By Paul Lazaro

Staff Writer, ‘11

Mexican drug cartels strike in Houston, TX -(photo courtesy of dentonrc.com)

A recent government report lists Mexico as a nation ripe for collapse; our southern neighbor’s knees are buckling under the weight of fighting drug cartels. Worse yet, the violence has begun spilling into the Southern United States. It seems like every day the nightly news carries a story about Americans living and dying between the crosshairs of warring factions. To win the “War on Drugs” and finally bring order, our government must realize that their chosen tactics are both short-sighted and ineffective.

First, conservative “intellectual” commentators like Sean Hannity and Mark Levin propose that we can win the “War on Drugs” by building a border fence to prevent border crossings. This band-aid approach has the benefit of seeming completely obvious while being largely ineffective.  The root of the problem has and will always be American demand. When Americans stop buying illegal drugs, the cartels will leave the Southwest United States for good.

Of course, we could go ahead with that fence idea.  How hard can it be to install 1,969 miles of fencing on uneven terrain with thousands of immigrants and highly equipped drug dealers spending all their time trying to knock it down?  Surely, the U.S. will have no trouble raising the billions needed to erect and maintain the physical blockage of our nearly 2,000 mile border.  The fence will probably do the opposite of what it is intended to and increase drug related violence.

How?  Because making it more difficult to traffic drugs, decreasing the supply while the U.S. demand stays constant, will push the prices up. Higher prices means higher rewards for drug cartels, giving them a couple of million more reasons to aggressively engage the competition.  Maybe the fence is not such a good idea.

Others have proposed continuing the Mérida initiative, a multi-billion dollar plan in which the United States provides Mexico with munitions and other things that “go boom.” Again, however, this fails to address the root issue behind drug violence and will probably encourage more bloodshed. Considering that the Mexican police are renowned for their corruption, providing them with heavy munitions means that much of it will end up on the black markets where the cartels love to shop. Just how many billions of dollars are American taxpayers willing to fork over before getting even the most basic results, like keeping drugs out of American prisons!

There is only one legitimate solution to Mexico’s and the United States’ cartel problem: the free market. By legalizing drugs, our government could engineer an overnight saturation of the market, making drugs less expensive. This will make drug running less profitable, decreasing illegal immigration.  With lower stakes, it would also become inefficient for the Cartels to continue buying, maintaining and using their huge arsenals, taking violence out of the center of economic competition.  Drug consumers could then rely on American companies to manufacture their dope commercially, creating revenue for the government through taxes, employment opportunities and giving them a greater degree of quality control.  Legalizing drugs only poses on major problem that I can see:  long lines at White Castles and Taco Bells.