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Our addiction fuels the Mexican drug war
Heath Haussamen
Unlike many wars, there’s nothing ideological about the drug war that has consumed Mexico and threatens the United States. The motive behind the fighting is money.
Rival cartels are fighting with each other for control of supply routes into the United States, and they’re battling the Mexican government for control of the nation.
With Ciudad Juárez recording its 3,000th murder of the year Tuesday – making 2010 the deadliest on record in the border city – it’s important to remember that the cause of the drug war is simple economics.
We – the United States – create the demand for the product. The cartels simply slide into the role of supplying it.
“Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in 2009 in Mexico City.
America has a ravenous appetite for drugs, legal and illegal. There’s a drug store on nearly every corner. When we have a problem, we generally don’t think about exercise, or eating better. We want to pop a pill and get on with things.
We’re stretched thin. We’re stressed. We pump ourselves full of caffeine and sugar to keep functioning. We relax with alcohol. And many supplement both with other, illegal drugs.
Even former Gov. Gary Johnson, a likely 2012 presidential candidate, admitted recently to illegally using marijuana for medicinal purposes from 2005-2008.
Accepting others’ suffering to get what we want
So, in the name of capitalism, Mexico has descended into war, and, in some regions, into anarchy. It’s all about who can get rich off the United States’ addiction to drugs.
To get what we want, we as Americans accept so much suffering by others. Because of our society’s thirst for oil, we tolerate atrocious human rights abuses all over the world. With our hunger for diamonds, we help fund conflict and death in Africa.
Similarly, Those who use illegal drugs should remember that there’s a reasonable chance someone died so they could smoke their weed.
The drug war is getting worse. In addition to this being the bloodiest year in the history of Juárez, there are reports that Mexican cartels are opening bases in Guatemala to evade Mexican authorities, and in Costa Rica because they ship drugs from there to the United States. And, as I’ve already written, cartels operate all across the United States.
With candidates for office in this year’s Mexican elections being killed, threatened and intimidated, you have to assume that cartels are increasingly asserting influence in the Mexican government. Mexico is becoming a narco-state.
Economics dictate action
A narco-state. On the southern border of the United States.
How long before the cartels start asserting more influence in the United States to ensure supply routes stay open? Is it already happening?
Enforcement and border security are important topics to discuss, but they alone won’t solve the problem for the same reason that building a 10-foot wall won’t stop illegal border crossing. It will simply motivate people to build 11-foot ladders. Economics dictate action.
We must somehow deal with the issues of supply and demand.
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@ Michael L Hays
This is where you and I take divergent paths. I am always looking for less federal intervention and more states’ rights, and you are not as sensitive to federal control as I am. Thomas Jefferson was, and Ron Paul is today. I think you lean toward a Statist solution to our problems. I don’t. Actually, I think we agree on a lot of problems in need of being addressed in our society, but you look to the government for the solution. I look to the free market. Michael, the government is big enough and has not proved to be a very efficient problem solver. Agree?
Heath, you’ve made no public comments about any plans for a news service that would attract an audience interested in social concerns other those told under a banner that declares politics to be the subject and your view of politics to be a preferred perspective.
Your three replies addressed particularly to my screen name indicates that we already are talking. Our talk would be more productive if you would address public concerns I raised in my posts, beyond defense and promotion of your ego as represented by your online brand. (i.e. “you’re making another unsubstantiated statement about me,” “I never said..” “I’m not OK with…” “you make assumptions about me”) Regardless what might be the character of your day-to-day personality, such an ego-centric, identity-oriented approach to news production represents a narcissistic approach to problem solving that would be best replaced by an approach that considers a broad range of relevant facts, causes and effects.
Thomas,
I agree with your idea about decriminalizing drugs. Criminalizing instead of regulating and taxing a “luxury good” creates crime and then bureaucracies to fight it. However, I disagree that eliminating the federal role, including the DEA, in favor of state law, is appropriate. Cross-border issues, both between countries and between states, require a federal role. For example, if AZ had a lax law and UT had tough law, AZ might become a conduit of drugs into UT.
Tribunals, you’re making another unsubstantiated statement about me when you write “one-man-band bloggers such as you who have no plans for constructing a news service that will outlast their lifespan and provide more service than they are able to individually conceive, construct and deliver.”
When you stop making assumptions about me that are based on nothing more than your own biases, maybe we can talk.
Heath, you are constructing straw-man arguments to reply with yet another “I never said” to my analysis of the implications of what you wrote. You cited occasions in which you crossed swords with the new governor. I said evidence of such push and pull does not effectively rebut my argument that you appear to be catering to a source.
