Andrew Demers of Manchester is a political and public affairs professional who has worked on congressional, Senate, and presidential campaigns.
The war on drugs has been a colossal failure, costing American taxpayers billions of dollars while failing to curb the supply or demand of illicit drugs. Despite vast resources spent, and the best efforts of law enforcement and public health officials, drug use and addiction rates have skyrocketed.
According to a CDC Data Brief from March 2015, heroin-related death rates nearly quadrupled between 2000 and 2013. The CDC reports that fentanyl-related overdose fatalities in New Hampshire increased by over 1,590% from 2010 to 2017. This epidemic seemingly has no end in sight. Are we making our best efforts to educate our citizens about the dangers of drug use? And if so, why aren’t these efforts working, even a little bit?
The blanket prohibition of drugs has, predictably, resulted in the rise of powerful international criminal cartels and domestic street gangs alike, who have amassed tremendous wealth and power from the illicit drug market. A recent study by the Rand Corp.’s Drug Policy Research Center estimates that drug exports from Mexico to the U.S. are worth tens of billions of dollars annually.
In 2022, Customs and Border Protection seized over 14,699 pounds of fentanyl, or roughly 3.3 billion lethal doses, enough to kill the entire population of the United States several times over. As a result of our failed drug policies, the opioid epidemic has now become a serious national security crisis.
There is discussion and pending legislation (H.J. Res.18 – 118th Congress) surrounding an “Authorization for Use of Military Force” to declare war on Mexican drug cartels. This idea is worse than short-sighted — it’s in fact downright dangerous.
The Mexican drug cartels are not common criminal organizations, they are highly militarized with their own armies. They are better equipped than the Mexican military and control vast territories within Mexico. These cartels are currently fighting each other over lucrative drug trafficking routes into the United States, and invading Mexico would unite these groups into a single destructive force, creating a humanitarian crisis on our nation’s borders the likes of which we cannot even imagine.
H.J. Res.18’s co-sponsor, Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), describes the cartels as “like ISIS.” Yet we are on the verge of repeating the folly of our failed 20-year occupation of Afghanistan, but with the added catastrophe of replicating the Syrian War’s humanitarian crisis on our own border. Is the United States prepared to see a comparative surge of roughly 25 million northbound refugees if we bomb and invade Mexico?
Pointedly, an invasion of Mexico would be a costly and deadly endeavor that would do little, if anything, to address the root cause of our problem: profits generated from American drug users have enriched the cartels to the point that they have become a destabilizing force in our hemisphere.
Seemingly, the only way to address this issue is to reduce the demand for drugs in the United States, yet demand has skyrocketed amidst our epidemic’s current wave of death and destruction, and it is doubtful that demand will ever subside. Counterintuitively, it may be that the only viable solution to this problem is the legalization of drugs, through prescription or other means, to reduce the power and profits of the cartels.
The highest priority of public policymakers must be protecting the liberty and safety of Americans. By taking the drug trade out of the hands of criminal organizations and bringing it into a regulated market, we can reduce the harm associated with drug use while depriving these international, militarized criminal organizations of the profits they use to fuel their violence and corruption.
Critics will argue that legalizing drugs would send the wrong message to our youth, thus encouraging further drug use. However, this argument ignores the fact that, despite decades of anti-drug education programs, drug use is already rampant among young people.
As I asked before, are we making our best efforts to educate our youth about the dangers of drug use? And if so, why aren’t these efforts working? Moreover, how much worse can this crisis get before we finally seek different solutions?
Our current drug epidemic is among the largest national security crises we face, and public officials who advocate for more of the same failed policies, or worse, are unfit to lead our communities and our nation. No, the legalization of drugs is not a panacea, and there will undoubtedly be challenges to implementing such solutions. However, we must acknowledge that the current approach to drug policy has been an unmitigated disaster.
To solve this complex problem, we must explore new approaches to this crisis and finally recognize that drug addiction is a public health issue that requires an innovative and comprehensive public policy response, not decades of more failed policies and disastrous international interventions.