American Marijuana Growers Could Beat This War on Drugs
The gruesome concomitants of the war on drugs were on display yet again last week in Mexico, where gangs continue to terrorise the public with impunity. The decapitated body of a crime-awareness blogger was found in Nuevo Laredo, the third of such killings to occur in the city over the last month. A bag of rotting human heads outside an elementary school in Acapulco had a note threatening the state governor, who responded with promises of more police and security cameras.
After four decades of bloodstains and milked budgets, only one thing is certain: no matter how hard you fight, the market always wins. It is no longer tenable to describe this war on drugs as a failure. It is, as Winston Churchill once remarked, “an affront to the whole history of mankind”. Although former dignitaries have routinely come forth to denounce prohibition, the incumbents and bureaucrats who continue to wage this battle simply refuse to be swayed by data or reason. In the past few months, new fronts have opened up in Russia, Africa and south-east Asia. But nowhere is the incongruity between reality and ideology more acute than in its North American epicentre.
