“¡Pobre México! ¡Tan lejos de Dios y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos!” Jose de la Cruz Porfirio Diaz

One step closer to…

On March 24^th, California election officials announced that, this November, Californians would get to vote on whether marijuana should be legalized and taxed in the Golden State. Backers of the initiative needed 434, 000 signatures to qualify for the ballot – they submitted nearly 700,000.

The man behind the initiative, Richard Lee, whom the Los Angeles Times described as an “Oakland marijuana entrepreneur,” declared that Californians were “one step closer to ending cannabis prohibition and the unjust laws that lock people up for cannabis while alcohol is not only sold openly but advertised on television to kids every day.”

Somewhere, Porfirio Diaz is sighing.

If you’re thinking that Lee and his supporters are a bunch of stoners playing at politics, think again. Lee has spent $1.3 million of his own money (I guess “marijuana entrepreneurship” is recession-proof) and the initiative campaign is being “led by a team of experienced political consultants, including Chris Lehane, a veteran operative who has worked in the White House and on presidential campaigns.”

Not surprisingly, law enforcement groups and their allies are also gearing up for a fight. A lobbyist for the California Police Chiefs Association promised that “there’s going to be a very broad coalition opposing this [ballot initiative].” Their strategy will be to “educate people as to what this measure really entails.”

Then there’s the matter of federal law. First-year law students learn about preemption and the Supremacy Clause, although, at least in the case of some attorneys general, the lessons are sometimes forgotten. Regardless of how Californians vote, possession, not to mention distribution and sale, of marijuana is still a federal offense.

The initiative does have one thing going for it: its honesty. At the start of 2010, there were more marijuana dispensaries in Los Angeles than schools or Starbucks: more than 1,000 according to the New York Times. These operate under the aegis of California’s “medical marijuana” laws.

Closer to (my) home, a proposal to legalize medical marijuana in the District of Columbia has been criticized for being too restrictive. One migraine sufferer objected to the provision that limits “medicinal marijuana” use to one’s home. He wanted to able to light up whenever he feels a migraine coming on, including while driving. (Across the Potomac, this migraine sufferer has to settle for Maxalt.)

Just relax?

Whether we acknowledge it or not, we are, as former Mexican foreign minister Jorge Castañeda has written, moving towards the “decriminalization of marijuana” and the adoption of a “a far more relaxed attitude toward drugs.”

This goes beyond treating drugs as a public health, as opposed to criminal justice, problem, which is about compassion and sound public policy. What we are doing is making it easier to buy marijuana than it is to buy a mocha frappuccino in some parts of the country. Whereas we once insisted on Colombia’s Killing Pablo, we now call Lee an “entrepreneur” (narcotraficante in Spanish), even before the ballot initiative becomes law. Even if it doesn’t become law, the “far more relaxed attitude” (hedonismo in Spanish) Castañeda wrote about is probably here to stay.

That being the case, the neighborly thing to do would be to inform the people of Mexico, so that they can limit the death toll in a drug war fought, in no small part, at the urging of the United States.

There’s an obvious geographic reason why Mexico’s flawed drug war is being waged in places like Baja California, Coahuila, and Chihuahua and not, say, in the Yucatan Peninsula.

Yes, Mexico’s local police and judiciary are notoriously corrupt. But the money that fuels that corruption comes from drug sales north of the border. Per capita Mexican demand for drugs is lower than in the United States, Canada, Western Europe, and much of Latin America. The horrific violence in Mexico, like the crack wars of the 1980s and early 1990s in American cities, is over which “entrepreneur” gets to supply American demand. .

The Mexican Army is trying to restore a semblance of order and governmental authority, without much success. For our part, we send “high level” delegations to Mexico City (not coincidentally, 1500 kilometers south of the border area) and cite the “sending of a delegation of this stature” (I’m not making this up) as evidence of our commitment to do something.

Do something!

What is this “something?” It’s not longer sentences for drug offenders – they’re bad public policy and, in any case, most states can’t afford them. It’s not increased drug treatment – there’s very little, if any, public support for that. (Imagine what Glenn Beck and company could do with “socialist rehab.”).

How about decriminalization? Secretary of State Clinton, the leader of the aforementioned august delegation, flatly ruled that out. Forget about the public health consequences – it would be awkward: if Richard Lee somehow succeeded in his entrepreneurially-driven quest, Mexico would be left in an “untenable and absurd situation in which troops and civilians were dying in Tijuana to stop Mexican marijuana from entering the U.S. – where, once it entered, it could be consumed, transported and sold legally.”

That leaves promising to curb demand in the United States (“This time we really mean it when we just say no!”) and leaning on Mexico, which brings me to former Mexican president Porfirio Diaz’s famous epigram: “Poor Mexico! So far from God and so close to the United States!” Our appetitive problem has become Mexico’s national security problem. (Something similar is at work in Afghanistan: the market for the opium that finances the Taliban isn’t Kabul – it’s Oslo, Amsterdam, and other European cities.)

Mexico can’t do anything about our appetite for drugs and it can’t ignore, however much it might want to, the violence that this appetite fuels. Even if it were inclined to let the various drug gangs kill each other off – a tempting prospect given the alternative – a lot of innocent people would die before the bloody dust settled.

They have little choice but to listen to sanctimonious lectures about corruption and read ill-informed nonsense about Mexico being or becoming a “failed state,” as often as not from people who didn’t care for Mexico or Mexicans before the drug wars. They have to endure talk about a possible “surge” along the border from the likes of “Black Jack” Chertoff.

In a morally-sane world they would tell the people of California (and the rest of the country) something along these lines:

“Since many, if not most, of you insist on your right to use recreational drugs, this is what we are going to do: we are going to tax the stuff as it leaves our country and use the proceeds to build schools, hospitals, and provide services that will give our people an alternative to working for the drug lords. We don’t begrudge you your ‘relaxed attitude’ towards drugs but we do resent the injury of dying for that ‘relaxed attitude’ and the insult of being lectured and called a ‘failed state.’ After all, it’s not as though we forced you to use drugs or even tried to persuade you. No gardener even told his employer ‘Mrs. Lane, I will make your property look real good. Would you like to try some excellent crank?’ No, you did that to yourselves.”

No doubt many of us on this side of the border would object and call Mexico a “narco-state.” I prefer “entrepreneur.”

For more insight to this subject, get the book, Another Man’s War, by Sam Childers, from our online store. Or read the article, “Dopey Logic,” by Charles Colson.