Mar 03, 2009
drug war, law enforcement, Prohibition
On Sunday night, CBS's "60 Minutes" did a grimly fascinating piece on the escalating drug war in Mexico. Reported by Anderson Cooper (whose day job, of course, is at CNN), the piece was as notable for what it didn't cover as what it did. Like most recent media coverage of the growing carnage along our southern border, the "60 Minutes" story carefully tiptoed around the proverbial elephant in the room.
That elephant, of course, is prohibition. Here is a piece of what I wrote in a letter to Cooper after watching his report:
There is nothing about the trade in marijuana or any other drug that is inherently violent. The violence is entirely an artifact of prohibition, a policy which consciously relegates a highly popular and valued product such as marijuana to the criminal underground. We experienced this dramatically during the U.S.'s experiment with Prohibition of alcohol: From 1919 to 1933, the liquor trade was fraught with violence, the murder rate soared, and prisons were jammed -- while gangsters got very, very rich. As soon as Prohibition ended, the bootleggers disappeared and the alcoholic beverage business returned to the hands of licensed, regulated, law-abiding businesspeople.
Of course, Cooper and CBS are far from alone. News media accounts of the catastrophe in Mexico have been disturbingly consistent in their avoidance of the central issue. Like "60 Minutes," many have avoided including, even briefly, anyone willing to question prohibition.
This is especially shocking after the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy (co-chaired by former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo) urged decriminalization of marijuana and a broader rethinking of the drug war for precisely this reason. "We are farther than ever from the announced goal of eradicating drugs," the commission wrote in its recent report. "It is imperative to review critically the deficiencies of the prohibitionist strategy adopted by the United States."
U.S. policies on marijuana -- by far the largest cash cow for Mexican drug gangs -- are directly adding to the carnage taking place literally walking distance from San Diego and El Paso. It would be nice if our news media at least started asking the relevant questions.