End the "War on Drugs"

Unfortunately, I do not expect American public policy makers to come to terms with the absolute fact that the "War on Drugs" has been a colossal failure of epic proportions any time soon. Although the "War on Drugs" has resulted in:

• $49 billion spent per year by local, state and federal agencies -- money that could have been going to education, health care, etc.;
  
• 80 percent of the increase in the federal prison population was due to drug convictions between 1985 and 1995;
• somebody getting arrested every 17 seconds for violating a drug law (for cannabis alone its ever 38 seconds);
• more than half of all sentenced federal prisoners are drug offenders; and
  
• 17 percent of State prisoners and 18 percent of Federal prisoners committed their crimes in order to obtain drug money.

The only winners in the "War on Drugs" are criminal enterprises and politicians who appease public sentiments (I'm looking at you Rahm Emanuel, Eric Holder, Joe Biden, Ronald Reagan (for increasing mandatory sentences) and essentially the entire GOP/American Right). While these costs are relatively hidden to the American public and media outlets, the disastrous consequences are very apparent in Mexico.Here is just a taste from a blog post at Cato-at-Liberty:

Mexican soldiers are being killed and beheaded, and police officers are being assassinated (warning: violent content)... For more on this topic, click here, here, or here.

More recent evidence from the Washington Post:

After a long, controversial career, Brig. Gen. Mauro Enrique Tello Quiñones retired from active duty last month and moved to this Caribbean playground to work for the Cancun mayor and fight the drug cartels that have penetrated much of Mexican society. He lasted a week.

Tello, 63, along with his bodyguard and a driver, were kidnapped in downtown Cancun last Monday evening, taken to a hidden location, methodically tortured, then driven out to the jungle and shot in the head. Their bodies were found Tuesday in the cab of a pickup truck on the side of a highway leading out of town. An autopsy revealed that both the general's arms and legs had been broken.

The audacious kidnapping and killing of one of the highest-ranking military officers in Mexico drew immediate expressions of outrage from the top echelons of the Mexican government, which pledged to continue the fight against organized crime that took the lives of more than 5,300 people last year. Military leaders, who are increasingly at the front lines of the war against the cartels, vowed not to let Tello's death go unsolved or unpunished.

The underlying problem here for Mexico is simple; their isn't a damn thing they can do to address the root cause of the violence -- demand from American consumers. As America pumps in billions of dollars to cut off supply chains the money to be made from the drug trade is increasingly found not necessarily in producing the stuff -- it is in getting substances across the border.

Their is a full on war going on south of our border. One that CANNOT be won. The question we must ask ourselves is what is it going to take for our country to wake up and demand real change.