Shaky warzone

The situation over in Mexico is turning towards worse for each day that passes. And I am not talking about some average earthquake. I’ve been writing about the unwinnable drug war the Mexican government started and continues to escalate for a long time now.

It is time for people of this earth (excluding government that never will acknowledge it) to realize two things; firstly that the “war against drugs” is unwinnable. It doesn’t matter how severe punishments there are for peddling drugs are or how many police officers you put into the equation, it has no barring whatsoever if you throw the military at kingpins, it will always, without exception, fail. Secondly it is the ‘war’ itself that creates the problems, not the drugs or the gangs. In effect it is the government that is at fault, not the mafia or the terrorists.

Since the Mexican government stepped up their unwinnable war close to 20,000 people have died, the costs has escalated with hundreds of billions, and now the cartels are starting to attack military installations.

Apparently coordinated attacks by dozens of gunmen took place last week targeting two army garrisons in northern Mexico. Military patrols and checkpoints have repeatedly come under fire in Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leon, where armed gangs have raised roadblocks in the middle of cities and around army bases.

Jailbreaks are now so common in Mexico that most inmates don’t expect to sit off their sentences. And entire towns are being evacuated, some voluntary, others by force by drug gangs. Yeah, you read it right. Entire communities are being told by the cartels to leave or die.

Almost every day heads from decapitated bodies are found. And things are not calming down in any way, on the contrary. More and more bloggers and independent sources are talking about a civil war, which the Mexican authorities as well as their criminal counterparts in Washington are ignoring or trying to hide.

Let’s put this in a mathematical term.

I + HP + HC = HP

In this equation I stand for ‘illegality’, HP stands for ‘higher punishment’, HC is ‘higher costs’ and the summation HP is ‘higher profits’. This is contingent on people wanting drugs, which we know they always have and always will.

If you make something illegal profits for selling it goes up. If you increase punishment and in other ways increase the costs for making and selling it, profits go up.

So when the Mexican government throws military at gangs, all they really do is make the profits go way up. If they lock up a couple of gangster, then profits for those outside jail go up and that’s an invitation for more people to join in.

The solution, the only sensible and actually working solution is of course to legalize drugs. If drugs were legal they would be sold at supermarkets at a fraction of the cost and scrutinized by the market. And almost every criminal organization, as well as most terrorist groups, would disappear.

This civil war in Mexico could be over tomorrow if they legalized drugs. But you see, the government doesn’t want that, not for any nice protecting of you reason, oh no, they want this war because when there’s a war going on, who do we turn to for protection? Yes, that’s right… This is also why they are fighting the war against terrorism, the war against poverty, the war against unemployment, the war against inflation. All of these things are created by government and then fought by government under the disguise of "war".

So when a quake at the magnitude of 7.2 topples buildings and shake things up a bit, it cannot hold a candle to the damage being done to the Mexican people by their government.