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It's Mexico. The root cause is poverty and misery, not drugs. Before poor and desperate Mexicans discovered drugs were profitable, they were into banditry. And there will always be those who use chaos and violence to build their own base of power at the expense of everyone else.
Focusing on the the violence associated with the "war on drugs" disregards two facts: first, that drugs are illegal for damn good reasons that seem strange to some people only because, with enough time, history has been well enough forgotten that some are prepared to repeat it, and second, that most of the problems driving the violence could be solved by non-violent means that Americans don't have the patience or depth to consider.
Americans buy drugs because they're unhappy with their lives, and the overpowered American currency enables them to enslave foreigners in the service of their addiction. Americans are unhappy because of the lack of purpose and structure in American society, and because the nihilistic pursuit of "efficiency" and "freedom" has eviscerated the American economy and left even those with jobs miserable.
Of course when you try to explain any of what I just said to ordinary Americans, they look at you like you're from planet Mars. The notion that social values and the world at large actually might be a driving force in individual behavior is completely outside the American psyche. Americans never stop to think that inner-city deadenders and the idle rich might be less compelled to turn to drugs if their lives were simply more fulfilling, or the corollary that maybe, just maybe, this isn't the best of all possible worlds.
Americans are by and large too stupid and ignorant to consider that make-work, education, housing, healthcare, police coverage (of non-drug offenses such as theft and hooliganism), and social opportunity might actually make drugs obsolete. Those solutions, again, take patience and wisdom.
Mexicans export drugs because, as I said, the American currency is overpowered, and their own government has little authority and control, partly because of age-old problems that go back to Cortez and partly because of American interference in the service of corporate interests. The basic wants of Mexico - land and liberty - have not changed since the days of Zapata. People can't earn an honest living, and the Mexican government has less power than the mob - removing drugs from the equation won't fix that, it just means that mob violence will go back to being what it was 100 years ago, racketeering, extortion, human trafficking and the like. In fact legalizing drugs would not even remove violence any more than trade in oil and diamonds removes violence from Nigeria.
Mexico's problems are probably even more challenging than those of the US and there is no easy fix. The best thing that can probably be done is to remove the US from the equation by disbanding the CIA, mandating that any products made in Mexico for sale in the US obey American laws, extending the protection of American law to Mexican citizens, and restructuring the American economy to improve the quality of life for our poorest citizens while reducing the power of the currency. Doing so would effectively vacillate the destructive role that American social problems and dollar power wreak on Mexico.
As to legalization, I'll say it again. Drugs are defacto legal in Russia and that has solved no problems there, in fact the widespread use of opiates is a profoundly destructive force. Same with the notorious Russian penchant for alcoholism. Clearly, legalization, alone, does not solve problems, nor is legalizing drugs and alcohol a benign measure for everyone but the user. Life is hard in a country where one can't ignore the social destruction, the chaos, the uncertainty, the culture of incompetence created by widespread use of drugs and alcohol.
If you want another example, look at Germany in the 1920s, when a country in misery sought to escape its problems through what was at the time the newly invented novelty of psychoactive drugs, before laws were conceived banning them.
Ming China. Americans are dismissive of the importance of the history because it's not as cool as reading about American heroes shooting Nazi bad guys. But I firmly believe that the history of Ming China will be THE relevant example for what history is to come in our own lifetimes - how Ming China went from being a proud, sovereign, independent nation to a weak country controlled by outsiders who hid behind the "free market" and selectively applied the laws of China and Europe to their own advantage, how the Chinese had to make the enormously difficult commitment to challenging their culture's own deficiencies and blind spots and open their minds to wider options, and above all else the tremendously destructive impact of legalized drugs on Ming China, something the Chinese have definitely not forgotten given their determined - and highly successful - anti-drug efforts.
And that bullshit on Wikipedia about some unnamed advisor proposing legalization is just that, unsourced bullshit, a political edit. Legalized drugs have been tried and the results were horrible.
Aestu of Bleeding Hollow... Nihilism is a copout.
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