Valley Lawmaker: Texas Troopers to Check Southbound Border Traffic

Texas State Rep. Aaron Peña has filed a bill calling on the state police to monitor vehicles traveling toward Mexico.

“If the U.S. is serious about taking out the drug cartels that are causing so much violence and mayhem in Mexico, we can no longer focus solely on stopping illegal drugs coming north. We have to stop the weapons and drug money going south,” Peña, D-Edinburg told the Rio Grande Guardian.

The proposal makes much more sense than most of the other draconian measures foisted to battle the flow of drugs into the United States, such as the building of a network of towers with video cameras accessible online. Checking southbound traffic seems more in line with state functions than mixing drug trafficking with checking unauthorized immigration, which is clearly a federal function.

Still, Peña couldn’t pass up the opportunity to hop on the blame-the-feds bandwagon. “We have to have more engagement with Mexico. We have to get to the fundamental causes. Our federal government is just doing a bad job,” he said.

Clearly, drugs have wreaked havoc on Mexico that has destabilized much of its northern parts. There are, however, two sides to the economic formula that has brought the mayhem to our southern neighbor. Were there not a great demand for illicit drugs, the lucrative trade of supplying them would not exist. The profit margins created by drugs would not exist if Americans would simply stop using them, which isn’t likely. A more reasonable alternative would be to decriminalize small quantities of the most popular drugs as other states are now doing, and tax them steeply.

Isn’t that how we brought alcohol-related gangsterism under control after we repealed Prohibition?