I started reading Anabel Hernandez’s book on Mexican drug cartels and can’t get through the shock of the first 5 pages. I’d much rather keep considering Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderon fools who destroyed their country to make the US happy than accept that they were in the pay of the Sinaloa cartel that needed the war on drugs to get rid of competition.
Maybe this is old news to everybody but I just discovered this book. My students can’t get enough of Mexican drug wars, so I decided to read up on the subject. Now I will have to can all of my “Vicente Fox is not a smart person” lectures.
Clarissa's Blog 
Adult drug consumption and selling should be legal.
LikeLike
This is what Vicente Fox is saying these days but if he’s in the employ of a cartel, how much value does it have?
LikeLike
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
– It’s expensive as hell to put people in prison and much cheaper and, ultimately, better to offer the ones that become addicted treatment. (see Portugal)
– Throwing someone whose only illegal action was taking some drugs in a prison full of hardened criminals ends up with the person being more likely to become a hardened criminal themselves.
– Saddling people with a criminal record makes it harder for them to get jobs and become productive members of society.
– Making buying and selling drugs illegal creates an area of transactions that don’t have the backing of regular contract law in case things go pear-shaped, so the people participating in the transactions revert to the oldest way of ensuring they aren’t cheated upon, violence.
– Most ODs are due to varying potency of the highly and unevenly adulterated street drugs, so legalization, which would allow quality testing, would lower both the rate of ODs and the chances of dangerous adulterants in the drugs themselves.
– The way current drug laws are written and applied, they function as a way to get non-white people in prison (often, for-profit prisons where the inmates are forced to work while receiving only the paltriest compensation). White people risk being imprisoned for drug use far less (and are searched for drugs far less), and sometimes use of a form of a drug mostly used by non-white people will be punished far more severely than the form used by white people (see crack vs powder cocaine). Also, I believe having a felony record prevents you from voting in the US? If true, this makes drug laws a great way of ensuring a group of people doesn’t have as much influence on the country’s politics as they should have.
– Taking the alcohol prohibition as an example, we see that the criminal cartels that make their fortune on supplying a prohibited substance tend to dissapear into irrelevance when the prohibition is lifted. If these people were good at business they’d get rich in far more lucrative fields, but what these people are good at is living more dangerously than most people would accept.
I can start rustling up what people who aren’t Vicente Fox are saying about the issue, if you want.
LikeLike