The Post Drug War Mentality: Why Peace Begs Legalization

An incessant violence, increasingly brutal and widespread has taken hold over a beautiful and once safe country. For decades it was the beacon of stability in a tumultuous region gripped by dictatorship. But now Mexico faces collapse, threatened by drug cartels who wield more power than the fledgling government. In a recent report published by the Joint Operating Forces Command, army and intelligence officials fear that Mexico could implode into a failed state. It seems that only the potentially nuclear threat of an unstable Pakistan rivaled concerns over currently escalating cycles of violence and the government’s failure to bring stability. While many Latin American journalists have been quick to denounce these projections, pointing to Mexico's history of robust institutions and rule of law, it would be naive to pretend like the country faces anything but an existential crisis. In 2008 alone, over five thousand lives were lost to drug related violence, a number that qualifies the situation as low intensity civil war. In response to this, President Calderon has sent tens of thousands of troops to border towns such as Juarez in the hope of fighting fire with fire. This however, is not the answer; the problem is much more fundamental. For every drug lord killed there are ten ready and willing to take his (or her) place and be twice as vicious as the one who fell. The power of the cartels stems from the illicit nature of the material they traffic. To blunt the violence, the government will have to begin to seriously consider legalizing the substances that have brought so much bloodshed upon its people. Though Calderon has made a timid proposal to decriminalize possession of small amounts of cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine, he will soon be forced to take on more drastic and unpopular options.

Recent security concerns are the visible sores and symptoms of a trade that will never be irradicated or even diminished. Daily decapitations and kidnappings may hold Mexican headlines hostage today, but ten years ago they found their home in Colombia. The drug production, trafficking and related violence that had paralyzed Medellin and Bogota in the 1980s was met with brutal, and eventually successful retaliations. Stifled, it traveled north and flourished in the ample spaces provided by corruption and endemic poverty. Helped by the United States' Plan Colombia, transit points in Mexico became the hubs of production and trafficking. With “drug syndicates controlling about 8% of global GDP”, these cartels have massive amounts of capital, and have armed themselves with state of the art weaponry including submarines and rocket missiles. Rule of law has been replaced by the rule of the gun. Meanwhile, the security forces that should be protecting citizens are often indistinguishable from the drug cartels they should be fighting whether through greed or intimidation. Officers are often given the choice of “Plata o Plomo” (Silver or a Bullet) and are easily bought into complicity. Entire municipal elections are now rigged through bribery and coercion. Only last week, the police chief of Juarez was forced to resign after the local cartel threatened that one police officer would be killed every forty-eight hours until his resignation. These same organizations are suspected to be behind massive protests in the border region calling on the government to remove military forces, proving that they can pressure not only politicians but entire populations. During Independence Day celebrations in Morelia, several bombs exploded and wounded unsuspecting crowds , raising fears that a fatal nexus between organized crime and terrorism is emerging here, too. The 2004 Madrid train bombings that were linked to Al Qaeda were carried out by a Moroccan drug trafficking network. We all have much to fear from such marriages of convenience – where acts of ideological and religious terror now have boundless funding.

Targeting the demand curve of this perverse equation is wasting energy. The reality is that people use drugs - always have, always will. Freud would suggest that society necessitates intoxication. In civilization, essentially, we are unhappy, and therefore inevitably turn to drugs for fleeting comfort. This he argues is an inescapably human quality, not something that can be constrained by law and order. These substances provide individuals an outlet of relief to counter the constant oppression of civilization, which we have paradoxically constructed to deter our life-quest for fulfillment and happiness. Prohibition in the United States saw, not only no decrease in the amount of alcohol people consumed but dramatic increases in violence and organized crime. Dissatisfaction is ubiquitous, and modern liberal constructs have attempted to channel it; but prostitution, pornography and drugs have never gone away. Despite the laws we codify to cement the rigid structures of our legal rational society, there are instinctual drives that people will simply never evolve past. Controlled substances, like religion, allow us to suffer the daily wretchedness and therefore play an important social function.

I am not proposing that a society of drug addicts is desirable, merely acknowledging that drug use is as rampant as it is intractable, and must therefore lose its stigma and become accepted and, more crucially, regulated by governmental agencies. Making something illegal only increases the economic profit that can be made off its illicit trade. De-incentivize, and business will be taken out of the hands of violent gangs and into pharmacies. The movement to legalize is no longer one clung to by stoners and hippies, but must be taken somberly by the voices of peace and development, understanding that the puritanical refusal to take this on will come at the bloody cost of too many lives. Theory only supports the cold hard facts, which are: drug consumption levels do not increase in societies that legalize and control substances; the control of these substances not only provides the government with massive amounts of revenue, crucial in the midst of rising unemployment and financial collapse, but ensure that the substances provided are clean and relatively safe for consumption. Like with alcohol, careful regulation would be necessary, as it is for legal prescription medications (that can be as detrimental and addictive as illicit ones). Driving under the Influence, for example, would remain a punishable offense. From Holland to India, the world is slowly realizing that criminalizing drugs has an equal opposite effect. Illicit drugs have been the bane of Latin America’s existence; fueling corruption and retarding development, and it is time to re-conceptualize and re-prioritize our values.

The drug trade is here to stay. If production is stifled in one area it will simply flow to another. Making it illegal benefits the cartels in Mexico and Colombia, but also the Taleban in Afghanistan and Hizbollah in Lebanon. By clinging to obsolete moralities we with one hand feed the monster we are trying to defeat. The reactionary argument (spearheaded by the Catholic Church) that discounts legalization on moral grounds must reconcile itself with reality. People who get high will keep getting high. Is it not then time to relinquish the stale argument that pretends to make of society something it is not? The many decapitated heads rolled into clubs have long divorced this position from relevancy. It is now a matter of life or death. The Mexican government has no power in its current war against the cartels. The only choice it has to make is whether or not it will make the difficult decisions necessary to keep the state standing. It either legalizes the source and controls it, preserving itself, or collapses at the mercy of this boundless profit-driven violence. Institutionalized corruption must be tackled, as Calderon has attempted to do as part of his plan to democratize and make the system more transparent. In the face of such violence, however, this is simply impossible, and will not make for peaceful streets (see image above). Morality is a force for good when it propels us forward, but can become a dangerous veil that keeps us from seeing the truths that lay on the other side of it. Reality is ugly and, if indeed we are willing to examine the underbelly of this beast and confront it in the hopes of saving lives and restoring peace and security, then unsavory choices must be made.

Days after this post was first published, The Economist wrote the following article: How To Stop The Drug War