Manhattan Institute scholar Judith Miller writes of the "Mexicanization" of US law enforcement: drug lords are sending corruption north from Mexico, which increasingly resembles a narco-state. An excellent article well worth a read. George Will surveys US and global drug war efforts and offers this downer:
In 1998, the United Nations, with its penchant for empty grandstanding, committed its members to "eliminating or significantly reducing" opium, cocaine and marijuana production by 2008, en route to a "drug-free world." Nowadays the United Nations is pleased that the drug trade has "stabilized."
The Economist magazine says this means that more than 200 million people -- almost 5 percent of the world's adult population -- take illegal drugs, the same proportion as a decade ago. The annual U.S. bill for attempting to diminish the supply of drugs is $40 billion. Of the 1.5 million Americans arrested each year on drug offenses, half a million are incarcerated. "[T]ougher drug laws are the main reason why one in five black American men spend some time behind bars," the Economist said in March.
"There is no correlation between the harshness of drug laws and the incidence of drug-taking: citizens living under tough regimes (notably America but also Britain) take more drugs, not fewer." Do cultural differences explain this? Evidently not: "Even in fairly similar countries tough rules make little difference to the number of addicts: harsh Sweden and more liberal Norway have precisely the same addiction rates."
Bottom Line. Drugs are primarily a demand-side problem, for which there are no known effective remedies today. Supply-side efforts cannot carry the day. Bad news all around, save for drug kingpins & narco-states.
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