The most infuriating aspect of the past week of talk-talk-talk about the chaos on our southern border is that I haven’t heard anybody ask, Why are all these people abandoning their familiar homes, friends and families to come here?<\/p>\n
A big reason is that the “war on drugs” has made criminal trafficking in narcotics fantastically profitable, with the result that Mexico, and numerous other countries throughout Central America, are teetering on the edge of being failed states.<\/p>\n
Ironically, Richard Nixon’s original vision<\/a> of the war on drugs emphasized shriveling the demand side, treating addiction as a medical problem, with the expectation that demand would dry-up and trafficking would cease. Unhappily, that has been forgotten, with the result that we spend billions attempting to interdict drugs — and weak governments have been destabilized by ruthless gangs chasing big money.<\/p>\n So their citizens flee to the country whose shortsighted policies contributed so much to making their own country uninhabitable, where they are put in cages. Nuts.<\/p>\n We need to get over the Puritan need to punish somebody for sin, and reclaim the original vision of the war on drugs: Drive down demand by treating addiction as a medical problem. We will be a generation, if we start today, before the tide of refugees wanes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The most infuriating aspect of the past week of talk-talk-talk about the chaos on our southern border is that I haven’t heard anybody ask, Why are all these people abandoning their familiar homes, friends and families to come here? A … Continue reading