Marisol Valles Garcia, a 20-yearold criminology major, just this month became the police chief of Praxedis G. Guerro, a town of 8,500 people in Mexico.
Garcia, with 13 police officers under her (she hired ten immediately after being sworn in), will begin a campaign against two cartels vying for smuggling control of the nearby highway.
No one else wanted the job of police chief after the former chief was gunned down, and the criminology major was the only one to accept the position.
Many would commend Garcia’s valor and fortitude, but this can only be seen by most as foolish; she inevitably will become a prime target for the cartels and, in all likelihood, a martyr for the cause.
Still, there are worse instances of insanity. In Los Ramos, an entire police force of 14 resigned after a thousand rounds of bullets and half a dozen grenades decimated their newly opened police station. How no one managed to get killed is an amazing query, but the real question is, why hasn’t the shock of this violence sunk in on this side of the border?
There are so many areas to place the blame, but the very reason the cartels exist is to service the vice of American drug users.
That’s right, the main place to pin the blame is on the supporters: the American and state governments. We democratically decide to keep drugs such as cocaine and cannabis illegal and then individually choose to purchase (or not to purchase) it illegally and therefore create a niche for cartels to thrive.
The largest percentage of profit for the cartels comes from marijuana. Students who purchase marijuana are adding to the drug violence.
The number one way of stemming the drug cartels’ influence and very livelihood isn’t by cracking down and fighting fire with gasoline; it’s by cutting off their reason for existence. Cracking down, using force and having zero tolerance in the war on drugs will do nothing but make the profit from drugs increase.
Making the penalties more stiff and punishing users more harshly won’t fix the situation; neither will closing your eyes and pretending that there isn’t bloodshed going on in the country just under you.
Legalization shouldn’t be done for freedom of choice, business uses or medicinal purposes. At this point, legalization should be done for humanity’s sake. If the profits disappeared for the cartels, there wouldn’t have to be decimated police stations and the desperation for a city to find a leader.
David Haydon is a political science junior and may be reached at [email protected].
While bullets fly into El Paso, bodies pile up in the streets of Juarez, and thugs with gold-plated AK-47s and albino tiger pens are beheading federal officials and dissolving their torsos in vats of acid, here are some facts concerning the peaceful situation in Holland. –Please save a copy and use it as a reference when debating prohibitionists who claim the exact opposite concerning reality as presented here below:
Cannabis-coffee-shops are not only restricted to the Capital of Holland, Amsterdam. They can be found in more than 50 cities and towns across the country. At present, only the retail sale of five grams is tolerated, so production remains criminalized. The mayors of a majority of the cities with coffeeshops have long urged the national government to also decriminalize the supply side.
A poll taken earlier this year indicated that some 50% of the Dutch population thinks cannabis should be fully legalized while only 25% wanted a complete ban. Even though 62% of the voters said they had never taken cannabis. An earlier poll also indicated 80% opposing coffee shop closures. http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2010/02/pub…
It is true that the number of coffee shops has fallen from its peak of around 2,500 throughout the country to around 700 now. The problems, if any, concern mostly marijuana-tourists and are largely confined to cities and small towns near the borders with Germany and Belgium. These problems, mostly involve traffic jams, and are the result of cannabis prohibition in neighboring countries. Public nuisance problems with the coffee shops are minimal when compared with bars, as is demonstrated by the rarity of calls for the police for problems at coffee shops.
While it is true that lifetime and past-month use rates did increase back in the seventies and eighties, the critics shamefully fail to report that there were comparable and larger increases in cannabis use in most, if not all, neighboring countries which continued complete prohibition.
According to the World Health Organization only 19.8 percent of the Dutch have used marijuana, less than half the U.S. figure.
In Holland 9.7% of young adults (aged 15 to 24) consume soft drugs once a month, comparable to the level in Italy (10.9%) and Germany (9.9%) and less than in the UK (15.8%) and Spain (16.4%). Few transcend to becoming problem drug users (0.44%), well below the average (0.52%) of the compared countries.
The WHO survey of 17 countries finds that the United States has the highest usage rates for nearly all illegal substances.
In the U.S. 42.4 percent admitted having used marijuana. The only other nation that came close was New Zealand, another bastion of get-tough policies, at 41.9 percent. No one else was even close. The results for cocaine use were similar, with the U.S. again leading the world by a large margin.
