THE REAL COST OF WAR ON DRUGS

By now the majority of Calgarians will have heard of the daily
fighting between drug cartels and authorities in Northern Mexican
cities that dot the border with the United States. The devastating
context of this protracted 'war' has been slow to reach us here,
largely because the news media has been slow to see the story as
something other than a Mexican story.

And by Mexican story, I mean a story from Mexico we dismiss or
diminish because it is, well . . . Mexico, a place we love to visit
but whose misery we assume is not our concern, until and unless you
begin to consider the larger story the Mexican border hints at.

In truth, the drug trade causes havoc in every western nation, not
just Mexico, and our sense of Mexico as a lawless, corrupt place
where these kinds of things happen routinely, is to miss the point entirely.

It is time that news organizations started connecting the dots on the
drug trade, and assembling the little bits of information on this
issue into a more coherent and cohesive package, drawing lessons from
this mess, and holding legislators in Canada the U. S. and Canada
accountable for allowing this to continue. Because it is clear that
legislators would rather continue with the fight than face up to its
costs --in both dollar terms, and in the damage to lives.

To set the often-missing context, drug cartels have been operating in
Mexico in one form or other and in a sophisticated way since the
1980s. In the early days, the focus was on the movement of the
product from other countries through Mexico to reach the U. S. The
flow of drug money into Mexico enriched and emboldened the locals,
and the immensely wealthy and powerful cartels that operate on the U.
S. border today are one result of this. The other results are less
obvious but no less concerning. Death dogs cities like Juarez and
others in Mexico. The toll stands at an estimated 7,200 attributed to
drug trade along the border alone in just two years, but the problem
exists throughout the country. On a recent visit to the city of
Colima in west central Mexico, my colleagues at the local university
were talking of the escalation of drug-related violence in their part
of the country, including several message-sending beheadings.
Further, it is folly to limit the discussion of the death toll to
"soldiers" in the trade.

You need to factor in all the people who die from overdoses, or who
live their lives in miserable addiction. Mexicans whose lives have
been disrupted or threatened are now Canada's newest and largest
source of refugee claimants, and you also need to factor in gang
shootings in Calgary, Toronto and Vancouver, and so on.

Calculating the actual cost of the so-called "war" on drugs is
impossible. Calculators don't have enough numbers for that. The
phrase "war on drugs" is attributed to former and disgraced U.S.
president Richard Nixon but it was Ronald Reagan who made it a
popular crusade, authorizing the expenditure of vast sums to beef up
policing agencies both in the U. S. and abroad.

That was 1982. Now, 27 years later, we are no closer to eradicating
drug use than we were then. In fact, by most measures the problem is
worse. The only thing this policy has succeeded in doing is wasting
untold billions in enforcement and encouraging the enemy to defend itself.

Every war needs an enemy, and in this case the enemy has grown from a
series of modestly scaled country-specific gangs into large-scale,
wealthy, well-armed and well-connected international organizations.

Just last week, U. S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said U. S.
policy on drugs has been a failure and Mexico is paying too steep a
price for the war on drugs, especially considering that the U. S. is
the main market.

She then went on to say that the answer is to escalate and get more
money promised during the Bush years into Mexican hands to support
their battle with the cartels.

Meanwhile, the U. S. border service has just announced it will spend
another $184 million right now policing the border.

That money is on top the cost of building the border wall between the
U. S. and Mexico, and the billions and billions the U. S. has spent
fighting these cartels from a distance by providing cash and other
resources to Colombia and Mexico. Meanwhile Mexico (whose population
still lives largely in poverty) is also spending hundreds of millions
monthly it does not have, waging a "war" in its own cities, against a
drug gang 'army' estimated to be almost as large as, and likely
better equipped than, the real Mexican army.

I wouldn't presume to have the ultimate answer to this issue, but I
would suggest that news organizations need come up with more
sophisticated questions to ask of decision-makers. Starting with a
simple one: what alternatives to waging this war might exist? When
former Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo suggested in late February
that perhaps it might be smarter to legalize the use of marijuana the
idea was immediately dismissed by the current Mexican government, and
some U. S. lawmakers.

Zedillo was floating that idea as an example of alternative action
following release of a report he co-authored on the bigger problem.

"If we insist only on a strategy of the criminal pursuit of those who
traffic in drugs," Zedillo has said, "the problem will never be resolved."

Maybe he has a point.

Arguably, if drug production and use was made legal, we could save
billions of dollars, countless lives, make money taxing it, and using
what we earn to educate the public and treat addicts.

It might not reduce the demand, and it might result in other issues,
but it would alter the context dramatically and take the drug trade
away from cartels and gangs.

At the very least, the idea is worth examining in a serious way.
Politicians are too close to law enforcement, too concerned to admit
failure, and too ideologically driven to allow for that any time
soon. News organizations must now stage the debate without the
legislators by giving more credence to Zedillo and others with fresh
ideas about this desperately naive and misguided war that is taking a
tremendous toll on our Mexican friends and partners.