Let’s talk about what you really never said. It’s the holiday season. Regardless the fact that you don’t know available facts about retail spending in various localities in the state even though the facts are available in the trickle of electronic public information released by the state, your tome about addiction does not address the role of addictive behavior in seasonal consumer habits, or the role of media in promoting addictive behaviors through consumerism.
And in response to my reply that your occasionally joining a major newspapers bandwagon campaign for a particular record that might not even be legally classified as a public record you never said one word about your absolute failure to address the New Mexico Electronic Records Censorship Act — NMS 14-3-15 — that makes it a crime to publish records obtained in electronic formats even though that statute stipulates that those are in fact public records and must be provided at a cost of up to $1 a page in paper format – where they are useless for electronic analysis.
And you said nothing about my concerns related to a trend toward narcissistic branding in the news industry, fueled by one-man-band bloggers such as you who have no plans for constructing a news service that will outlast their lifespan and provide more service than they are able to individually conceive, construct and deliver.
Again, Tribunals, you’re making a leap that isn’t there. I never said readers are naive or that journalists don’t cater to sources. Certainly, some, and maybe many, do that. I work to avoid doing that. The fact that I was blacklisted by the outgoing governor’s office for not doing what they wanted should be evidence of that.
I have had many interviews with the incoming governor in the past and I see no reason to believe I couldn’t get another simply by asking. Why would I need to write a column she likes in order to get an interview with her? I don’t play that game.
You’re welcome to believe what you want. But I have explained, on this site, on the radio, and in other venues, many times over the last five years, why I went out on my own instead of continuing to work for newspapers – and one of the main reasons was cozy relationships between newspapers and those they have to cover. I’m not OK with that.
Heath, you play us readers as exceptionally naive to suggest that we would consider push and pull between journalists and their sources to be evidence that journalists don’t cater to their sources, and that you are not doing so in this instance.
Academic literature abounds about the ways journalists cater to sources. Some push and pull between journalists and sources does not obscure the cozy relationship. A quick jab about transparency in which you join a bandwagon of one media outlet in this state that has perhaps done more than any other to narrowly frame the discussion of transparency does not suggest you’re burning bridges with the new governor.
Your effort to cozy up with a newspaper that races to print with claims that public officials refused to meet their occasional novel inquiry while that same company consistently fails to assert our collective right to inspect public records by way of enforcing those rights in court, or even routinely obtaining and inspecting records such as state payroll records might suggest you are jockeying for a freelance role in a paying outlet after the collapse last month of another of the New Mexican’s putative progressive liberal partners.
In your entire opus as owner of an online politics publication branded around your byline and an image of your face, you’ve made no mention of systematic and statutory interference with public access to records one would think a digital media outlet would be most concerned. You’ve not once mentioned that the Foundation for Open Government has data showing New Mexico has the most restrictive law in the nation with regard to electronic public records. You’re reports are styled primarily to repeat the name of politicians who, by the way, pay to advertise on your site and who we must suspect purchase their advertising directly from you.
Which gets back to the topic of addiction. If you are composing something you couldn’t quite say a few days ago, we’re all ears. Hopefully, it will inform concerns about why politics has become a cult of personalities perpetuated by online media that fails to appeal to broad interests beyond politics in such a way as to involve a broad cross section of the public in public policy discussion. Hopefully it will address why politics caters to addictive behaviors by way of highly emotional campaigns fueled by individuals seeking to feed an ever-increasing need for personal recognition i.e. dependence on a stimulus in a way that requires an ever-increasing supply of that stimulous to provide satisfaction.
And maybe you will get all introspective and discuss why you went solo as the publisher, editor, writer and ad salesman of your own Web site rather than working with other concerned professionals to address serious transparency concerns in an era when traditional paper-centric media outlets found themselves lacking technological capacity to keep up with and report on government activities conducted primarily by way of electronic records.
Amen Ben,
The “War on Drugs” might be better labeled “The war on Americans personal freedoms, with the added benifit of creating new jobs for Thieves and Smugglers”. But “War on Drugs” sounds so much nicer to the ears and doesn’t bring up any morality issues.
Unmanned Drone Crashes in Backyard of El Paso Home
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/12/16/929599/-Unmanned-Drone-Crashes-in-Backyard-of-El-Paso-Home-(with-several-updates-from-esteemed-commenters)
http://www.currentargus.com/ci_16875462
scary read the comments
new_direction:
Childish cutesy attempts at demeaning nicknames aside, did you forget the part where the “smart alec student” in question turned out to be correct about the professor’s grandfather’s work? I’m just pointing out that your analogy, like your earlier statement, is actually support for your opposition.
