It Is Just A Matter Of Time

High Country News has an interesting article on how Mexico is becoming a failed state. All because of the Drug War.

The man talking on the screen was recruited by the drug industry in Ciudad Juarez, sent to the state police academy, where he got around $150 a month as a student and around $1,000 a month from the drug industry as their sponsored law enforcement person. He was also trained by the FBI in Tucson, Ariz., (he told me the training was very good) and headed an anti-kidnapping squad in Juarez. And he also kidnapped people, almost all of whom died once their families were drained of money.

I helped make the film the man is watching, and he knows this. He is mesmerized by the man talking. And he is angry at me, because I know such a man, someone like the killers who took his son and sold him back for some money. Fortunately.

If the press reports this sort of thing, it is framed as part of a War on Drugs that must be won. These stories are fables at best. There is no serious War on Drugs. Rather, there is violence, nourished by the money to be made from drugs. And there are U.S. industries whose primary lifeblood comes from fighting a war on drugs. The Department of Homeland Security, for example, has 225,000 employees and a budget of $42 billion, part of which is aimed at making America safe from Mexico and Mexicans. Narcotics officers in the U.S. cost at least $40 billion a year. The world's largest prison industry would collapse without the intake of drug convicts, and, in recent years, of illegal Mexican migrants. And around the republic there are big new federal courthouses rising that would be cobwebbed without the steady flow from drug busts and the Mexican poor coming north.

It is just a matter of time until this sort of thing crosses the border and becomes an American problem. Of course considering the cost it already is an American problem. And we are financing this with our War On Some Drugs. Some day we will surrender the fight. And then we will have the aftermath where the drug gangs turn to other "opportunities" for profit. The aftermath of the War On Alcohol lasted some 20 or 30 years. The sooner we can get over the war on drugs the sooner we will get over the aftermath.

You can read more about it in:

Bad Trip: How the War Against Drugs is Destroying America


Cross Posted at Classical Values