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 Editorials | Opinions | June 2008 
Drug War as Usual is a Script for Surrender
 Alan Lupo - Boston Herald
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 |  | It doesn’t matter how many millions the government pours in here to stop drugs. As long as Americans keep buying them, this business is never going to stop. |  | | | |
The news from south of the Rio Grande is the stuff of nightmares.
As we pay attention to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is a full-scale war going on in Mexico that makes the New York gang wars of the 1800s, the Chicago gang competition of the 1920s and the Boston bloodletting of the 1960s and ‘70s resemble skeet shooting matches.
Drug cartels are engaged in the typical organized crime practice of eliminating competition, while at the same time battling law enforcement personnel ranging from frightened local cops to the army and federal police.
There are casts of thousands. It’s a struggle to pick out who is after whom on any given day. And it doesn’t help that corruption has too long been a way of life in law enforcement agencies.
As in any war, the innocent suffer. Those who have not been wounded or killed in crossfires fear to leave their homes or talk to strangers or even neighbors. Drug running has become big business in Mexico; some cynics might contend it’s the nation’s leading industry. Say something wrong to some neighbor who secretly works for a cartel, and who knows what might result?
The bad guys are heavily armed. They are not depending on switchblades. They have fully automatic weapons.
Police, both the corrupt cops and the straight shooters trying to impose peace on this insanity, are targets, and rank has no privileges.
Early last month, the federal police commander was ambushed and killed in his apartment.
President Felipe Calderon has inundated trouble spots with federal police and soldiers, but there are too many such spots and not enough troops equipped with the kind of street intelligence they need to shortstop the violence.
The violence has been escalating for more than two decades, as our fellow citizens north of the Rio Grande cannot seem to sate their appetites for meth, coke, weed, smack whatever.
“It doesn’t matter how many millions the government pours in here to stop drugs,” a Mexican lawyer told a New York Times reporter.
“As long as Americans keep buying them, this business is never going to stop.”
The fellow said that in 1986.
One need not have majored in economics to understand that if a market exists for a product, entrepreneurs will show up to sell to and profit from that market. Al Capone, after all, used to insist that he was nothing more than a businessman as he peddled illegal hooch to willing buyers.
Even if Mexican drug dealers were somehow stopped at our southwestern borders, they and others would find a way into our lucrative market, just as, during Prohibition, Irish, Jewish and Italian mobsters shipped and trucked in booze, and the Scotch-Irish of Appalachia cooked it up in back country stills.
If we Americans were serious about the drug war, we’d be fighting it not only aggressively at our borders and beyond, as we do, but also at home by treating our addicts with every manner of medical, psychological and social program we could invent.
The betting in this corner is that it’ll never happen. What will happen is more gunfire to the south and more addiction in the north. |
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