TIME: Legalize Marijuana and Other Ways U.S.-Mexico Can Win Drug War

[kpete]

Legalize Marijuana and Other Ways U.S.-Mexico Can Win Drug War

By Tim PadgettMay 03, 2013

There was a lot of drug-war hand-wringing in the U.S. leading up to President Barack Obama’s visit to Mexico this week. That’s because Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto is in change-the-conversation mode: he wants the world, especially Washington, to focus less on his country’s awful drug violence—some 60,000 narco-related murders in the past seven years, with little sign of abating—and more on its robust economic potential. The fear in some Washington circles is that Peña Nieto and his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which in its dictatorial 20th-century heyday was every drug lord’s cuate, or best buddy, is putting the fight against Mexico’s vicious cartels on the back burner.


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If I were Obama, and if I were truly interested in the Mexican drug war’s long-term success, I’d be focused less on Peña Nieto’s interdiction scorecard at the moment and more on the Mexican Senate’s roll call Tuesday night. And I’d hope like hell that it really is the first installment of the Mexican elite’s own, long overdue investment in rule of law.

As for what happened on election day last fall in the U.S., if I were Peña Nieto I’d urge Obama to do on the federal level what the states of Colorado and Washington did: legalize marijuana. (Mexico should do the same, by the way.) That would do two things: First, deprive Mexico’s drug cartels of more than a third of the $30 billion or so they make each year. Second, save the U.S. the estimated $10 billion it wastes every year chasing down a drug that’s no more harmful than alcohol when used in moderation. It can then steer that money to drug-demand reduction efforts like rehab services, which studies show do more to ease the drug plague than conventional supply-side interdiction does.

Let’s focus our cross-border angst on raising Mexican rule of law and reducing American appetite for blow, smack and meth. Because if those efforts fail, all the other drug-war hand-wringing we do is meaningless.



Read more: http://world.time.com/2013/05/03/how-obama-and-pena-nieto-can-win-the-drug-war/#ixzz2SFhZ1WdN

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. I could NOT agree more.

[RKP5637]

2. Often, the US creates more problems than solved, for example, the inane war against marijuana ...

but, keeping marijuana illegal can be very profitable for some, so we muddle along inflicting millions with death, agony and despair, while padding the pockets of others with cash for the stupid war against marijuana and thereby associated profits for some. It's all a game, and a bad one at that ... and ever so stupid.

[theaocp]

3. Obama will kick the can down the road and

actively continue to ignore states' rights. Take it to the bank.

[Fumesucker]

4. The last thing either government wants to do is win the drug war

The US government got a taste of the power that can be provided by prohibiting substances during alcohol Prohibition, it's no accident that the drug war took off right as alcohol Prohibition was ending.