We so need an exit strategy from the war on drugs.
How about tough sentences for drug dealers, actually enforcing our existing laws, and reforming the prison system (keep prisoners separate, etc. so that it’s not Crime University). Not to mention no tolerance for heroin sales as it’s funding terror.
Or were you looking for a “marijuana, it’s not so bad” response?
In most parts of the country people do get long prison sentences for dealing drugs, and existing laws are being enforced. They bust people left and right. About 20% of the people in our state prisons are in for drug crimes, and in the federal system it's over 50%. And tough sentences? The maximum sentence in my state for selling any tiny amount of a drug like meth or cocaine or heroin or methadone or hydrocodone, any Schedule one or two drug, is life in prison for a first offense. The sentences are potentially very long, and in most parts of the country people are in fact getting long sentences for small time offenses.
State prison drug offender populations:
http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook/pdf/t600012004.pdf
Federal prison drug offender populations:
http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook/pdf/t657.pdf
I'm not recommending we legalize all drugs if that's what you're thinking I'm going to say, but we should acknowledge that we have in fact been trying for a long time to take care of the drug supply problem and that it hasn't been working. We do have tough laws which we enforce and we put an awful lot of people in prison. It doesn't fix the drug problem for us though because there are still always plenty left behind who will supply the drugs to people that want them. That's not going to change even if we stay on this present course locking more and more people up every year on drug crimes. There is a big demand for drugs and lot of money to be made supplying the drugs and there will always be plenty of people who will do that as long as there is so much money to be made, many billions every year.
Our government recently estimated that Mexican drug trafficking organizations make 13.8 billion dollars a year, 8.6 billion from marijuana alone. This is a ridiculous sum of money and it's even more ridiculous in a country like Mexico where where hardly anyone has any money and where $13.8 billion will go a lot further than it will here. No wonder half the cops and government officials have been corrupted. No wonder these cartels murder each other fighting over a bigger piece of the pie and murder anyone that gets in the way of making that money, including those in law enforcement and the judicial branch of their government. There is just too much money being made selling drugs Americans.
There is no way we will arrest and imprison enough people to stop this. We'll probably try though. We'll crack down even more and make it such that more than half the people in our state prisons are there for drug offenses and more than three quarters of our federal prisoners are in for drug offenses. It won't make a difference though. We'll just being throwing more good money after bad.
I don't know what the answer is. We're not going to start executing everyone involved with drug on the spot. I doubt we start giving small time drug dealers the death penalty either. That won't happen here and I don't know that even that would work if we did do it. I'm not opposed to a border wall, but I don't think that would stop really determined people from getting the drugs in to make all these billions of dollars there are to be made. People get pretty darned innovative when there is that much money on the line. They'll figure out how to get the drugs in one way or another. This is just a tough problem.