Prohibition fuels gangsterism

Twenty-one slaughtered in the nightclub in Monterrey.
Eleven shot to death in Chalco, just outside Mexico City.
Ten decapitated in the northern city of Torreon.
In the last four years, at least 42,000 killed!
That's about one out of every five people in my county being murdered each year!

"Most of the dead were killed by warring drug cartels fighting over routes to the U.S. and increasingly-lucrative domestic drug markets."

Lots of folks think increased "war on drugs" will help. Certainly, society, north and south of the border, has failed miserably to stop rampant gangsterism. However, it's not drugs but PROHIBITION which provides the fuel for the modern equivalent of rum-runner profits and Al Capones.

Drug-abuse fear is understandable. My state is suffering a meth disaster. Crack is a hideous social pandemic. I have seen the ravages of heroin and alcohol, and I have a special disdain for that nasty crap nicotine. "Mere" marijuana is plainly not the safe substance it's purported to be, but neither is abuse of caffeine, sugar, and saturated fats good for the "temple of the spirit." Drugs are not the only vices, of course, as there's gambling and pornography and prostitution and one could add shopaholism or so many other forms of self-abuse, physical and mental. The individual cost is horrendous, as are the familial and societal effects.

So, we want to do something, and it is the impulse of those who don't think Constitutionally to legislate, to police "vice." The only result is to compound the problems and criminalize the casual users. To consider every instance of use as if it were transgression is to declare every user guilty without trial. Under prohibitionist mentality, the individual who enjoys a glass of wine is put on a par with the sot who beats his wife or drives drunk. This is UN-AMERICAN! How ironic, how perverse that the Left has (allegedly) championed personal freedom while the Right invests in more and worse Big Nannying! Repeal should be a conservative issue because prohibitionism is TYRANNY.

End prohibition. Legalize all "vice." Enforce strictly those good laws which deal with true transgression as we do (or ought to do) with public inebriation. Deal with habituation and addiction as we do (or ought to do) with alcoholism, through family, church, medical intervention, and involve the law only when an individual truly transgresses another's liberty. That would be liberty-respecting, right-respecting, American!

This decent principle, this ideal, gets lost amid exacerbated drug fears, gang fears, and the immense profits made by both sides off of the aberration of the "drug war." Until the conservatives can be corrected, the situation will remain as it has become, worsening, and turning our society over to thugs, both ganster and elected.