Even more striking is what the researchers found when they asked young adults when they had started using marijuana. Again, the U.S. led the world, with 20.2 percent trying marijuana by age 15. No other country was even close, and in Holland, just 7 percent used marijuana by 15 — roughly one-third of the U.S. figure.
thttp://www.alternet.org/drugs/90295/
In 1998, the US Drug Czar General Barry McCaffrey claimed that the U.S. had less than half the murder rate of the Netherlands. That’s drugs, he explained. The Dutch Central Bureau for Statistics immediately issued a special press release explaining that the actual Dutch murder rate is 1.8 per 100,000 people, or less than one-quarter the U.S. murder rate.
Here is a very recent article by a psychiatrist from Amsterdam, exposing Drug Czar misinformation http://tinyurl.com/247a8mp
Now let's look at a comparative analysis of the levels of cannabis use in two cities: Amsterdam and San Francisco, which was published in the American Journal of Public Health May 2004,
The San Francisco prevalence survey showed that 39.2% of the population had used cannabis. This is 3 times the prevalence found in the Amsterdam sample
Source: Craig Reinarman, Peter D.A. Cohen and Hendrien L. Kaal, The Limited Relevance of Drug Policy http://www.mapinc.org/lib/limited.pdf
Moreover, 51% of people who had smoked cannabis in San Francisco reported that they were offered heroin, cocaine or amphetamine the last time they purchased cannabis. In contrast, only 15% of Amsterdam residents who had ingested marijuana reported the same conditions. Prohibition is the ‘Gateway Policy’ that forces cannabis seekers to buy from criminals who gladly expose them to harder drugs.
The indicators of death, disease and corruption are even much better in the Netherlands than in Sweden for instance, a country praised by UNODC for its so called successful drug policy.
Here's Antonio Maria Costa doing his level best to avoid discussing the success of Dutch drug policy:
The Netherlands also provides heroin on prescription under tight regulation to about 1500 long-term heroin addicts for whom methadone maintenance treatment has failed. http://www.rnw.nl/english/article/free-heroin-bri…
The Dutch justice ministry announced, last year, the closure of eight prisons and cut 1,200 jobs in the prison system. A decline in crime has left many cells empty. There's simply not enough criminals http://www.nrc.nl/international/article2246821.ec…
For further information, kindly check out this very informative FAQ provided by Radio Netherlands: http://www.rnw.nl/english/article/faq-soft-drugs-…
or go to this page: http://www.rnw.nl/english/dossier/Soft-drugs
There was no vote to make cannabis illegal. Look up how cannabis became illegal over the objections of the American Medical Society.
In all honesty, there is no "solution" to this problem – at least not that can be accomplished with the legalization of marijuana. This is a pipe dream, sadly.
Just like the lifting of prohibition didn't end organized crime in America, lifting the ban on marijuana alone won't stop this violence. The chief reason for this, is because there are always other markets to corner for organized criminal groups. Crime organizations are all about shifting to whatever is lucrative at the moment. Lifting the ban on marijuana won't do a thing to stop these killings alone; the cartels' business interests are not strictly tied to marijuana.
Quite a bit of their money comes in the shipping of cocaine, not to mention the fact that the methamphetamine market is growing. This is why the cartels are fighting over Ciudad Juarez. They don't want that highway just so they can feed cannabis and cocaine into the US; cartels need that highway to move their cocaine, methamphetamines and heroin into the US, as well as to import guns from the US back to Mexico.
Having said that, in no universe do I think cocaine, methamphetamines, or heroin should be legalized. Not cocaine as we know it today. Smoking marijuana can give you a nice feeling of relaxation after a tough day; there is nothing "recreational" about those other drugs. Like I said above, the business interests of the cartels lies in the distribution of those other drugs just as much as, if not more than, marijuana. You would need to legalize all of those substances to begin making a dent in the cartels' businesses, and that is not something I can support.
You would have to legalize every one of those things in order to stop this violence.
Do not expect that to ever happen – nor should it.
I am definitely of the belief that marijuana should have been legalized a long time ago. If cigarettes and hard alcohol are sold openly, there is no reason why marijuana should be illegal. Just get the attorney general to put a warning on the pack advising smokers to not operate moving vehicles or heavy machinery. I've heard of drunk driving, cancer-related deaths due to nicotine, alcohol poisoning, but one thing I have never heard of, was someone dying from having a joint. I'm sure someone probably has died a death related to marijuana smoking, but I am damn sure the numbers aren't anywhere near the deaths caused by the other two "legal" drugs.
Unfortunately, I don't see a solution for this situation that does not involve caving in on all fronts. Like I said, I think marijuana should have been legalized long ago. But I would never support the legalization of those other drugs, and I struggle to really think of a person who would – aside from the people hooked on those other substances.