You're right. The name was a stupid typo. I'll have it fixed. Falibility is one of my strong suits. That said, having changed the name and re-read the piece...I'm sticking with my guns on the rest of the piece. Apologies.

While your on "stupid typo", Dave, fallibility (with a double L) may be one of your strong suits.

If we're grading on spelling, we should make sure our grammar is correct, lest we look like smug idiots. .."While YOU'RE . . . ." not your.

That is a relatively one dimensional outlook. There are many policies changes that could be made, in addition to enforcement, that could change the dynamics of the situation.

"Sealing" the border for the purpose of halting the drug trade is a ludicrous proposition with no grounding in reality. Even if it were possible, it would be at an astronomical expense and provide no tangible benefit.

Like sugar or iPhones, high-demand, high-margin commodities will find their way into the hands of consumers, regardless of the logistic rigors required to deliver and acquire them. Plug one leak and another will spring elsewhere. The insane fallacy of "fighting" against products that grow from the ground is what has destroyed so many lives and communities, not the product itself.

Regardless of what your pastor, police, principal or local politician tells you, the vast majority of people who use recreational drugs do so responsibly, without cost to their friends, family, career or health. For those who are unable to moderate, the costs of treating addiction are a tiny fraction of the overwhelming cost of fighting a war on plants and the people who transport them.

The only way this insane murder and destruction will end is if the world wakes up and realizes that recreational drugs are a just another natural commodity, and should be traded, taxed and regulated like oranges, lumber, and steel.

I know this is a hard concept for you Drug Warriors to grasp, but our society will not collapse if recreational drugs were legal, taxed and regulated. As evidence, I cite "Ethyl alcohol," available in a wide variety of tastes and colors at your local convenience store. Considering its availability, it's amazing we're not all drunk, all the time, isn't it? I can get all the cocaine, heroin, and marijuana I could afford right now with just a few phone calls, but I don't.

Funny that.

There is nothing recreational about heroin!
The only people advocating for the leagalisation of drugs are those hooked on drugs, or making money on the manufacturing, sale or otherwise being in the loop. Are you being paid to advertise your "believes"? We win you lose!

several years back Portugal decided to base their drug policies around evidence and reason. As a result, they decriminalized ALL drug use and/or possesion. Trafficking in drugs remained illegal. When the idea to do this was floated in the public arena, the same fears that we have, eg. that drug use and addiction would sky-rocket, robberies and crimes by addicts needing a "fix" would increase, foriegners would increase as a result of drug "tourism", etc. etc. crime would increae....all these and more were heard. But they did it anyhow.

The results were not at all what most people would expect, especially not after us all having been steeped in anti-drug commercials and such for decades now. Drug use among teenagers actually went down. AIDS and hepatitus infections plummeted, more people went into treatment to get off them altogether, and those alien hordes of drug tourists" never did materialize. Overall, this brave experiment in running government by reason instead of emotions was an unparelled success. Given this example here and the sharp decline in gang violence upon repeal of alcohol prohibition historically, it's obvious that there certainly is another choice.

People need to realize that the drugs themselves dont create a desire to form a gang/cartel, the circumstances under which supply and demand play out compels it. Those circumstances then are the thing we must fight against and change. Only an imbocile could possibly believe thats its possible to stop people from using and selling drugs to each other, so the choice is really one of whther or not we think certain drugs, their distrubution, who they are sold to, are better left in the hands of un-elected cartel king-pins, or with people who we can trust not to sell them to kids or cut them with toxins. Thats the way it always was before the Carrie Nation, Anslinger types made their own moral disgust of other people's choice of intoxicants, the law of the land.

Funny how people were able to see that anti-booze laws were behind the creation of that black-market (and the crime and corruption that entails), and that fixing the problem involved repealing the laws responsible for it. Yet when precisely the very same problems arose with other drugs, the solution seems to escape them. Perhaps its understandable to suppose that, given the relative scarcity of drug users compared to alcohol, that maybe it might be possible to stamp out that problem by nipping it in the bud, so to speak. But that didn't happen. Quite the opposite in fact.

So to continue on as if that might still be a possibility is downright delusional. People do drugs. Deal with it. Our choice now, whether we like it or not...approve of drugs or not, is now to ask ourselves whether we want criminals in charge of their sale and distribution thus driving the price to where they now reap incredible profits (which is also money they can use to fund whatever cause they choose), or whether those who will inevitably do drugs should have their supply made and profits reaped by people we can hold accountable should they begin selling to children eg. It's lreally an easy decision and the only reason we haven't already made it is the inflence of a certain element in society that clings to the staus quo no matter how devastating doing so may be. Its a choice between remaining simply reactionary... or using our brains to become "pro-actionary". Of solving our drug problem the way Portugal did.

