I can remember attending some public urban meetings in the mid 1990s where a big issue was being made about the Bush connection with promoting the drug trade. I know it was before 1996. Today I was listening to an interesting program on drugs in Latin America. There was an American journalist whose specialty was economics who was interviewing powerful drug cartel guys in prison. He was interviewing them as people operating a business, and asking questions that he would ask any other big business executive. They were quite responsive and he has written a book. He gave statistics on various aspects of the drug problem. One was that spending money on drug treatment in the US was 6 times as cost effective as going into the countries and trying to fight it there. The high crime and murder rates in various US/Mexican border states is because there are only a limited number of them so the competition is fierce and deadly.
He described a Swiss program where they legalized heroin prescribed by doctors. Many middle class addicts were dealing drugs to pay for their own habits. When they no longer needed to find/create customers because it was relatively cheap going to the doctor, the rate of addiction started going down because new addicts were NOT being created. He also said that the US decriminalization/legalization of marijuana is already have noticeable effects on that business south of the border.
Good points. The War on Drugs is stupid and empowers the cartels.