However, the latter is more insidious and violates the public conscience in a more serious way. We must end the war on drugs, and we must do it now. We need to legalize marijuana, regulate all other more extreme substances, and treat them as public health problems, not criminal ones. Not confronting this fundamental problem in our society will kill thousands of people. Between 2006 and 2009, drug-related violence killed at least 18,000 people across Mexico. The execution of a woman in Ciudad Juárez, just across the border from El Paso, caught the attention of many for its bizarre and violent method of killing. But the real truth was not that women were being killed. Because if some people have the impression that only women are killed, they are wrong. Hundreds of people were murdered, and the US media was so fond of its own scandals that it promoted a feminine perspective and ignored the fundamental indiscriminate nature of the killings.
We can’t even accept the billions of dollars wasted funneling weapons to drug lords. We are literally arming the destabilizing forces driving illegal immigration. In the process, we are creating a nightmare problem that makes today’s immigration problems seem incomparably small.
If we want to get to a better place, we have to face our own false beliefs. That means creating meaningful guest worker programs and stopping the war on drugs. Famous author Chuck Borden said it best. “We’re a 12-pack nation and we don’t allow anyone to have a joint.”
Chuck Pezeshki is a professor of mechanical and materials engineering at Washington State University.