Why would the billionaire cartel leaders and associates want drugs to become legal? They make their astounding profits precisely because they are illegal. And FYI, pharmecuetical giants already do manufacture heroin and all the other opiate-opioid drugs we all use legally. Heroin, per dose, actually costs mere pennies to produce this way. The steep prices charged on the street are entirely artificial and they get away with it because we made a decision to try and get rid of them entirely. Clearer heads at least maaged to repeal the ban on alcohol, but the crime spike that began with alcohol Prohibition dropped upon Repeal. And the reason was because the organized gangs moved way from making and selling that drug and simply moved to the other drugs that, back then, wasn't popular enough with the general population to warrant their repeal as well. Your belief that they remained there because they were all more destructive to the person using them than alcohol is simply untrue. Heroin and morphine are chemical brothers, they cause the same physical damage as demerol, codiene, and other opioids, the same addiction, everything. Like the rest it only costs pennies per/does to make. It does provide a better "rush" when injected, but that's it. People can do heroin and other narcotic pain-killers daily for many many years and die in their bed at a ripe old age. That you cannot do with alcohol or a slough of presription drugs.

\Why then is it illegal when its opiate bros. are? Heroin does not cause violent crime. The profits to be made in the black market supplying it surely does. There was no black market before a law was passed that created it, a black market that is as inevitable and as sold as the "law" of supply and demand is. We have alcohol prohibtion to thank for the rise of the US-based mafia -- la cosa nostra, and we have pot, coke, heroin prohibition to thank for the violence in Mexico.

I expect a Military Coup to occur in Mexico within the next 5 to 10 years.

They have been the only ones that, so far, has been fighting the cartels.

If that does happen, expect a role back off all the economic "Reforms" that has allowed a already very wealthy few get wealthier at the rest of the Mexican population.

Mexico's troubles go back to the days of the Conquistadors.

Look at the Ducth!

The only reason they are putting restriction back on the legal drug trade is the Foreigners coming in to abuse them.

Its the "Keep out of the Cookies" syndrome.

The more my Mom told be to stay out of the Cookie Jar, the more had to have a cookie!

Unfortunately, there's a substantial number of people among us who are incurious, are highly obedient and extremely deferentiial regarding whatever an authority figure tells them is true. Sociologists know them as RWA-SDOs (or authoritarian followers and leaders, respectively). And they simply cannot understand why the rest of us would behave that way. They can't understand why anyone would want to disobey merely to satisfy their curiosity over something they know isn't good for them in the first place. And because they can't understand it, they oppose it on principal.

But because their cognitive--intellectual development hasn't fully matured, their worldview is still reduced to the simple black and white dualities our minds could grasp as children. This then places them in a world of simplistiic, "right or wrong, us and them, legal or unlegal, do it or don't do it'...kinds of choices. This group gives rise to our more prejudiced, bigoted personalities because simple epthets or labels are easier to make sense of than if they saw them as we do....as many individual people, each with different views and experiences than our own. So again, unfamiliarity represents possible hidden threats, and so theyre compelled to oppose their ways, their religions, their vices, even something as inocuous as their spoken language. Lack of understanding means lowered empathy or sympathy for drug-war victims, hightened aggression makes them more inclined to take up careers with the military, which they are suited to, and domestic law-enforcement (DEA, ICE, etc. ) which they are not.

And it's these people who initiated the drug-war, who carry it out, and who stand in the way of resolving it in any way other than brute force.

(As an aside, this is but one of several social crises they hinder a resolution to. Search the phrase: "RWA-SDO Authoritarian Embrace" using google scholar. Weeds out the nonsense)

For clarities sake however, depicting FARC as a drug gang with a political motive is simply untrue. Its a political group that happens to have used drug traficking as a means of raising revenue so they could continue to fight their political cause via an insurgency, which is the begining and end of what they are all about, Drugs per se figured nowhere in he ideology. Military commanders and political figures within the government also availed themselves of drug revenue, as they have done and are doing right there in Mexico.

That they are not a Mexican insurgency however is true. They arent fighting for government office, ideology, or anything of the sort. Rather they fight to simply maintain the infrastructure they've established through which they supply the American market with the drugs it's government banned, as well as continue providing it with drugs that have their profit margin artificially widened...something they are free to do since the US government decided they wanted no part in regulating them itself.