Time to admit we've lost the drug war

If you thought the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan were going badly, you haven’t been paying attention to the other war we’re losing – the drug war.

Billions of dollars are flowing from middle class Americans to fund drug cartels and terrorist organizations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Mexico. Guns and money from the USA are used to subvert, bribe and terrorize government officials and ordinary citizens.

This week the State Department had to caution U.S. college students about the dangers of spring break travel in Mexico. Today there was this in the New York Times:

With Force, Mexican Drug Cartels Get Their Way
By MARC LACEY
CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico — Mayor José Reyes Ferriz is supposed to be the one to hire and fire the police chief in this gritty border city that is at the center of Mexico’s drug war. It turns out, though, that real life in Ciudad Juárez does not follow the municipal code.

It was drug traffickers who decided that Chief Roberto Orduña Cruz, a retired army major who had been on the job since May, should go. To make clear their insistence, they vowed to kill a police officer every 48 hours until he resigned.

They first killed Mr. Orduña’s deputy, Operations Director Sacramento Pérez Serrano, together with three of his men. Then another police officer and a prison guard turned up dead. As the body count grew, Mr. Orduña eventually did as the traffickers had demanded, resigning his post on Feb. 20 and fleeing the city.

Replacing Mr. Orduña will also fall outside the mayor’s purview, although this time the criminals will not have a say. With Ciudad Juárez and the surrounding state of Chihuahua under siege by heavily armed drug lords, the federal government last week ordered the deployment of 5,000 soldiers to take over the Juárez Police Department. With the embattled mayor’s full support, the country’s defense secretary will pick the next chief.

Chihuahua, which already has about 2,500 soldiers and federal police on patrol, had almost half the 6,000 drug-related killings in all of Mexico in 2008 and is on pace for an even bloodier 2009. Juárez’s strategic location at the busy El Paso border crossing and its large population of local drug users have prompted a fierce battle among rival cartels for control of the city.

The solution is not more guns and greater militarization of Mexico and the U.S. We’ve tried that and it doesn’t work. The solution is to cut off the supply of money at the source by legalizing and regulating recreational drugs. The cartels would deflate like tired balloons. Terrorists wouldn’t be able to afford airline tickets. We would be able to deal with drug problems within a rational healthcare system, not as only a criminal problem.

When set against the background of a collapsing government on our borders, the unproven assumption that more people might use drugs (so what?) is pretty flimsy. It’s time to solve this problem before terrorists figure out that we have a great big open sore on our southern border just waiting for them to take over.