FAILED STATE ON OUR SOUTHERN BORDER?

From The Marston Chronicles

We invite you to think about the consequences to the United States if this headline became a fact. It is rapidly becoming a fact. Just take a look at this news from Mexico. Mexico has always had its problems with corruption. It began with one political party controlling Mexico for many decades, an open invitation to corruption. The second cause is the abysmally poor salaries paid to government employees, including the police. We have our own problems with "dirty police" when this happens. But let's face it, what is causing Mexico to crash and burn is our own insatiable appetite for illegal drugs. The drug cartels are now the dominant force in Northern Mexico.

So what can we do about this? If you are a realist, you have to know that there is no way our own government can prevent drug use in our country. It has poured billions of dollars down this black hole to no avail. No government can pass a law that a sizable portion of its citizens refuse to obey. You cannot build enough jails to hold all the people. We already have over one percent of our adult population in jail, the majority of whom are in there on drug charges. At some point, the cost of jailing so many people leaves too few of us left out of jail to pay the taxes to keep all those people in jail.

We tried outlawing one chemical and all that was accomplished was to make organized crime incredibly rich and powerful. It also caused official corruption to become rampant. We are still dealing with the fallout from that experiment in social engineering. Now we are repeating the same mistake with another group of chemicals. Why do we insist on adopting a policy we know from experience is doomed to failure? So far, while our own problems with drug gangs are bad enough, most of the damage is being done in countries that either produce or are in the path of the drug routes to our country. Columbia is already very close to failed state and Mexico is on the same path.

We are not suggesting that encouraging drug use is a good idea nor is it a bad idea to discourage drug use. What clearly is a bad idea is to make drugs illegal. It is clearly a recipe for disaster. What is it going to take to wake us up to this fact of life? We are close to having drug gangs making raids across the Mexican border already. When we are forced to station an army division along that border, will that wake us up? Perhaps it is time for an experiment. Marijuana was legal in this country not that long ago. Let's try decriminalizing it and see what happens. It presents no worse of a health hazard than tobacco. The sale can be restricted to stores that can keep it under lock and key and who severely card young people to prevent them from getting access to it. It is hard to see what we have to lose by trying this at this point.