When Cutting and Running Might Do Some Good

In addition to not reducing the supply of drugs and not increasing the street price of drugs, supply-side drug control policies appear to have the effect of increasing requests for political asylum. Mexican drug trafficking organizations have responded to attacks on their economic interests by Mexican security forces by killing over 30,000 people in 4 years. Such a situation is not sustainable.

Currently, the United States spends hundreds of millions of dollars per year training Mexican security forces to reduce the supply of narcotics coming into the US. These are admirable goals, but will probably never work. The money we've spent on training Mexican security forces doesn't appear to be making any impact at all, short of the very high profile killing of Arturo Beltran Leyva. While this may be something to cheer about because he was a bad guy, it has the effect of creating a vacuum that other drug producers will try to fill, likely leading to more outbursts of violence. This is exactly what happened in Colombia in the 1990s. After the death of Pablo Escobar and the arrests of the leaders of the Cali Cartel, the number of drug trafficking organizations exploded, and more and more drugs were moved through Mexico as a result. Breaking up cartels will probably decrease the street price of drugs over the long term, because more producers will enter the market to pick up the slack created by cartels who have left the market.

It's clear that 80 years of attempts at supply-reduction haven't really worked. People can point to individual successes like Turkey, but the end of illicit drug production in Turkey didn't decrease global production at all. It just shifted to other places in the world. Our drug policies exacerbate problems rather than solving them. By focusing on the fact that drugs are imported into the United States and pretty much ignoring what creates incentives for importing drugs (demand) we're resigning ourselves to wasting money. Instead of sending around $400 million a year to Mexico, we should probably move toward European-style drug control policies; which emphasize access to drug treatment and other methods to reduce demand.