Enough With The War On Drugs Already!

Twenty year-old Marisol Marisol Valles García took over as police chief in a small town of Praxedis G. Guerrero on the outskirts of Ciudad Juárez after no one else would last October. She was a mother and a student of criminal justice and just wanted to help her community, as we wrote then. This week, after receiving death threats, she fled to the U.S. with her family and is now seeking asylum.

This comes on the heels of yet another meeting with a U.S. president and a Mexican president who made yet another vow to fight drug violence. Not that I’m old, but when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s we were fighting drugs, when I went to college and everyone discovered marijuana we were fighting drugs, when I worked on the border and violence began to creep into the civilian part of life we were fighting drugs, and now that Felipe Calderón’s six years are almost up, we’re still fighting drugs.

When will enough be enough?

Personally, I don’t like drugs nor do I feel the need to use them; caffeine, alcohol and tobacco are just enough temptation for me to resist, thank you. But when I think about how many billions — shoot over the decades we’re probably talking in the trillions — of dollars of licit and illicit monies this country has spent “fighting drugs,” it makes me sad. How many college educations could we have funded with that money? How many veterans could have received treatment? What about high speed rail or Internet infrastructure?

Isn’t it time to legalize, tax and legislate drugs already?

The point, of course, is that our priorities in this country are all wrong. This picking and choosing which “sins” are legal and which are not hasn’t gotten us anywhere significant. Rather, so many lives have been lost that most have lost count — unless of course you believe that the only lives worth valuing are U.S. lives and that the tens of thousands who’ve died in Mexico aren’t really that important. Which, I’d like to point out over the media coverage of slain ICE agent Jaime Zapata, brings me to another point: Mexican lives don’t really count as human lives in this country.

The country that produces the most porn in the world and consumes the most drugs in the world is hardly in a position to take the moral high ground. It’s the same attitude we have towards immigration, almost like that of a child who knows they’ve done wrong. Although we all know what the real truth is and how ugly it looks, it makes us feel so much better to deny that truth and find as many other explanations and solutions to the problem as possible. I take the realist stance, that we’re losing, and say it’s time to explore some other real options.

We live in a country that puts away pot smokers and paroles murderers and child molesters. I don’t know about you, but my own personal morality scale tips in the exact opposite direction of our domestic and foreign policy. How much worse can it get when you’re the biggest addict in the world? How many more Mexican lives are worth our over-inflated sense of integrity? And didn’t I hear something about a budget deficit?

Follow Sara Inés Calderón on Twitter @SaraChicaD