First, I must state, for my own protection from the DEA and others, that I do not indulge in, sell, handle, or have the least bit of anything to do with illegal drugs. Not even pot, which is so easy to get that it isn’t funny, even in a buttoned-down city like Las Vegas.
My tush covered, I’d like to consider the Arizona immigration situation. I mentioned it here a while back but at that time I didn’t know that the event that touched off the current brouhaha was when they found the murdered body of a borderland rancher. Authorities are pretty sure that the rancher was killed by someone working for a drug cartel in Northern Mexico who was in the country illegally. Here you had an illegal killing somebody, which is, naturally enough, intolerable. No wonder the people of Arizona rose up and demanded action. They weren’t thinking at all!
The murderer, if the authorities are right, was not an illegal immigrant. In fact, unless your heart bleeds for the American hit man who didn’t get the job, the murder had absolutely no effect on employment in Arizona, except for any employees the rancher may have been paying. Then, okay, they may (or may not) be out of work now. The real problem in Arizona, the crime along the border and the violence, are not because of people sneaking in to the country to find work. No, that murderer has a job, probably one that pays quite well, in Mexico. Why would he want to move to a country where he’s more likely to get caught? The murder of the rancher in Southern Arizona can be credited to the incredibly ineffective War on Drugs that’s been going on now for decades.
Leaving aside the logical oddness of fighting a war against inanimate material, consider that drug use remains widespread in this country in spite of several decades of billion-dollars per year efforts to stem the tide of illegal substances. Part of the problem is simply that a lot of drugs are simply weeds. Pot certainly is, and it grows in all fifty states, in the wild, with no help whatsoever. Give a bunch of pot plants some loving attention and you get a fine and lush crop of drug-laden weeds, for not much investment. Opium, and heroin, and codeine, are all made from the juice of a flower seed pod. They grow a lot of them in Afghanistan, but you could grow them right here in Nevada if you really wanted to. The flowers are pretty white poppies, even, and would compliment many a city garden if they were legal. And cocaine is made from the leaves of a plant that grows wild in the Andes mountains. The locals chew the leaves to help them through arduous mountain treks. Methamphetamine, okay that’s not a weed. But it can be made from common household chemicals plus a common decongestant. The supply, I’m saying, is virtually impossible to cut off for any of these drugs. Virtually anyone can whip them up if they have a mind to.
The law of supply and demand would therefore say that these things are dirt cheap, right? And so they are. The coca farmer in Columbia is lucky to get by on what he receives for his crop. The same is true of the poppy farmer in Afghanistan. And as anyone who has grown his own pot can tell you, it’s easy and cheap to get a buzz that way. So why are these things so expensive on the street? Because they are illegal! The only reason there is a lot of money in these drugs is because to buy them you must pay your supplier for risking his freedom, often his very life, to provide you with the product. Cocaine isn’t expensive. Getting cocaine in your hands in America is. Ditto with Heroin, Pot, and even Meth when you come right down to it.
Since these drugs are so expensive, there is a lot of competition to sell them. Since the sales are illegal, there is a lot of reason for the sellers and suppliers to be as vigilant as possible about their ability to keep selling. Since the profit margin is so high, the business of transporting and selling illegal drugs attracts adrenaline junkies and career criminals, because let’s face it, no ordinary person would go into that risky a line of work. Those are the people who shoot ranchers in Southern Arizona, or anyone else they consider to be a threat. Those are the people now waging a war along the US/Mexico border. They are not illegal immigrants stealing American jobs. They are purveyors of a very lucrative product protecting their sales territory.
I do not advocate drug abuse. I’m not really sure why pot is illegal, to be honest, but I wouldn’t smoke it if it were legal and free. Of course, if it were legal, it would be close to free. There are problems with recreational use of any drug, especially ethanol by the way, but none of the problems associated with using the drugs comes close to the problems we cause by making these things illegal. Here’s a quick comparison of the overall situation if drugs were legal, versus how it is now.
| Problem |
Legal |
Currently |
| Addiction and abuse problems |
Yes |
Yes |
| Drug related violence |
No |
Yes |
| Lost productivity and illness |
Yes |
Yes |
| Billions Spent on Interdiction |
No |
Yes |
| Drugs very expensive |
No |
Yes |
| Career criminals enriched |
No |
Yes |
| Money for terrorists |
No |
Yes |
Okay, call me crazy, but the problems of the drugs themselves would remain if they became legal. Where we’d save literally billions of dollars every year would be by not paying obscene amounts of taxpayer money to enforce laws that simply do not work, as evidenced by the continued drug abuse problem in America today.
If the folks in Arizona were thinking, they’d see that their problems aren’t with illegal immigrants, but with illegal drugs.The solution is neither likely to make anyone mad (other than people you don’t really care about) and actually saves a bundle of money for Arizona, and for the rest of us as well. It’s simple: if this is a War on Drugs, the only reasonable thing to do is surrender. Anything else is just crazy. Like maybe we’re smoking something, you know?