VIOLENCE BREEDS VIOLENCE. THE ONLY THING DRUG GANGS FEAR IS
LEGALISATION

A Chief Of The Mafia Cruenza, One Of The Biggest Drug Gangs In The
1980s, Was Recorded Expressing His Gratitude For The War On Drugs As
'good For Business'

To many people, the "war on drugs" sounds like a metaphor, like the
"war on poverty". It is not. It is being fought with tanks and
sub-machine guns and hand grenades, funded in part by your taxes, and
it has killed 28,000 people under the current Mexican President alone.
The death toll in Tijuana - one of the front lines of this war - is
now higher than in Baghdad. Yesterday, another pile of 72 mutilated
corpses was found near San Fernando - an event that no longer shocks
the country.

Mexico today is a place where the severed heads of police officers are
found week after week, pinned to bloody notes that tell their
colleagues: "This is how you learn respect". It is a place where hand
grenades are tossed into crowds to intimidate the public into shutting
up. It is the state the US Joint Chiefs of Staff say is most likely,
after Pakistan, to suffer "a rapid and sudden collapse". Related articles

* Mexico: bleeding to death in the war on drugs
* Leading article: Mexico's stark reminder of the cost of prohibition
* Search the news archive for more stories

Why? When you criminalise a drug for which there is a large market, it
doesn't disappear. The trade is simply transferred from off-licences,
pharmacists and doctors to armed criminal gangs.

In order to protect their patch and their supply routes, these gangs
tool up - and kill anyone who gets in their way. You can see this any
day on the streets of a poor part of London or Los Angeles, where
teenage gangs stab or shoot each other for control of the 3,000 per
cent profit margins on offer. Now imagine this process taking over an
entire nation, to turn it into a massive production and supply route
for the Western world's drug hunger.

Why Mexico? Why now? In the past decade, the US has spent a fortune
spraying carcinogenic chemicals over Colombia's coca-growing areas, so
the drug trade has simply shifted to Mexico. It's known as the
"balloon effect": press down in one place, and the air rushes to another.

When I was last there in 2006, I saw the drug violence taking off and
warned that the murder rate was going to skyrocket. Since then the
victims have ranged from a pregnant woman washing her car, to a
four-year-old child, to a family in the "wrong" house watching
television, to a group of 14 teenagers having a party. Today, 70 per
cent of Mexicans say they are frightened to go out because of the cartels.

The gangs offer Mexican police and politicians a choice: "Plata o
ploma". Silver, or lead. Take a bribe, or take a bullet. President
Felipe Calderon has been leading a military crackdown on them since
2006 - yet every time he surges the military forward, the gang
violence in an area massively increases.

This might seem like a paradox, but it isn't. If you knock out the
leaders of a drug gang, you don't eradicate demand, or supply. You
simply trigger a fresh war for control of the now-vacant patch. The
violence creates more violence.

This is precisely what happened - to the letter - when the United
States prohibited alcohol. A ban produced a vicious rash of criminal
gangs to meet the popular demand, and they terrorised the population
and bribed the police. Now 1,000 Mexican Al Capones are claiming their
billions and waving their guns.

Like Capone, the drug gangs love the policy of prohibition. Michael
Levine, who had a 30-year career as one of America's most
distinguished federal narcotics agents, penetrated to the very top of
the Mafia Cruenza, one of the biggest drug-dealing gangs in the world
in the 1980s.

Its leaders told him "that not only did they not fear our war on
drugs, they actually counted on it... On one undercover tape-recorded
conversation, a top cartel chief, Jorge Roman, expressed his gratitude
for the drug war, calling it 'a sham put on the American tax-payer'
that was 'actually good for business'."

So there is a growing movement in Mexico to do the one thing these
murderous gangs really fear - take the source of their profits, drugs,
back into the legal economy. It would bankrupt them swiftly, and
entirely. Nobody kills to sell you a glass of Jack Daniels. Nobody
beheads police officers or shoots teenagers to sell you a glass of
Budweiser. And, after legalisation, nobody would do it to sell you a
spliff or a gram of cocaine either. They would be in the hands of
unarmed, regulated, legal businesses, paying taxes to the state, at a
time when we all need large new sources of tax revenue.

The conservative former President, Vicente Fox, has publicly called
for legalisation, and he has been joined by a battery of former
presidents across Latin America - all sober, right-leaning statesmen
who are trying rationally to assess the facts.

Every beheading, grenade attack, and assassination underlines their
point. Calderon's claims in response that legalisation would lead to a
sudden explosion in drug use don't seem to match the facts: Portugal
decriminalised possession of all drugs in 2001, and drug use there has
slightly fallen since.

Yet Mexico is being pressured hard by countries like the US and
Britain - both led by former drug users - to keep on fighting this
war, while any mention of legalisation brings whispered threats of
slashed aid and diplomatic shunning.

Look carefully at that mound of butchered corpses found yesterday.
They are the inevitable and ineluctable product of drug prohibition.
This will keep happening for as long as we pursue this policy. If you
believe the way to deal with the human appetite for intoxication is to
criminalise and militarise, then blood is on your hands.

How many people have to die before we finally make a sober assessment
of reality, and take the drugs trade back from murderous criminal gangs?