Even if we promise to do better for you than we did for New Orleans? Your country could become a shining beacon of hope to the downtrodden etc. etc. etc. 
Cleaning up our own mess does seem the saner option for us here, doesn’t it?
You know what? I support legalizing marijuana but certainly not (any reasonable person will agree) hard drugs. The drug wars has spread to kill American citizens and the Mexican government has proven incapable of suppressing it.
There certainly are reasonable people who say some or all hard drugs should be legalized in some fashion as well. It’s not like making them illegal has stopped their use.
Because we are funding their criminals with our drug money, and arming them with our lax gun laws.
The use of hard drugs is relatively minimal and limited to antisocial types of the population.
Than we should crack down and punish drug dealers, users, and smugglers along with those who smuggle guns to criminals.
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You don’t get out much, do you?
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That’s brilliant! If only somebody had thought of doing that years ago we wouldn’t have a drugs problem now.
So? We have no more business sending U.S. troops into Mexico to catch drug dealers, without the Mexican government’s permission, than General Pershing had chasing Pancho Villa into Chihuaha without the Mexican government’s permission.
Pancho Villa attacked American soil-that is more than enough reason to intervene in Mexico considering it was in chaos at that time. Plus the Mexican government has proven incapable in this crisis and if we intervene subtly I don’t think they will care that much.
“Subtly”? How can we intervene in a way that is both “subtle” and will make a difference?
:rolleyes: Of course they’ll mind, the same as we would if Mexico started intervening on American soil. And how exactly could we intervene subtly and make any difference?
Assassination or kidnapping drug lords.
Meaningless, even assuming we could do that very well. What, do you think they are the source of the problem?
Why blame us? Guess who started the drug war? The USA. So now that a few Americans have been victims of the violence you believe you have the right to intervene in our country?
You are foolish to believe that intervention, which will only increase the violence, will succeed. And more of your young will die for nothing as is usual when you settle for a violent solution. You created the problem, now get rid of it. End your ridiculous prohibition. Stop legislating personal morality. In other words, start minding your own business for a change.
And have you ever paused to think why do you Americans need so many drugs to get you thru life? Maybe you should work on an improvement of your culture in order to reduce this need.
Not to defend the idea of any kind of police action/military intervention, but nearly all of the same drugs that are illegal in the US are illegal in Mexico. It was only fairly recently that Mexico decriminalized the possession of small amounts of most drugs. Otherwise, it’s still a crime to possess and/or sell large amounts of the same drugs on both sides of the border.
As for violent solutions, the cartels are violent and bloody organizations that have connections with prison gangs. They aren’t going to suddenly become “regular” business enterprises if all drugs were magically deemed legal in both the US and Mexico.
While the US certainly could do a lot to “improve” its culture vis-a-vis drugs, Mexico could certainly use some help too - starting with narcocorridos.
The U.S. has proven “incapable” in nearly twenty years of Reagan-induced drug war and the lower level drug war that preceded this round for twenty years. Surely we should ask Russia or China to subtly intervene in our country on our behalf?
But they’ll suddenly lose most of their cash flow. That would cripple them. I would expect those organizations to drastically shrink or disintegrate rather than become legitimate businesses.
It is business. If we wiped out every drug lord and supply line in the world today, new ones would quickly reappear. If there is profit to be made, someone will supply it. Fighting supply and distribution is not attacking the problem at all. It has proven over and over that it will not work. It seems like a logical approach but is merely sophistical. It is an illusion of fighting the drug problem without dealing with the cause. The demand for drugs in America will drive our police and politicians to the dark side. It is the demand that must be dealt with. We need a huge expansion of drug treatment programs, for a start.
We need legalization, with taxing and controlling the quality and making it available to the addicted . Our whole drug system is corrupting.
This is naive, particularly around here. A lot of people do support the legalization of hard drugs. I tenatively agree with them. I’ll admit to mixed feelings because I’m not sure how much harm it might cause. In any case invading yet another country or assassinating drug lords is not going to solve this problem. That would be similar to trying to stop car sales by killing the CEOs of Ford and GM. If people wanted to buy the cars, someone else would take over the organization and keep selling them. This is not like a war between two countries, where killing the leadership of one country might end the conflict.
The recent change in our drug laws was passed by our legislation back when Fox was President. Under pressure from the US , Fox vetoed the law.
The US government puts heavy pressure on México to not legalize. If we were to do so unilaterally there would be some very hard consequences.
The cartels would shrink considerably without the huge sums of money they now enjoy. There is no other crime that comes close to illegal drugs in generating those types of earnings. They wouldn’t have even 10% of the resources they now have to fund the corruption or buy the weaponry.
I agree 100%. :eek:
No – they would do what the Mob did when Prohibition ended: Move into other fields of criminal enterprise. IOW, they would remain criminals but stop being drug smugglers, just as the bootleggers stopped being bootleggers. A marginal improvement.