FACING TWO DRUG FACTS A GOOD FIRST STEP

WASHINGTON ­ It's an indictment of our fact-averse political culture
that a statement of the blindingly obvious could sound so revolutionary.

Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade,"
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told reporters on her plane
Wednesday as she flew to Mexico for an official visit. "Our inability
to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border …
causes the deaths of police, of soldiers and civilians."

Amazingly, U.S. officials have avoided facing these facts for
decades. This is not just an intellectual blind spot but a moral
failure, one that has had horrific consequences for Mexico, Colombia,
Peru, Bolivia and other Latin American and Caribbean nations.

Clinton deserves high praise for acknowledging that the United States
bears "shared responsibility" for the drug-fueled violence sweeping
Mexico, which has claimed more than 7,000 lives since the beginning
of 2008. But that means we will also share responsibility for the
next 7,000 killings as well.

Our long-running "war on drugs," focusing on the supply side of the
equation, has been an utter disaster. Domestically, we've locked up
hundreds of thousands of street-level dealers, some of whom genuinely
deserve to be in prison and some of whom don't. It made no difference.

According to a 2007 University of Michigan study, 84 percent of high
school seniors nationwide said they could obtain marijuana "fairly
easily" or "very easily." The figure for amphetamines was 50 percent;
for cocaine, 47 percent; for heroin, 30 percent.

At the same time, we've persisted in a Sisyphean attempt to cut off
the drug supply at or near the source. When I was The Washington
Post's correspondent in South America, I once took a nerve-racking
helicopter ride to visit a U.S.-funded military base in the Upper
Huallaga Valley of Peru.

It was the place where most of the country's coca ­ the plant from
which cocaine is processed ­ was being grown, and the valley was
crawling with Maoist guerrillas who funded their insurgency with
money they extorted from the coca growers and traffickers.

Eventually, the coca business was eliminated in the Upper Huallaga.
But now it's flourishing in other parts of Peru, and last year
authorities there seized a record 30 tons of cocaine ­ meaning, by
rule of thumb, that at least 10 times that much was probably produced
and shipped.

In Colombia, I saw how the huge, brutally violent Medellin and Cali
cocaine cartels threatened to turn the country into the world's first
"narco-state." The Colombian government, again with U.S. assistance,
managed to pulverize these sprawling criminal organizations into
smaller units, but the business continues to thrive ­ and to provide
most of the cocaine that finds its way to the American market.

Last year, Colombian authorities seized 119 tons of cocaine. Money
from the drug trade sustains the longest-running leftist insurgency
in the hemisphere. Ever inventive, the Colombian traffickers have
gone so far as to build their own miniature submarines to smuggle
illicit cargo into the United States.

And now Mexico has become the focal point of the drug trade, with its
cartels blasting their way to dominance in the business of bringing
marijuana, methamphetamine, cocaine and other drugs to the American
market. Violence among drug gangs, not just along the border but
throughout the country, has reached crisis levels. The government's
strategy is to break up the big cartels, as the Colombians did. But
even if authorities succeed, the industry will live on.

In the case of Mexico, there's a complicating factor: This is a
two-way problem. While drugs are being moved north across the border,
powerful assault weapons ­ purchased in the United States ­ are being
moved south to arm the cartels' foot soldiers. Clinton's statement
about "shared responsibility" recognizes that if we expect Mexico to
do something about the flow of drugs, we're obliged to do something
about the counterflow of guns.

First, though, let's be honest with ourselves. This whole disruptive,
destabilizing enterprise has one purpose, which is to supply the U.S.
market with illegal drugs. As long as the demand exists,
entrepreneurs will find a way to meet it. The obvious demand-side
solution ­ legalization ­ would do more harm than good with some
drugs, but maybe not with others.

We need to examine all options. It's time to put everything on the
table, because all we've accomplished so far is to bring the terrible
violence of the drug trade ever closer to home.