How to fix Mexico

So, all you spring breakers, how was Mexico?

Didn’t go? That’s too bad. The weather and beaches down there are amazing. Not to mention the cost of a drink is about 10 pesos.

Of course, there is that whole travel advisory thing. Since Mexican President Felipe Calderon launched a military response to drug cartels in 2006, violence has been on the rise. One thousand drug-related deaths have occurred in Mexico so far this year alone. 

Before Christmas, the severed heads of eight soldiers were found in a shopping center in the city of Chilpancingo. Another three were found in an icebox near Ciudad Juarez last month. A man named Santiago Meza, recently detained by police near Tijuana, admitted to dissolving more than 300 bodies in acid on the orders of a local drug baron. 

Resorts and tourist attractions have been complaining about the reduced amount of spring breakers. But there is so much more to fear. The U.S. Joint Forces Command published a report last month revealing that the countries most at risk to become failed states were Pakistan and Mexico.

That’s right. America’s second-largest trading partner might be on the verge of becoming a failed state – and for what? “To take back from organized criminal groups the economic power and armament they’ve established in the past 20 years, to take away their capacity to undermine institutions and to contest the state’s monopoly of force,” according to a statement by President Calderon’s attorney general Eduardo Medina Mora.

There is another way to do this, without violence. It is possible to drain most of the power from the Mexican drug cartels without a single murder, without placing a single soldier or police officer in harm’s way.

“We are not winning the battle,” Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard said at a congressional hearing this week in Washington. “Sixty percent of the battle is marijuana.”

Decriminalization of marijuana would undo the growth of organized crime around the globe. The illegal drug industry is worth about $320 billion a year. All this money is flowing to criminals, fueling violence that can throw a stable democracy such as Mexico into “a life-or-death struggle against gangsters,” as The Economist puts it.

Shifting the focus of the drug war away from violent struggles and prison time to public health and harm reduction is the answer to Mexico’s problem with organized crime.

The drug war has been senseless for so long – making criminals of otherwise law-abiding citizens (think President Obama’s youthful experimenting), putting addicts in danger and supplying organized crime and terrorist groups with untraceable, illegal dollars, all the while being rather unsuccessful.

The same amount of the world population still takes illegal drugs as it did a decade ago. But now the policy is directly resulting in the deaths of soldiers and police, terrorizing the Mexican population and even threatening the stability of the Mexican government. Not to mention these problems are posing a severe security threat to the United States. 

We need regulation, not criminalization. It is time to drain the strength from Mexican drug cartels and others like it around the world by decriminalizing marijuana.