Recently in Central California an entire family was wiped out, including a sixteen year old girl who was holding her ten month child. Of course the murderers also killed the baby. There are kidnappings taking place in the United States all along the Mexican border and now the Mexican cartels are operating throughout the United States. The main reason for this is sales of 'illegal' narcotics. The current narco boogie man is fentanyl. Thirty years ago it was PCP, then methamphetamine, rock cocaine, oxycontin and a few others until now fentanyl has taken the spotlight. Americans have been dying from overdose of narcotics ever since America began. Narcotics abuse is nothing knew yet instead of blaming the people who are dying from drug overdose we blame the drug.
And where are these dangerous drugs coming from? Mexico. And who benefits from that? The murderers who run the now legitimized drug cartels and corrupt Mexican officials. And who loses? The American public. I have read estimates that Americans spend over 150 billion dollars a year on illegal narcotics. And we still make it illegal. We support kidnap, murder, rape, bribery on a mass scale. Who can look at the photo of that sixteen year old holding her baby and then realize she along with the rest of her family was brutally murdered by cartel hitmen just because one of the family members was involved in the illegal narcotics trade and think it is still a good idea to support the drug lords?
Not me. We should legalize all narcotics immediately. We never had the right to outlaw them in the first place. It should be legalized, regulated and taxed. Put the drug lords out of business. Make sure that anyone who applies or a license to open a narcotics store passes a thorough background check. Conduct a background check on any investors. Clean it up. Make sure the manufacturing locations are clean. Don't allow any manufacturing to take place outside the country. Tax it heavily and use the tax to treat people who become addicted to narcotics. Use some of it to run public service programs warning people that if they are using narcotics for recreational purposes they are making a huge mistake. Then let them decide. There may be a spike in use for a time, but it will be a short period of time and we will learn about the effects of recreational narcotics use.
It could be that in certain quantities it is relatively safe. As long as we continue to support the illegal narcotics trade we will never know. And now these cartels are infesting the entire country. As far north as Montana and many other states they are witnessing a rise in all manner of crimes and an increase in deaths from overdose. And the amount of money the United States on enforcing our narcotics laws is staggering. It's almost 100 billion dollars a year when you include the cost of criminal prosecutions and then incarceration.
Americans are a fairly educated people, possibly the most educated fools in the world. And why do we do this? Nobody knows for sure. For thirteen years we tried prohibition and it was pretty much a failure. All we did was support a huge criminal syndicate. We supported kidnap, rape and murder and our society did not benefit from it. So why are we still supporting this madness now? It is nearly impossible to determine how many people die in the United States each year from drug related murder, certainly that sixteen year old girl and her baby were among the casualties, estimates run from 46,000 to 90,000. Opiate related deaths are estimated somewhere around 85,000. In addition to that we spend about 100 billion dollars to fight what law enforcement likes to call a 'war on drugs'. It is an immoral war. We have been engaged in this 'war' for over fifty years making it the longest war we've ever been involved in at a cost of over a trillion dollars and we continue doing the same thing over and over again with the same failed results. It's time we tried a different approach. One that costs much less both in dollars spent and lives ruined.
The United States could all but stop the wholesale murder of people on both sides of the border by legalizing all narcotics and then regulating and taxing the industry. You can practically guarantee that so-called accidental overdoses will be much lower because of the quality control that can be imposed. I fail to see how continuing the flow of dangerous narcotics across the border is helping with what is being described by a lot of people as an opiate crisis. If so, it is a crisis that we created ourselves and the solution is fairly simple; legalize all narcotics immediately.
Taking away the prohibition on narcotics probably will not make the problem go away, but it will slow it down substantially. If people insist on a perfect solution to the narcotics problem then we should get rid of all penal codes in America since none of our laws have effectively eradicated all crime. Use your heads folks we've spent trillions of dollars and suffered millions of deaths while claiming to be fighting a war anyone with any brains at all knows we can never win. It's time to stop the madness, legalize drugs and slow the drug smuggling trade to a mere trickle compared to the river flowing currently.
Simply allow the drug cartel leadership to die on the vine. When we take away their most affluent customers they will have a lot less to do.
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