Violence among Mexico’s drug cartels and government has spilled over the U.S. border and beyond. The New York Times reports, “In the past few years, the cartels and other drug trafficking organizations have extended their reach across the United States and into Canada. Law enforcement authorities say they believe traffickers distributing the cartels’ marijuana, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and other drugs are responsible for a rash of shootings in Vancouver, British Columbia, kidnappings in Phoenix, brutal assaults in Birmingham, Ala., and much more. United States law enforcement officials have identified 230 cities . . . where Mexican cartels and their affiliates ‘maintain drug distribution networks or supply drugs to distributors,’ as a Justice Department report put it in December.”

Does anyone still think the “war on drugs” is a good idea?

That may strike some people as an odd question under the circumstances, so let’s take it from another direction. Have you seen the news stories about the violence on the border being perpetrated by the Mexican whiskey and cigarette cartels?

No? That’s probably because there was no such violence and are no such cartels.

So why are there violent cartels in marijuana, cocaine, and heroin but not in whiskey and cigarettes?

All together now: prohibition.

“Our” Fault?

Of course the politicians blame everything and everyone but themselves for this spreading violence. “Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said. “Our demand”? Including hers? “Our inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border to arm these criminals causes the deaths of police officers, soldiers and civilians.” Her answer, in addition to sending the Mexican government taxpayer money, is to go after consumers of drugs and manufacturers and dealers of guns she doesn’t like.

Drug users and gun dealers are to blame for drug-cartel violence? That makes no sense. If it did, then drinkers and smokers would be creating violence, too. What’s missing?

Once again in unison: prohibition. Who brought us prohibition? Politicians. Every politician, bureaucrat, and agent who facilitates or enforces prohibition is an accomplice in the violence because he or she helps to create the conditions in which thugs have a comparative advantage in dealing drugs.

For years advocates of free trade in drugs—that is, basic rights to life, liberty, and property for drug consumers, producers, and merchants—have pointed out that prohibition, besides being an immoral invasion of liberty by the state, sets in motion a variety of concrete evils that harm innocent people. (No one has been more consistent and rigorous in this than Thomas Szasz). These evils include the corruption of law enforcement, violent crime, and the expansion of intrusive government. Besides these domestic evils, the U.S. government has alienated farmers in foreign lands by helping to destroy their crops and livelihoods. If that’s not terrorism, nothing is. Crop destruction has been a recruiting tool for guerilla organizations, while black-market profits finance them and others with malign intent.

Few listened to these Cassandras against the anti-drug crusade. Maybe people will listen now.

Government Impotence

While violent gangs that make their money selling drugs in the black market are murdering and kidnapping people, invading homes, and committing other atrocities, the politicians have nothing to say but the same bromides they’ve been repeating for years. Thinking we’re either simpletons or amnesiacs, they expect us to be comforted by their words. (Will they be right?) They promise to defeat the cartels, crack down on drug use, and disrupt the gun trade. It won’t work. It’s never worked. It can’t work. Black-market operators are always steps ahead of the plodding bureaucrats. Break up one gang and another emerges. The drugs keep flowing (there’s plenty of bribe money), and consumers will have what they want when they want it. The profits made possible by the black market are powerful incentives to keep the industry going. Government is impotent. (They can’t even keep drugs out of prisons!)

Yet the gangs could be put out of business overnight. How? By removing the criminal penalties for the production, trade, and consumption of all drugs; by bringing the black market into the open, so disagreements can be resolved through civil channels and a talent for violence is no longer an advantage; by dissolving the extraordinary profits that illegal industries always reap.

Yes, it is that easy.

People will recoil. We can’t do that! No? Then accept as normal the unspeakable violence that is starting to spread from city to city, because that is the alternative to the stubborn refusal to end the “war on drugs,” which is really a war on people. Even full police-state tactics will not be able to control it, though that won’t stop demagogic politicians from giving them a try.

The Drug War Finances Government Careers

I don’t expect the multitude of officials who depend on the drug war for their livelihoods and power to endorse an end to prohibition. They have shown themselves more than willing to accept the violence (against others) as the price of their ambition. The new threat to us is an opportunity for them to amass more power, bigger budgets, and higher salaries.

But the rest of us have no reason to support the complex of government and “private” tax-financed agencies that grow fat prosecuting this war. The worn-out rationalizations can’t stand examination. Prohibition keeps no one from getting any drug he wants at an affordable price. On the contrary, it encourages the creation of cheaper, more potent drugs, just as alcohol prohibition replaced wine and beer with hard liquor. (More bang in a more compact form.) Prohibition doesn’t keep our children safe. It makes drugs into enticing forbidden fruits and pushes the trade into less-visible channels. Drugs aren’t “dangerous,” though people are capable of doing harmful things with them—and many other things. (Jacob Sullum’s Saying Yes is an eye-opening book that I highly recommend.) Addiction is not a disease; it’s a choice.

Everything the drug warriors have said is wrong—and often a conscious lie.

Drugs are to our society what Eurasia and East Asia were to Oceania in Orwell’s 1984: a convenient conjured-up demon to justify expansion of power and the usurping of liberty—in the name of keeping us safe.

What will it take, if not the current violence from Mexico, to make people see through the scam?

Look around. It’s our self-proclaimed protectors from whom need we protection most.