Ruminations of an Expatriate

The Washington Post reports that “Mexico’s Police Chief Is Killed In Brazen Attack by Gunmen”, as in the “national police chief.” The report indicates that Mexican based “drug cartels [are] blamed for 6,000 killings in the past 2 1/2 years…”

Given that USA consumers provide the chief market for the products moved by the Mexican based drug cartels, most of the six thousand killings in Mexico may be directly attributed to the misguided USA prohibition of now illegal drugs. Prohibition, as was learned during the prohibition of alcohol in the USA from 1920 to 1933, accomplishes nothing except to raise the price of a product to the point of enabling black market entrepreneurs, who are often not reluctant to eliminate their competitors with extreme prejudice.

The rates of prohibited drug use have not been materially changed through prohibition. Prohibition has made criminals of millions of otherwise law abiding folks, increased police corruption, increased the USA prison population by millions, and spawned an industry engaged in the promotion of the construction and filling of prisons. And it has created a situation where police agencies are essentially working on commission, seizing property and selling the property to further militarizing policing in the USA and the consequent increase in “Botched Paramilitary Police Raids” which have resulted in the killing and destruction of the property of innocent citizens.

The drug cartels in Mexico, Colombia, the Bahamas, and elsewhere would be put out of business in short order, and those countries returned to civil rule, if USA drug policy was changed to return the price of now illegal drugs to their true market prices.

It is perfectly permissible in the USA for one to be whacked out daily on  legal psychotropic drugs, such as Prozac, Valium, and etc., so long as one pays the doctors and pharmaceutical companies; but one goes to prison for growing marijuana in the back yard.   The policy makes no sense, unless, of course, you one of the folks enriched by it.