Wow. qofdisks, I never equated the war on drugs with the war on terror. I said the cartels are as big a threat in the United States as terrorism. That’s all. And they are.
And Tribunals, you make assumptions about me you shouldn’t. You might be surprised when you read the column I’m working on about potential steps to combat this problem. It should run early next week.
If I was writing things based on wanting an interview with the new governor, I certainly would not have recently written that she isn’t being transparent (http://www.nmpolitics.net/index/2010/12/where-is-martinez%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%98new-level-of-transparency%E2%80%99/) or that she is breaking a campaign promise (http://www.nmpolitics.net/index/2010/12/martinez-admits-shift-away-from-campaign-pledge/).
Come on, people.
“It seems a thinly veiled attempt to ideologically align himself for access to the new governor when she changes from her job as a county drug warrior to take the seat as the state’s top gun in a couple of weeks.”
Since Tribunals points out that this may be a butt kissing session (lambe scon) on Heath’s part, it is really disturbing that Heath makes a pointed effort to equate the cartels with terrorists. We all know where that leads judging from the Bush response to 911. I mean, in the name of the “War on Terror” the Bush administration justified violation of the Geneva Convention on matters of human rights (torture?). A huge domestic surveillance program was started and the smell of fear was in the air. The Bush used that fear to justify any violation of our American held principles including gutting our 4th amendment. By conflating the War on Terror with the War on Drugs, there is no end to the fear generated. There is nothing sacred including American Constitutional Rights. You should be ashamed of yourself, Heath. What’s next?
Is Susanna going to start disappearing people like me who express an opinion on this very web-site? Anyone of the opinion that drugs should be legal and that the Drug War is a failure and that we can’t afford it anymore is suddenly an enemy of the state?
Ick Phoenix:
Every time I read your posts, you remind of that smart-alec student in Young Frankenstein that sits at the front of the class to dispute or attempt to correct everything the professor says.
There are plenty of Constitutional issues with the ever-failing war on drugs, from conversion of property to denial of due process to issues of double jeopardy – to say nothing of the long-term societal and economic damages of it. However, a bizarre all-expansive definition of the Tenth Amendment that has never been upheld by a single federal court since the end of the Civil War – particularly one that necessitates ignorance of large swaths of Article Two and the Fourteenth Amendment – is not one of those issues.
Ours is a federal republic. The federal government has only the powers granted to it in the Constitution.
The single most important law that Congress must repeal is the Controlled Substances Act of 1970.
That law is probably the most far-reaching federal statute in American history, since it asserts federal jurisdiction over every drug offense in the US. As previously noted, the federal government can exercise only the powers that have been delegated it. The Tenth Amendment reserves all other powers to the states or to the people.
The Controlled Substance Act is a failed attempt at prohibition. Remember the last failed attempt at prohibition (alcohol)? In 1933, a new Congress acknowledged the failure of alcohol prohibition and sent the Twenty-First Amendment to the states. That’s why you still have dry counties in the US seventy-seven years later. The states, each county even, decided for themselves as to its alcohol laws. Congress recognized that Prohibition had failed to stop drinking and had increased prison populations and violent crime. Today, drug enforcement costs $20 billion a year in federal spending alone. Fifty percent of the federal prison population consists of drug offenders. The US is the most incarcerated country in the world with a prison population that tops two million.
new_direction_2010:
In disjointedly referring to a “commerce clause/state’s rights situation” in your agreement with Mr. Molitor, you’re actually providing the Constitutional reason that he’s incorrect. If you’re all finished losing the Civil War, can we please get back to the current century? Or at least get to a position where we have a basic understanding of what it actually was that the “Founders envisioned” before invoking the fictional versions of them that conservatives are so obsessed with?
Well put, Mr. Molitor. I agree with your comment wholeheartedly. Sounds like a commerce clause/state’s rights situation exactly as confronted by our forefathers some 230 years ago, but this time with narcotics.
Nicholas says it correctly – Heath comes off here like a “smug ignoramus with no knowledge of what (he is) discussing.”
It seems a thinly veiled attempt to ideologically align himself for access to the new governor when she changes from her job as a county drug warrior to take the seat as the state’s top gun in a couple of weeks.
