recent town hall meeting that we should not decriminalize marijuana. His response elicited giggles from the crowd, but the situation is deadly serious, and is certainly a reversal of opinion from Mr. Obama’s side of things.
Secretary of State Clinton also recently returned from a diplomatic visit to Mexico, where she roundly condemned the traffickers and pledged greater American aid, but since when has throwing money and the valiant, already overstretched men and women of our armed forces at a problem created a workable long-term solution (for further examples, see the endless wars in Iraq/Afghanistan/Vietnam) For decades, level heads, including those at The Economist, have been stating flatly that the US must legalize and regulate its drug trade if it is to prove something other than a corrosive force to its neighbors to the south.
Instead we’ve had a laughably ineffectual ‘war on drugs’ that only succeeds in imprisoning and brutalizing a higher proportion of our citizenry than that of any other industrialized nation and killing thousands of people in the countries closest to us. It’s a fool’s errand that should not, under any circumstances, be repeated anywhere, but especially in Mexico, which lacks the infrastructure and resources the USA, has at its disposal. And yet that’s what we’re “helping” Mexico do.
Why on Earth, if it didn’t work for us, is it going to work for a country with legendary corruption problems and an entire genre of pop music dedicated to lionizing the adventures of drug smugglers (true story; they’re called narcocorridos. Maybe Kanye can do all of us a favor and get off his damn Twitter for a second to sample one. Mr. West, meet the Tijuana Toucans. The time has come for a more pragmatic assessment of our policies, especially those regarding assault weapons and marijuana. Not because the US is losing its morality (an imagined national trait if there ever was one), but because it’s time to show those around us, as well as the thousands of our own citizens we’ve jailed, that we actually do possess some sense of responsibility and rectitude.
If we’d simply act in our own best interest, we could act for the good of those nearby as well, and the case in Mexico is no exception. As the number of police officers, agents, and innocent bystanders killed, tortured, and abducted continues to rise, we have to ask ourselves: Is the greater fool he who admits his fault, or he who wraps himself in the blind hubris of the self-righteous as if it were a protection instead of an encumbrance?
Lacey Gattis earned her Bachelors of Arts from Yale University, studying the History of Art. Her editorial, reporting and writing talents have led her across media platforms, from PBS to Vogue and Rumpus Magazines.
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