Ban on Drugs

I had a discussion recently with the aide to a well known politician in Mexico City. The conversation was over drinks, and since I’m far from being a reporter, I’ll leave names out of it. Besides, what’s important is the content.

The political aide asked. “Tell me Mario, in what you write, fiction wise, you treat these cartels like bands of heroes, why is that?”

“I don’t think they’re heroes,” I said. “I just think that they aren’t the enemy that we should be fighting.”

This, of course was like lighting a fuse to a stick of dynamite. This political aide—who we’ll call Ruben lost his older brother to this incessant was against organized; his brother was a federal police officer. Maybe part of me wanted to light the fuse. Because I’m just as frustrated as anyone else by the seemingly unending violence throughout Mexico...and the world at large.

We both sipped our drinks in silence. A silence broken by me when I told him that I wasn’t trying to reopen a fresh wound. “I know your loss is recent. The last thing you wanna hear is that your big brother died in vain—”

“He didn’t,” Ruben said firmly.

“I know,” I said. My friend here is an avid weight lifter with about thirty-five kilos on me, easy. “You opened the door to this conversation, so hear me out.

“The government has essentially decided to wage war at the symptoms rather than the disease. You kill one drig trafficker and before his corpse is cold another has stepped into his place. On the off chance that the police arrest him, then parade him before the cameras, and even maybe get information from him, what has really been gained? More traffickers maybe arrested, turned, or killed, but so what? The cocaine still comes in, and the majority of it still makes it to the U.S. market. If not with one trafficker, then with another.”

Ruben signaled to the bartender for two more rounds. “We’re making the prison sentences harder, and the officers are a lot less hesitant to fire first and ask questions later.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “You could bring back the firing squad and public hangings and it wouldn’t change a damn thing. A man who is desperate is not thinking about the consequences of what may or may not happen to him tomorrow or the next day. He’s living in the moment. Yesterday he might have been an upstanding citizen, but he was hungry, his clothing was secondhand, and his prospects for meeting a beautiful woman, or for helping his elderly mother with money were zero. Yesterday he was a victim. But today...”

“Today he’s a criminal,” Ruben finished emphatically for me.

“Why because he decided to do what everyone else has been doing for as long as history has recorded? Look around...this isn’t a society, this is a free for all. As a whole we’re pitted against one another by the power of the almighty dollar. We’re asked to play by the rules set in place by those in power, with money, those who aren’t hungry. No man worth his salt is going to play by those rules.”

“It’s called civilization—progress.”

“What civilization, what progress?” I asked, feeling my pores open up. “The fact that we have more technology andlive longer aren’t in themselves progress. We still control people, if not by the blade of a sword, than by the barrel of a gun; we still kill, torture, and abuse our fellow citizen.

“Most nations tout equally but in all actuality, what we have here is a modern form of slavery.” I stopped and thought for a moment. “I take that back, we have progressed. The Egyptians had to use whips and chains to build their temples and mine their gold.

In all our ‘progress’ we’ve figured out how to program man into being a slave while convinced that he’s free. The fact that someone pays them for their efforts doesn’t make them free, especially not when starvation and death are the only other options.”

“You’re taking this a little far—slavery?”

“Ever been to India?” I asked. He shook his head negatively.

“Well, a huge population;—mostly poor, uneducated, and without opportunity to progress living in a country rapidly expanding under a tech boom that had made way to a middle class. Which, of course, is touted as good news, without anyone stopping to question it. Yes, there is more money, more private property and more infrastructure development—more capitalism.”

“Exactly more jobs.”

“Yeah, the construction industry is one of India’s largest employers. The labor force is made up of migrants from the devastated agriculture sector, escaping poverty, disease, and death they find themselves forced into a labor economy that exploits them with unsfe working environments, horrible living conditions, and almost complete social exclusion. I’ve seen them, and I tell you—they’re slaves. Even children work on these construction sites. These people are seen as nothing more than an expendable resource, like trees to be cut down, or water or air to be polluted.”

Rueben took a deep sigh. I could see in his eyes that he wasn’t overly concerned with India’s poor when Mexico has more than it’s fair share. “This has what to do with narco trafficking?”

“Everything” I said, “because the wealthy in India are no different from the wealthy anywhere else in the world. If Mexico had the kind economic growth that I ndia or China has, the poor here would be exploited just the same. The poor understand this which is why your attempts at stopping them from trafficking the one product they have that Americans want is futile at best.”

“You’ve obviously never seen what cocaine, heroin, and all these other poisons do to people—to kids. You expect the governments of the world to just sit back let their populations destroy themselves from the indside out?”

“If that’s what a population wants to do, then they will do it with or without the approval of some bureaucrat who’s never tasted the bitternss of poverty. Nobody wants to live with someone else’s rules over their head. Nobody wants to live under the perpetual threat of ‘do this—or else.’ Besides, if someone is determined to destroy themselves so instead alleviate the pains of their reality, they will ultimately find a way to do so, whether it be through alcohol, prescription meds, or some other chemical equivalent waiting to be discovered. these rules, these laws, these futile attempts at controlling people doesn’t work. They don’t address wht people find themselves so dissatisfied with life that they find chemical stimulation to be the only answer available to them. Until you address that problem, all that’s going to be achieved with this war on drugs is more senseless killing.”

“Well, what is the problem?” Rueben asked, somewhat sarcastically.

“Everything,” I said. “Starting from our values and going up from there. We value money which translates into power...and power gives us freedom to do and live how we want. Just because someone is poor doesn’t mean that they stop dreaming color, of freedom. The poor want freedom from the government sanctioned slavery just the same as the rich want to keep theirs.”

“So what you’re saying is that because I was born into a priveleged life that provided me with opportunity, that I’m somehow against the poor and less fortunate, that I want to keep them where they are?”

“I don’t presume to kmow what you want,” I said. “I know that somewhere along the line your family seized opportunities to make profit, to secure itself from the ills of humanity.”

“Not with selling drugs!”

“Relax,” I laughed, trying to difuse the tension. “Nobody is saying that your family sells drugs. All I’m saying is that they seized an opportunity, probably several, and, some of them had risks associated with them. But the reward of securing their family’s future was worth the risk in the short term. That’s no different from what so many young Mexicans are doing...they’re sezing an opportunity.

“Yes,” I said, anticipating what he was about to say. “Their opportunity happens to be an addictive drug that destroys lives. We could also argue that guns are made for the single end of killing, cigarettes cause cancer, alcohol destroys more lives than drug use, and drilling for oil destroys our environment—but all these are perfectly legal. tell me that it isn’t hypocrisy for the U.S government to ban the cocaine and heroin, the two end products that happen to flood billions into Latin American economics, if they themselves could produce it they would undoubtebly be its biggest advocates. What American policy makers fear isn’t the well-being of its citizens, but fear of what economically powerful neighbors to the South might mean in generations to come. South Americans have two extremely resillient crops—coca and poppy—both extremely valuable on the world markets and they’re not supposed to sell them because it’s harmful. Can someone show me a product that isn’t harmful?”

“You don’t understand, Mario.”

“No, I don’t...”