The United States is the largest market for illegal drugs in the world. Yet, the “Drug War” has focused on attacking the supply in Colombia, Mexico, and other parts of Latin America, rather than limiting demand at home, including prevention and drug treatment. The results have been catastrophic: soaring death, destruction, destabilization, and forced migration in the Latin American countries, and mass incarceration, deaths, and violence devastating poor communities in the United States.
The drug trade is the most profitable capitalist enterprise in the Americas, precisely because it is illegal. The “risk” involved means higher profits as it sows death and destruction. As pointed out in the accompanying article, the drug cartels are firmly entrenched within the ruling class in Mexico, and other Latin American countries. What is not as widely acknowledged is the degree of U.S. complicity.
With a profitability rivaling that of most Fortune 500 companies, the drug trade is also firmly enmeshed with the U.S. economy from money laundering, U.S. based distributors, increased funding for police and border patrol departments, prisons, and providing state of the art military hardware for drug interdiction.
The so-called “Drug War” is actually a smokescreen and an excuse. While actually increasing violence and crime, it serves as a means for social control of the masses of workers in both the U.S. and Latin America.
Former Mexican President Vicente Fox was silenced by the U.S. State Dept. when he proposed legalizing drugs in Mexico. This had been done in Holland, with crime and overall drug use declining, and resources directed to drug treatment and prevention instead.
Capitalism, whether in the form of corporations or drug cartels holds no future for us. Let us seek solutions that work for us and not for them.
