Success and Failure in the US-Mexico War on Drugs Essay -- Essays Pape

Illegal narcotic drugs champion a $60 billion market in the U.S., and this year altogether the State and Federal governments will each spend roughly $20 billion in attempting to stifle this market. The amount of m bingley involved in the drug trade, substantially inflated due to prohibition, makes both systemic rotting and violence inevitable. The illegal drug trade is a sophisticated global network, and while no nations involvement is limited to one economic function, one relationship is crystal clear Mexico serves as a high-volume channel of drugs into the United States, and drug traffickers will go to great lengths to treat serving the American consumers as long as their demand exists. A 1997 article stated that narcotics funnel as much as $30 billion into the Mexican economy each year, more than the countrys top two legitimate exports combined.1 Despite decades of attempts to control this illegal activity, the common perception is that the United States war on drugs has failed to substantially reduce both the supply and demand of illegal drugs. Supply-side efforts have been plagued by conflicting semipolitical priorities and corruption in both American and Mexican administrations, while the dearly-won anti-drug advertising campaigns and increased incarcerations of drug users have had only limited succeeder in decreasing the demand for drugs. Furthermore, the inherent difficulty of international coordination in such an effort has hindered the success of the drug war. As James Finckenauer, Ph.D. of the home(a) Institute of Justice states, The complexity of the worldwide drug market and the ample resources available to narcotic producers and traffickers requires afflicted countries to collabor... ... wellnessy People 2000 Final Review. discussion section of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and depicted object Center for Health Statistics. October, 2001.15 News from the DEA. Speech by Asa Hutchinson, September 16, 2002. Baylor University. 16 Community Epidemiology Work Group. epidemiologic Trends in Drug Abuse Advance Report. National Institutes of Health and National Institute on Drug Abuse. December, 1999.17 www.drugsense.org18 Gangster Cops, a lecture by Joseph McNamara, Stanford University. Engineering 297, April 30, 2003. 19 Gangster Cops, a lecture by Joseph McNamara, Stanford University. Engineering 297, April 30, 2003.20 Vicente switch on the Transition, NAFTA, Corruption, Drugs, the Economy... Business Week July 17, 2000.