According to NBC News, the Trump administration is now considering a military attack on Mexico. That’s on top of Trump’s obvious internal struggle on whether to do the same to Venezuela. Another possibility is Columbia, whose president, according to Trump, is an “illegal drug leader.”
Oh, the difficult life of an interventionist drug-war president who is ostensibly set on making America great again. Who to attack first? Who to kill? How many to kill? Which killing route will be more apt to make America great again? How best to win the Nobel Prize for Peace?
Trump says that the governments of these three countries aren’t doing enough to stem the manufacture, production, and flow of drugs out of their countries and their transportation to the United States.
I’ve got a question: Why has the Trump regime failed to halt the possession and distribution of drugs here inside the United States? Maybe — just maybe — no regime, including the Trump regime, is capable of stopping the operation of black markets arising from the criminalization of peaceful activities.
But I’ve got another question: What business is it of Trump or any other U.S. drug official what a foreign country’s drug policy is? Why isn’t that the business of those countries? Who died and made Donald Trump the worldwide imperial drug-war king?
Last weekend, drug gangs assassinated the mayor of a Mexican town who had decided to wage war against Mexican drug cartels. Like so many other similar Mexican officials over the years who have decided to take on the drug cartels, the mayor lost his war and the drug gangs won. That’s because it’s fairly easy to assassinate a public official — much easier than finding, arresting, prosecuting, and incarcerating all the members of a drug gang.
As I have long maintained, the best thing that Mexico could ever do is legalize drugs. The drug war —not drugs — has destroyed Mexico. The drug war is the cause of the massive violence and enormous death toll that has long afflicted the country. There is one — and only one — solution to Mexico’s violence: End the drug war through legalization of all drugs.
Drug legalization is the only way to put the drug cartels and drug gangs out of business, immediately. “Cracking down” on them will never put them out of business. Why can’t Mexicans see that by now? Legalizing drugs would put those black-market drug dealers out of business immediately because they would not be able to compete against legitimate firms selling high-quality, sound drugs to consumers.
Let’s assume that Mexico suddenly came to this realization and ended its policy of drug prohibition by legalizing the possession, sale, and distribution of drugs.
No doubt that Donald Trump, the Pentagon, and the CIA would go ballistic. “You can’t do that!” they would exclaim.
But why couldn’t they? Why doesn’t Mexico have the right to adopt its own policy on drugs? Why should it be forced to comply with immoral and ludicrous drug-war dictates issued by U.S. officials? If Mexico wants to legalize drugs, it has that moral and legal authority. It is a sovereign and independent country, not a colony or protectorate of the U.S. Empire.
By the same token, if Mexico chooses to retain drug prohibition but decides not to enforce its drug laws against drug gangs and drug cartels, that too is its prerogative. The U.S. government has no more moral or legal authority to attack or invade Mexico, Venezuela, Columbia, or any other nation to enforce its own drug-war nonsense than the Mexican government has the moral or legal authority to invade the United States to enforce its laws.
The U.S. government has been waging its drug war for decades. It has “cracked down” with asset-forfeiture laws, mandatory-minimum sentences, warrantless searches and seizures, violent no-knock raids, racial discrimination in enforcement, an endless stream of record drug busts, never-ending indictments and prosecutions, long jail sentences, exorbitant fines, and, now, drug-war assassinations of people on the high seas outside the territorial waters of the United States.
None of it has worked to prevent American consumers from ingesting what they want to ingest. But one thing is clear and indisputable: The U.S. drug war has brought massive death, destruction, and loss of liberty in both Latin America and the United States. There is nothing redeeming about the drug war, unless one believes that money and power flowing into the hands of U.S. officials and the entire U.S. drug-war bureaucracy is something positive.
Among the best things the American people could ever do for themselves and the people of the world is pressure their public officials to finally — finally — end the deadly and destructive war on drugs through the legalization of all drugs.
Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.