First, Heath demonstrates no knowledge of addiction, beyond typically naive insinuations that addiction comprises either moral failure or a readily treatable medical syndrome. Let me school you. Addiction, in as much as there is such a thing and in as much as it is medically described as harmful habituation with aspects of dependence and increasing tolerance for the habitual behavior, involves up-regulation of neurotransmitters associated with pleasure.
Despite attempts among addiction specialists, efforts to define addiction more narrowly and to consider one habit more addictive than another consistently fail logical tests. We as a society are increasingly addicted to pleasure-causing stimulus and it has little to do with legally proscribed psychotropics. Somewhere along the way, we embraced behaviors that required increasing levels of involvement to achieve similar levels of satisfaction. We variously describe the core focal points of our addictive epidemic as social success, intellectual accomplishment, academic performance, industrial progress, human creative potential and financial achievement.
Somewhere along the way, we deviated from social patterns that offered intrinsic satisfaction, in favor of social organizations that required constant struggle to get ahead. And our pleasure networks — our dopaminergic pathways — required ever more stimulation by various behaviors from scholastic performance to electronic entertainment to financial accumulation. We basically needed ever more physical and social artifacts to realize the same level of satisfaction as we previously realized with fewer. It’s called tolerance and it’s a fundamental indicator of addictive behavior.
No, demand for psychotropics legislated out of acceptance within the rule of law is not the problem. As other commentators have pointed out in their replies, use of the rule of law to supply an ever-increasing perception that solutions for uncomfortable social relationships by way of ever-increasing penalties for those who continue to defy the ever-more-demanding rule of law is the real addiction. It’s not just the “drug war” that betrays this widespread social pathology. The recent effort to require each citizen to purchase health insurance betrays an ever-increasing need to regulate away dissatisfaction expressed in our collective dialogue. Demands that each citizen annually prepares multiple documents attesting to their compliance with the state comprise further evidence of pathological attachment to a solution that will never be enough.
There are solutions. The solutions are to be found in behaviors that are fundamentally satisfying without requiring ever more of the same behavior to achieve the same level of satisfaction. For the most part, these behaviors are found in behaviors that involve relationships with species other than homo-sapiens. They involve getting to know our neighbors — the animals, plants and elements with which we share life.
Yes, our addiction is the problem. Our addiction to our selves and to our kind is the problem. Nice picture, Heath. But your opinion in this instance rides on lousy logic informed by the most unoriginal repetition of crowd mentality. I bet it gets you an interview with the new governor all the same.
Our addiction does fuel narcotrafficking and rival cartels and their resultant crime. No different than our thirst for alcohol fueled Al Capone in Chicago; both are spontaneous markets for desired products.
Congress should repeal the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, shut down the DEA, and let the states set their own policies with regard to currently illegal drugs. This would restore authority to the states, as the Founders envisioned. It would save taxpayers’ money. And it would give the states the power to experiment with drug policies and perhaps devise more successful rules.
Repeal of prohibition would take the astronomical profits out of the drug business and destroy the drug kingpins who terrorize our cities.
Well Ben, let me put it this way, do you really think ANY politician (other than the nutty Gary Johnson) would campaign and run on a platform of legalizing all drugs and having a happy time and happy hour free for all in America so we can see what happens? Is that a societal experiment you think a majority of voters would endorse? Please be rational and practical, that ain’t gonna happen, and for very good reasons in my opinion.
re: Dr. J.
The criminal justice system has to process all of those drug offenders, meaning that resources that could be used to rehabilitate other offenders are diverted. The resulting overcrowded prisons have the opposite effect, criminalizing rather than rehabilitating the inmates. (It’s also a human rights nightmare.) We aren’t releasing criminals since the behavior would be decriminalized: instead of “crack addicts” and “dealers” we would talk in terms similar to “alcoholics” and “the liquor section at Albertsons.” I assume you do not cast a jaundiced eye at those wicked purveyors of Pabst Blue Ribbon.
Rehabilitation currently works imperfectly because we are spending money on people who should not be in prison, meaning we have less money to process and rehabilitate real criminals. This is because its not just prisons that are overcrowded. It’s the court system, the probation system, the health care system, and so on, all the way down. A lot of crime is gang-related, so cutting the legs out from under the gangs has benefits beyond just the drug-related crimes.
The benefits in reducing the militarization of our police force that the war on drugs has necessitated is also not to be understated. Reducing public corruption that results from all the money involved in the war on drugs is yet another benefit.
