Hillary Clinton is on a two-day visit to Mexico to discuss what the U.S. has now acknowledged as a “common problem”: drug trafficking.

Does this mean that before Obama took office, the problem was seen by the gringos as one strictly confined to anything south of the border? As if once the drugs cross the Rio Grande they magically distribute themselves among the hundreds of thousands of American users, leaving the U.S. authorities free of responsibility for any of the 6,000+ drug-trade related violent acts that occurred in Mexico last year!

Not acknowledging this as a common problem would be as stupid as the persistence of my ex-boss that the only way to stop it is to legalize drugs. This is the typical opinion of those who have no idea of what goes on in the world beyond their noses, and who do not have the vision to see that there is a huge gap between theory and practice. It is also the opinion of your average cokehead.

In theory, through legalization governments would tax and regulate the drug trade and use the money generated from this to educate the public about the risks of drug-taking and to treat addicts. In theory, legalization would push prices down as drugs would become easily available and because reputable pharmaceutical companies would get involved in the development and distribution of safe and cheap alternatives.

Ha ha ha. What I would like to see is the implementation process of this theory.

Let’s say that Mexico decides to legalize drugs and by definition the drug trade. Then what? Mr. Drug Baron, who is already paying hefty bribes on both sides of the border to run his business and has a complicated network that goes all the way from producing to distributing and pushing, agrees with this ‘wonderful’ idea and goes legal?

So he registers “Fumate Un Churro S.A.” in Mexico and “Fly High Inc.” in the U.S.A. Enrolls his gangsters in the IMSS (social security), exchanges their guns for business cards, starts raising invoices, paying taxes and allowing the government to regulate the selling price of this produce? All this to see his revenues and profits plummet because the demand is not there anymore as Pfizer and Novartis are producing safer and cheaper alternatives to good’ol coke and marihuana?

Ha ha ha. Wake up and smell the coffee! Legalizing drugs without getting rid of the drug cartels first will only give users a cheaper ride to lah-lah-land and will increase the violence exponentially.

And unless you have a magic wand to transform all the bad guys into toads, I don’t really see that happening anytime soon.

Addendum 28/03/09: Since I publish this blog on Facebook, that’s where I receive a great number of comments to my posts from my closer friends. For this particular post, a good friend made a comment that I found very interesting, and I believe it deserves a place here together with my reply:

JF:

Great!!! Acknowledging that drug trafficking is a common issue is a powerful way of clearing the space for any possible further and joint collaboration between the two countries. Now, what do we want to create on this issue given the clear space we have?

My reply:

How about having the Americans commit to selling to someone else the top-notch weapons that have been empowering the drug cartels? Hey! How about giving those weapons to the Mexican drug squads instead so that they can fight on equal grounds with the gangsters? … and how about if the Americans lend us their international agents, specialized in finding the really bad guys (the ones that found Sadam Hussein, please, not the ones that are still looking for Osama Bin Laden) to locate the drug barons? This way you leave the ‘little guys’ headless and under-armed and easier to control … and then, Hillary can come down with the 3 Black Hawks she so kindly suggests to donate to fight the drug war, and can take some lovely aerial pictures of a safer Mexico.