"El Chapo" Makes The Big Time

The Mexican government has gone exoatmospheric. Their fast-burn boost was ignited by Forbes magazine.

The folks over at Forbes celebrate the achievements of capitalism and capitalists. Every year the rag lists the big winners in the race to pursue wealth and this year Joaquin (El Chapo) Guzman made the cut at number 701. El Chapo made his gigabuck or so by providing commodities much desired by many living in the United States.

That's what has the patrones in Mexico City so hacked off. Sr Guzman is the chieftain of the Sinaloa cartel. This means he is a criminal. A very big time criminal.

Sure, "The Dwarf" as the five foot tall Guzman has been affectionately (?) nicknamed has some unpleasant attributes. He has shown, for example, a tendency to eliminate competition and increase market share by killing members of rival syndicates. More than a thousand homicides have been laid at El Chapo's doorstep. He also has a fondness for kidnapping, torture, and suborning Mexican law, military, intelligence and governmental officials.

For these and related reasons such as increased social and political turbulence caused by the robust rivalries and vigorous defensive measures of Sr Guzman and his equivalents at the other three major drug trafficking cartels the Mexican government is righteously annoyed. At Guzman. At Forbes. At the United States.

Eighty or so years ago another capitalist made a remark to the press which is quite apropos today with regard to El Chapo. Al Capone, a man with unpleasant aspects and an acute business sense, commented, "I am doing what any good businessman does. I am meeting a public demand."

Yep, bucko, Al was doing just that. Meeting a widespread and readily expressed American need. The need to get high. To feel convivial. To lay aside worries and doubts, burdens and fears.

The need to get drunk. Or, at least, mildly tipsy.

Of course, Big Al was meeting that need during the time of the Noble Experiment, Prohibition. Reasons both sound and fantastic, arguments based on science, both legitimate and junk, justifications based on psychological, sociological and economic theories had all been invoked on behalf of a moral, not to say theological conclusion. Booze was evil. Alcohol was the devil's tool.

Caught up in a tidal wave of religiously derived morality as Americans have been from time to time in our history, the politicos and public combined to pass both a constitutional amendment and enabling legislation which, they were sure, would wipe out evil by eliminating the devil's beverage.

Al Capone moved quickly from the job of whorehouse bouncer to syndicate capo. He was not alone in effecting a rapid rise from obscurity to notoriety. He was not alone in reaping great wealth from the collective great thirst of We the People.

He was not alone in shooting and bludgeoning his way to greater market share, greater profits, greater success.

But, setting details of his business plan and methods aside, Al Capone was every bit as successful a capitalist as Henry Ford or David Sarnoff or Sam Goldwyn.

Ultimately Scarface took a fall for failing to pay income taxes. That wasn't what killed the blackmarket booze industry dead. Rather, when sanity finally prevailed in the collective American mind and the Noble Experiment was declared over, the need for bathtub gin and just-off-the-boat hooch disappeared overnight.

During the years of Prohibition the US government spent loads of money, made heaps of arrests, sent people to jail in large numbers. The American government even made ugly faces in the direction of foreign regimes which didn't make suitable efforts to stop the running of Demon Rum across the border.

Comes now Joaquin Guzman, Al Capone on steroids. El Chapo is Big Al magnified by a couple of orders of magnitude. As Al was the product of the moral climate of his times, so is Sr Guzman.

Theologically derived morality discretely clothed by science (more junk than genuine,) and data drawn from sociological, economic and psychological sources has been given free expression in the decades long "War on Drugs." Despite the risks, regardless of the hectoring, unconcerned over the warnings, a goodly number of Americans insist on altering their consciousness.

There is an evident need on the part of many humans to bend their brains via chemical means. It may even be inherent to our genome. It is a constant reality throughout our collective history. It is alive and well today.

This is the need which Sr Guzman meets. It is the need which has made him rich. It is the need which is costing Mexico many, many lives.

Far from Mexico, this need gives Taliban and others the monetary muscle necessary to kill Americans. The need for an altered state on the part of Americans, Europeans and others throughout the world fuels corruption, undercuts governmental integrity and legitimacy, diverts resources from vital, creative application to the wasteland of the "drug war."

Get a grip on it: Whether booze or smack, pot or pills, acid, shrooms or crank, Xanax from a physician or PCP from a pusher, people are bound and determined to move their minds, bend their brains, muck with the circuits, get high, stoned, wasted, tell the consensual, objective reality to shove it.

Cops and soldiers, therapists and presidents are not going to stop it. Preachers, pundits, politicos, tooth-gnashing, hand-wringing Health Nazis are not going to end the widespread human need to get high. Period. End of report.

The hang-'em-high, off-with-their-heads wallahs of Singapore or Iran or Saudi Arabia may kill those in need, but not the need. The need is always there, lurking in the brains and minds of humans generally.

That's right, ma, "everybody must get stoned."

As long as there is a need, there will be people like Al Capone, Joaquin Guzman, groups like the Mafia, or Taliban. People and groups ready and willing to meet the need, make the profits.

As long as the need and the meeting of it are considered immoral, against the will of whatsoever deity, including the god of "productivity" and the idol of "wellness," the business plans and methods exemplified by the "Outfit" in Chicago back in the good old days of blasting tommyguns or the cartels today with RPG's and LAW's, AK's and M-16s will continue in their customary bloody and corrupting ways.

It's time all and sundry got a grip on reality. The "War on Drugs" was lost before it was declared forty years ago by Richard Nixon. Every indicator both historical and contemporary undergirds that conclusion.

Unless and until that halcyon day somewhere in the haze of the future when we understand the many bases for the need to get high, the only realistic approach is to accommodate the reality of the need's existence. That means we have no genuine option other than legalization.

With legalization the profit disappears. There will be no need for the killing, the corrupting, the ripping of social and political fabric.

There will be no need for El Chapo. Metaphorically at least Sr Guzman and his ilk will be as dead as Al Capone. Or, if they stay in illegal businesses as did the Outfit after Prohibition's end, the nature of the goods and services will be different and perhaps more readily addressed by governments and societies.

SecState Clinton would be very well advised to keep this thought in mind when she heads to Mexico City in a couple of weeks to discuss cooperation in the "War on Drugs." Maybe it's time to agree, "We ain't going to study war no more."