Legalize Drugs?
July 28, 2006 by Marc Lamont Hill
A while back, Mexican president Vicente Fox planned to repeal his country’s US-based drug laws. President Bush immediately stepped in, citing the potential effects of such legislation on American crime. According to Norm Stamper, the legalization of drugs would have a positive effect on the United States and its neighboring countries.
How Legalizing Drugs Will End Violence
By Norm Stamper
…Last June in Nuevo Laredo, across the border from Laredo, Texas, Alejandro Dominguez was sworn in as the city’s police chief. That same day, three dark Chevy Suburbans with tinted windows pulled up to his office. Moments later, Dominguez, a reluctant top cop who only took the job at the pleading of a terrified citizenry, was dead. Police recovered 35 to 40 casings from an AR-15 assault rifle.
Mexico’s drug dealers, including the Zetas (elite military commandos assigned to fight drugs but who’ve gone over to the other side), are among the most organized, proficient and prolific killers in history.
The violence does not end with the capture or the killing of major players like the Arellano brothers. (Ramon was shot and killed by the federales in February of 2002; Benjamín was captured a month later. Francisco has been in prison for years.) As with the illicit drug scene in the United States, thousands of low-level drug-dealing wannabes are marking time — waiting for today’s kingpin to fall so they can move up.
And the violence grows, and grows.
Virtually every analysis of the Mexican “drug problem” points to the themes raised here: the inducements of big money and wide fame; the crushing poverty of those exploited by drug dealers; the entrepreneurial frenzy of expanding and protecting one’s markets; the large, unquenchable American demand for drugs; and the complicity of many in law enforcement.
But something’s missing from the analysis: the role of prohibition.
Illegal drugs are expensive precisely because they are illegal. The products themselves are worthless weeds — cannabis (marijuana), poppies (heroin), coca (cocaine) — or dirt-cheap pharmaceuticals and “precursors” used, for example, in the manufacture of methamphetamine. Yet today, marijuana is worth as much as gold, heroin more than uranium, cocaine somewhere in between. It is the U.S.’s prohibition of these drugs that has spawned an ever-expanding international industry of torture, murder and corruption. In other words, we are the source of Mexico’s “drug problem.”
The remedy is as obvious as it is urgent: legalization.
Regulated legalization of all drugs — with stiffened penalties for driving impaired or furnishing to kids — would bring an immediate halt to the violence. How? By (1) dramatically reducing the cost of these drugs, (2) shifting massive enforcement resources to prevention and treatment and (3) driving drug dealers out of business: no product, no profit, no incentive. In an ideal world, Mexico and the United States would move to repeal prohibition simultaneously (along with Canada). But even if we moved unilaterally, sweeping and lasting improvements to public safety (and public health) would be felt on both sides of the border. (Tragically and predictably, just as Mexico’s parliament was about to reform its U.S.-modeled drug laws, the Bush administration stepped in, pressuring President Vicente Fox to abandon the enlightened position he’d championed for two years.)
For the entire story, click here.
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