As far as education, I am not proposing that we educate people into using fewer drugs (although that is quite doable, as the decline in smoking rates illustrates), but rather that our education system is hurt when drug-smuggling-related crime spills over into schools. Furthermore, the poorest urban areas are for a variety of reasons most prone to becoming entangled in the drug trade, meaning the children who most need a supportive home life are most likely to have a parent in prison or dead because of the war on drugs. There’s no way that situation is superior to just making the drugs legal.
Ending the war on drugs would comprehensively be a positive thing in the United States. It is the single best domestic policy for reasons ranging from liberty to prison reform to human rights to national security. It won’t, as you fear it might, unleash an epidemic of drug use. Examination of the prohibition era suggests that prohibition actually promotes drug use. Ending the war on drugs could have the counterintuitive effect of reducing drug use. And if it didn’t, quite frankly, who cares? If people commit crimes as a result of using drugs, charge them with that. But don’t punish law-abiding citizens by banning the drug, not unless you plan to ban alcoohol because some wino breaks into a video store.
I am okay with living in a free society in which people are free to use drugs, with all the ups and downs that liberty entails. Personally, I use beer.
I hope you are not suggesting that Americans give up their drugs as a solution Heath. That would be a “pipe dream”. It is human nature to be driven to get high as it is to eat and have sex. This is true of all the species on the planet. In greater or lesser degree, all have the drive to achieve a pleasurable alternative state of mind.
I think that drugs could be used moderately with restraint just as most people that drink are not alcoholics.
As for appealing to the peoples’ conscious, forget about that. Woman wear/LOVE their diamonds. People will not even consider giving up their cell phones albeit made with conflict minerals. I was in the candy isle at the store and when I mentioned that another good reason to give up gratuitous chocolate was that the sugar is produced using the cruelest child labor. Her reply was that the children were lucky to have a job as she stood next to her own beautiful and spoiled 11 year old son. We eat tormented cafo meat and battery chicken in our SUVs. Just saying no to drugs would be as ineffectual as abstinence only has proven to be for avoiding STDs and pregnancy. Prohibition and appeals to consciousness is a proven failure when put up against human nature.
Legalization would make drugs interchangeable with money instead of guns. That would be a good start. Harm reduction tactics instead of the never ending War on Drugs would have the biggest payoff for stabilizing the border and the narco-states.
I’m sorry Heath, but you come off like a smug ignoramus with no knowledge of what you are discussing. Address supply and demand indeed! That’s exactly what’s being addressed by the cartels! And we could avoid funding them by producing our own cannabis, if it was regulated and taxed. Many if not most regions produce some cannabis for local consumption right now, and you would know this if you knew anything about ‘the war on drugs’ Good luck , man, you’re gonna need it to get this writing thing down.
Ben, I don’t see any rational premise for legalizing drugs and just lettng everyone out of jail and never prosecuting drug dealers, addicts, etc.. How will that benefit society as a whole? We may have a few more bucks in our pockets, but too many will just spend that on drugs. And education, rehab, etc. don’t work either. So how do you propose the, in my opinion, impossible task of ” A capitalist approach would recognize the self-interests of all actors and allow those self-interests to interact in a way that is beneficial to society.” The solution is not to end the war on all currently illegal drugs (or I guess legalizing them all), that will accomplish nothing except enabling more addicts on the streets and more crime.
It’s a little unlike ideological capitalism because the drugs over which the Mexican gangs are fighting are illegal. They aren’t shooting themselves so they can take control of shipments of aspirin. This is a bit more like the opposite of capitalism: you can’t ban human nature, as several ideologies that endeavored to do so discovered. A capitalist approach would recognize the self-interests of all actors and allow those self-interests to interact in a way that is beneficial to society.
The solution is to end the war on drugs. It costs us billions and gets us nothing. The secondary effects are worse: it fills our prisons with people who shouldn’t be there, crippling the rehabilitative effect of prison through overcrowding. It breaks up families and engenders generational poverty, making it an education and welfare nightmare as well. It diverts border resources, hitting us on the national security angle. And hey, we don’t get all this bad policy for free: we pay for it, costing us something like thirty billion dollars a year. That’s just the visible costs. The invisible costs (prison, education, welfare, probation, awful rehabilitation, the inherent racism, illegal immigration as a result of Mexico being a hellhole, the federal government obtaining militarized enforcement powers, etc) have got to be much worse. The war on drugs may be the single worse domestic policy in America because of the insidious way in which its effects cascade into disaster.
I’ve never done an illegal drug in my life. I am against ‘em. Heck, I’m even against cigarettes. My drug of choice is beer, because it is the drug of civilization, and caffeine, because it is also the drug of civilization.
End the war on drugs across the board. Regulate, don’t ban.