Victimless? Bullshit!

Anyone who thinks smoking marijuana is a victimless crime needs to read this.

FWIW, I'm not rabidly anti-drugs. I don't believe that smoking marijuana leads to using hard drugs. Nor do I believe that recreational tooting makes one a slack-jawed drooling pothead. I do, however, believe that actions have consequences. Anyone who chooses to smoke marijuana has some degree of moral culpability in the deaths of not only Lesley Enriquez and Arthur Redelfs, and the orphaning of their baby, but also the deaths and downstream impacts of everyone else killed by the drug cartels.

I work three days a week in a Texas border town. Things happen down there that aren't reported outside of the local media, and often aren't even reported there. The cartels torture and murder government officials, law enforcement personnel, journalists (link1; link2 - note the quote "The Inter-American Press Association says a fifth [journalist in 2010] was recently killed in the border city of Reynosa, but media outlets there are too afraid to file a police report." - link 3), and even social workers and priests in the most gruesome ways imaginable, with no regard for innocent bystanders or collateral damage (11-month-old shot in the head; summary) .

Many of my students, and some of the faculty, live across the border and come to the U.S. to study or teach. They tell stories of hour-long gun battles in the streets, grenade attacks on police stations, and road blocks by cartel members - not police - for purposes of kidnapping, extortion, and intimidation (BTW - we can hear the shots and explosions from our side of the river). Once they cross the border into Mexico they go straight home and stay there until it's time to return for class. All their shopping and socializing is done on the U.S. side. It sounds like life in Baghdad or Kabul, not in a city that is literally a stone's throw from the United States.

So what's the solution? Well, to me it seems a lot like Prohibition. Organized crime got a big boost when alcohol was criminalized. Once it was legitimized the sale and consumption was regulated and taxed (God knows the government could use the income, the way obama and the dems are bleeding us dry - and I'll take the IRS against even the toughest, most vicious cartel), and the gangs turned to other sources of income (prostitution, gambling, loan-sharking, unions...). IMO we should learn from history and give legalization a try. It can't be worse than what's happening now.

And if you use drugs, you share in the responsibility for the abhorrent and cowardly violence that is desecrating Mexico and spreading northward...