from Truthdig:
Drugs, Guns and RealityPosted on Mar 26, 2009
By Eugene Robinson
It’s an indictment of our fact-averse political culture that a statement of the blindingly obvious could sound so revolutionary. “Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters on her plane Wednesday as she flew to Mexico for an official visit. “Our inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border ... causes the deaths of police, of soldiers and civilians.”
Amazingly, U.S. officials have avoided facing these facts for decades. This is not just an intellectual blind spot but a moral failure, one that has had horrific consequences for Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia and other Latin American and Caribbean nations. Clinton deserves high praise for acknowledging that the United States bears “shared responsibility” for the drug-fueled violence sweeping Mexico, which has claimed more than 7,000 lives since the beginning of 2008. But that means we will also share responsibility for the next 7,000 killings as well.
Our long-running “war on drugs,” focusing on the supply side of the equation, has been an utter disaster. Domestically, we’ve locked up hundreds of thousands of street-level dealers, some of whom genuinely deserve to be in prison and some of whom don’t. It made no difference. According to a 2007 University of Michigan study, 84 percent of high school seniors nationwide said they could obtain marijuana “fairly easily” or “very easily.” The figure for amphetamines was 50 percent; for cocaine, 47 percent; for heroin, 30 percent.
At the same time, we’ve persisted in a Sisyphean attempt to cut off the drug supply at or near the source. When I was The Washington Post’s correspondent in South America, I once took a nerve-racking helicopter ride to visit a U.S.-funded military base in the Upper Huallaga Valley of Peru. It was the place where most of the country’s coca—the plant from which cocaine is processed—was being grown, and the valley was crawling with Maoist guerrillas who funded their insurgency with money they extorted from the coca growers and traffickers. Eventually, the coca business was eliminated in the Upper Huallaga. But now it’s flourishing in other parts of Peru, and last year authorities there seized a record 30 tons of cocaine—meaning, by rule of thumb, that at least 10 times that much was probably produced and shipped. .........(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090326_drugs_guns_and_reality/