Our Continuing Lost War On Drugs - Never Underestimate The Creativity Of Drug Criminals

With all of the election hoopla, we have not revisited our continuing lost war on drugs for a little while. This hopeless cause has been going on since the Nixon administration and has probably wasted hundreds of billions of dollars without making a serious dent on the addiction some of our fellow citizens have with drugs. The only accomplishment of our lost war on drugs has been to enrich and expand the violent criminal activities of the Mexican drug cartels.

Our latest edition was covered in the following post:

http://www.loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-deaths-carnage-and-stupidity-of.html

What has come to the forefront since this post? Consider the following developments:

1) Along part of our southern border, the Federal government has constructed a 14 foot high fence to keep out drug traffickers and illegal aliens. We have previously reported on how expensive, late, and ineffective this fence effort has been. Part of the reason for the ineffectiveness of the fence is that the Mexican drug cartels are so creative.

An October 31, 2012 Associated Press article was one of the best illustrations of this creativity. Suspected drug cartel smugglers apparently tried to use ramps to drive an SUV over a 14-foot-tall border fence. They had to abandon the plan when the Jeep became stuck on top of the barrier:

Law enforcement personnel could not capture two people on site who retreated back into Mexico. They assumed that the stalled vehicle was initially filled with marijuana bales that were unloaded when the vehicle got stuck on the top of the fence. You cannot make this stuff up, it illustrates how dedicated the drug cartels are to filling the consumer demand that is aggravated by our losing war on drugs strategy.

2) An October 11, 2012 Associated Press article reported on how Mexican drug cartels filling the void in the U.S. drug market, created by the long effort to crack down on American-made methamphetamine. As a result of the Federal government cracking down on the chemicals that were used in the domestic meth production labs, Mexican drug cartels are now flooding U.S. cities with very cheap, very potent meth from Mexican "superlabs."

These super labs now account for as much as 80% of the meth sold in the U.S., according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. And this super lab meth is close to 90% pure, a level that offers users a faster, more intense and longer-lasting high. According to a DEA spokesperson: "These are sophisticated, high-tech operations in Mexico that are operating with extreme precision. They're moving it out the door as fast as they can manufacture it."

This is a classic example of how wrong headed our war on drugs is. The Federal government never attacked the root causes of our problem, i.e. some Americans, for whatever reason, like to get high. The “war” strategy attacked the supply side of the equation, not the demand side. So while we spent billions of dollars and untold resources shutting down small domestic producers of meth, the demand was unaffected and was then fulfilled by the drug cartels. We are not better off then prior to the crackdown on domestic manufacturers.

This is illustrated by the fact that DEA seizures and interceptions of Mexican meth has quadrupled over just the past few years, indicating that total drug cartel meth production has probably increased about the same amount. Combine these findings with the additional finding that the Mexican meth is much purer than domestically produced meth and the impact of cracking down is much more pronounced. The “war” strategy has actually made a bad situation far worse.

According to the DEA:

• Increasingly large quantities of Mexican meth are turning up in dozens of American cities, including Dallas, Phoenix, Denver, Chicago, St. Louis and Salt Lake City, indicating a large distribution network.
• The cartel marketing strategy follows a well-established pattern. By simultaneously increasing the purity and cutting the price, the cartels get customers hooked on meth and create a new customer base.
• "They're marketing geniuses," according to a DEA spokesman.

How does this qualify as a winning war on drug strategy?

3) An Associated Press article from October 2, 2012 reported U.S. Federal government sources suspect that Mexican federal police, who fired on a U.S. Embassy vehicle, wounding two CIA officers, were working for organized crime in a targeted assassination attempt. A Mexican government official with knowledge of the incident confirmed that Mexican prosecutors are investigating whether the Beltran Leyva Cartel was behind the Aug. 24 ambush.

Just another victim of our ill-fated “war,” the corruption of Mexican authorities. This strategy has enriched the cartels so much that they can afford to corrupt and pervert the government sources in Mexico responsible for apprehending the very criminals that blackmail the authorities with their U.S. drug profits.

4) But the best reason for stopping the insanity of our failed war on drugs is in Portugal. According to an article from July 5, 2011 from the Forbes website, and other sources, ten years after decriminalizing all forms of illegal drugs and treating drug addiction as a medical problem and not a criminal act:

• Drug usage and abuse has not skyrocketing as many had predicted.
• The number of addicts considered “problematic,” people who had repeatedly use hard drugs along with intravenous users, had fallen by 50% since the early 1990s, from about 100,000 citizens to about 40,000 today.
• Treating 40,000 drug abusers is far cheaper than imprisoning and holding 100,000 abusers, according to the article.
• Drug abusers are more likely to seek treatment now than before since the risk of being branded a criminal and locked up in prison is far less under the decriminalization laws, providing the users and abusers a much better shot of getting off the drugs.

Gee, certainly sounds like a much saner approach to the problem than the approach we have used over the past four decades or so.

So what have learned today:

• Our lost war on drugs has largely not affected the demand side of the problem.
• As long as there is demand for illegal drugs, there will be criminal elements willing to fill that demand and will use whatever creative means necessary to profitably do so, even if it means dring SUVs over 14 foot walls.
• By driving up the cost of illegal drug running, we also drive up the amount of profits that the cartels earn, allowing them to corrupt much of the law enforcement and judicial components of the Mexican government.
• Pivoting from a war strategy to a treatment strategy has proven successful elsewhere and is less expensive, less oppressive to personal freedom, and more humane.

Simple lessons that even simple politicians should be able to understand…but do not.

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