WHY LEGALIZING DRUGS LOOKS LIKE A SOLUTION TO SOME IN EL PASO

Murders across Mexico more than doubled last year to more than 5,600.
That's more than the total Americans lost so far in the Iraq war.

Most of those murders have been happening in border towns. More than
1,600 were killed in Juarez, Mexico's fourth-largest city, with a
population of 1.7 million. The bloodbath of unspeakable brutality
includes kidnappings and decapitated bodies left in public places as a
grisly form of advertising.

"There have already been 20 murders in Juarez this year," Beto
O'Rourke, a member of El Paso's City Council, told me in a telephone
interview this week as President-elect Barack Obama met with Mexico's
President Felipe Calderon Monday. "That doesn't include the
kidnappings and extortions."

The situation is deteriorating so fast that "Mexico is on the edge of
abyss," said retired four-star Gen. Barry McCaffrey, a drug czar under
President Bill Clinton. "It could become a narco-state in the coming
decade," he wrote in a recent report, and the result could be a "surge
of millions of refugees" crossing the U.S. border to escape.

Something drastic needed to be done, O'Rourke, a fourth-generation El
Paso resident, decided. A proposed City Council resolution called for
more federal action on both sides of the border to reduce the flow of
guns and drugs.

But it wasn't strong enough. O'Rourke pushed things further by adding
12 words: "supporting an honest, open, national debate on ending the
prohibition on narcotics." The council passed it unanimously.

Yet even a bid to talk about drug legalization was too much for Mayor
John Cook. He vetoed the bill, at least partly out of concern that
Washington might not take the measure seriously with the drug
legalization line in it.

Nevertheless, the controversy brought what has been rare American
media attention to Mexico's crisis by turning it into radio and cable
TV talk fodder. That's a start.

Calderon faces mounting pressures on his two-year-old campaign against
drug and gun smuggling. The campaign that actually touched off much of
the fighting between the cartels. It has also exposed corruption that
reached the highest levels of his government. Even a member of his
security team has been arrested for allegedly feeding information to
the cartels in exchange for money.

When you step back and take a broad look at Mexico's growing carnage,
it's easy to see why El Paso's city leaders think legalization doesn't
look so bad. Mexico's drug problem is not the drugs. It is the
illegality of the drugs.

Legalization is not the perfect solution. But treating currently
illegal drugs in the way we treat liquor and other legal addictive
substances would provide regulation, tax revenue and funds for
rehabilitation programs. Most satisfying, it would wipe a lot of
smiles off the current drug lords' faces.