It's A Shooting War On This Side Of The Border

The Geek did not ever meet Rob Krentz. But, he knows other men like the murdered Arizona rancher. Mr Kentz and his dog met death at the hands of a Mexican, an illegal entrant to the US, probably a member of one of the drug smuggling syndicates so active in this part of our country.

By all reports the murdered fifth generation rancher was like most of the breed found here in the vast, sparsely populated area of harsh hills and white hot deserts--self-reliant, independent, ready to help those in need (including illegal aliens), wresting a living from a territory which is unforgiving and unkind in the extreme to those who are weak of will, mind, or body. Scoffed at as shambling last remnants of an obsolescent way of living by the sophisticated denizens of urban America, a relic of our past environmental "insensitivity," ranchers such as Mr Krentz have had nearly daily acquaintanceship with two high profile areas of modern life known only in the abstract by the majority of our fellow citizens.

The Great Emptiness extending to a depth of a hundred or so kilometers along the US-Mexico border interrupted only every now and then by towns is the line of contact along which the Americans fight out their "battles" against the flow of imported, illegal drugs, and the danger zone through which hundreds of thousands of economic opportunists, political fugitives, must pass. Like Mr Krentz and all the ranchers like him in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, the Geek has encountered exhausted, hungry, border-crossers in need of aid. Likewise, the Geek has observed the mule trains and low flying aircraft bringing their very profitable cargoes to the bottomless maw of American appetites.

It is for all these reasons of commonality that the Geek feels a particular sympathy for Mr Krantz, or, more accurately, his family and friends. Mr Krantz was collateral damage in the long failed American "War on Drugs." His death was incidental, perhaps even unintended. It was coolly impersonal as if he were simply a person unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Be that as it may, Mr Krentz died as a direct consequence of an American policy which has existed for well over a decade as a monument to the power of misplaced belief. The "Drug War" has been a conspicuous failure for its entire forty year existence by any and all rational measurements. A cost-benefit analysis would--and does--show that the costs, economic, social, political, and personal have far outweighed any benefit.

In recent years the costs--particularly those measured in lives lost--have escalated significantly. No where has this been more evident than along the Mexican border. The violence associated with "market share enhancement" has turned the city of Ciudad Juarez into a place so soaked in blood as to make Kabul safe in comparison. (OK, Caracas still is far ahead of Juarez in the Murder Derby.)

In the past twenty-seven months, over five thousand have been KIA in El Paso's sister city. Neither the body count nor the use of thousands of troops have lowered the violence. Quite the contrary. Unlike the killing of Krentz, the destruction of Juarez has been a deliberate act of policy executed by the rival syndicates but (inadvertently)aided and abetted by the Mexican government. For years the government and elites of Mexico have welcomed the drug trade as a necessary underpinning for the wheezing Mexican economy.

Now that the drug monster has grown to proportions that threaten the country's continuation as a viable polity, the government is trying too little and far too late to regain control of its own territory. Only during the past two or so years has the Mexican government finally taken real as opposed to rhetorical action in the US declared "War on Drugs." However, the Mexican authorities are unconcerned about the "Drug War" per se, only about their retention of power.

While it is irritating to listen to Mexican officials and journalists blame the totality of the current mess on the US, there is a very large germ of truth behind their portmanteau charge of American culpability. The proposition that the drug "war" would end if Americans curtailed their seemingly insatiable desire for an altered state of consciousness is accurate.

There is only one viable means to remove the problem of illegal drugs. That method is to remove the word "illegal" from the phrase. While education (whatever that might mean or imply) and treatment (whatever that might mean or imply) may serve to lower the desire for mind altering substances over time, the only practical way to abate the drug problem is to legalize the drugs.

To be sure battalions of moralists and brigades of those with a vested interest in the status quo will howl that legalization will be the end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it. So what? By what rational process using what data sets can it be shown that the consequences of legalization will be worse than a continuation of the status quo?

Leaving aside the domestic results of continuing the same old, same old, the foreign policy concerns and national interests of the US require we start the long, tortured process of political debate with a view to ending the "War on Drugs." This does not imply that we must at some future date declare "unconditional surrender" to our desire for an altered state of consciousness; rather it implies that we must sign a rational truce with the consequences of our harboring this desire deep in our brains.

Like it or not, the only way we will see the shooting stop on our side of the border as well as the Mexican, is to heed the counsel of experience gained by the blood of so many including Rob Krentz.