- Hunting El Puma, The McAllen Monitor
- Mexico, US step up drug war cooperation, The Christian Science Monitor
- Mexico says crackdown is pressuring cartels, The Houston Chronicle
- Mexico's Narco-Insurgency, Time Magazine
- Arrests, slayings underscore Mexico's drug crisis, The Washington Post
- Seized cash likely drug related, The El Paso Times
- Chertoff quote to 'grow up' way off base, The El Paso Times
- Fear grows with violence in Peru's cocaine trade, Reuters
- For sale to the highest bidder: A little bit of a drug lord's empire, The Guardian (UK)
Monday, January 28, 2008
Lots of MSM coverage of multinational drug cartels
Since I've been posting a great deal recently on the Mexican border wars and multinational drug cartel activity, I wanted to point readers to some related recent MSM coverage:
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2 comments:
How do we commission a study on the effect that drug legalization would have on Mexico, South America etc?
Has anyone done this? It seems a no brainer. Political instability, corruption, murder, are all externalities of Prohibition.
We can put drug cartels out of business for good only if we allow legitimate companies to compete in these markets. In our current political landscape that is seen as a "radical" "fringe" idea.
Given the recent headlines and the certainty of the same headlines in the future, isn't Prohibition a "fringe" idea?
Mr. Guest, to answer your question, yes, it is a 'fringe' idea. Unfortunately, it's a fringe idea that was allowed to gain traction early in the last century partly thanks to unreasonable fears and hatreds of some Americans about their fellow citizens. The rest, as they say, is history.
Government policies carry inertia. And inertia can be deadly at times, especially when a policy has caused more damage than the behavior it was supposed to curtail. You'd think it would be self-evident to any who take the time to research the War on Drugs just how true that is. Any thought at all would lead to the determination that the DrugWar is enriching everyone but its' intended beneficiaries, namely, the citizens who foot the bill for it.
But when one class of said beneficiaries happens to be the very people who've taken on the charge of conducting this 'war' then you really have problems.
In the ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus, some poor slob was condemned to roll a boulder up a mountain all day only to have it roll back down to the base of the mountain again, and have to start all over the next day...and do that for eternity.
But what if Sisyphus was being paid to do that? That's our DrugWarriors in the DrugWar: paid to do a job that will never end so long as drug prohibition continues to be the source of their salaries. When you've got an entire corps of Sisypheans, replete with lobbyists demanding more taxpayer-purchased mountains and boulders, well, you see where this leads.
There's always been a sick symbiotic relationship between the narcos and the drug prohibitionists: both need each other to survive. They truly are two sides of the same coin. But just as the narcos need the drug laws to make their wares insanely profitable, the drug prohibitionists are dependent upon taxpayer's dollars to continue operation. And those are going to be in short supply thanks to the ever-tightening financial squeeze this country is undergoing, thanks to the wars in Iraq and A-stan. Some hard decisions will have to be made, and made soon, if this country is to avoid a 1929 style calamity.
The National Debt is greater than it has ever been before. Uncle Sam's creditors, who've been taking up the slack caused by a shrinking industrial base (which has led to more people being out of work and not being able to pay taxes) will no longer idly sit by and watch their 'investments' being p****d away and will demand the US tighten its' belt.
The Budget will have to be reduced, and soon; portions of it will have to be re-allocated to cover what will happen when millions more lose their jobs and need what's left of the tattered social safety net (meaning unemployment insurance). Where will the money to run the DrugWar come from, then? Certainly not from any trees in your neighborhood, that's for sure...
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