Drug Wars

There are two drug wars being fought in the United States. We're all familiar with the government's “war” against drug trafficking because of news reports of drug seizures, drug sniffing dogs in our schools, and the fact that our prisons are filled beyond capacity with drug offenders.

The United States have lost their “war” against drug trafficking. How do we know the “war” has been lost? Despite annual spending of more than $41 billion to fight illegal drug trafficking, we have illegal drugs (and drug sniffing dogs) in our schools, high school students use marijuana more frequently than alcohol, and we buy more than $100 billion of illegal drugs each year (and that's just for heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, and marijuana). In other words, sales of illegal drugs are roughly equal to the $137 billion in annual sales of alcoholic beverages. Clearly, the government's “war on drugs” has failed because illegal drugs are present and easy to obtain in the United States.

But the government's quixotic “war on drugs” has created a second drug war that we see mainly in the United States' murder rate. Given that the illegal drug industry has annual sales exceeding $100 billion, it's obvious that distribution is controlled by organized crime which we call gangs (an homage to the gangsters of Prohibition). Since competing gangs are criminal enterprises, they cannot resolve their disputes in courts. Numerous studies have found that the majority of urban murderers and murder victims are young men with extensive arrest records (i.e., gang members). Simply put, the various gangs and cartels are in a constant state of war – “The idea that ordinary people kill each other is nearly never true.”

One obvious conclusion is that the majority of murders committed with guns were committed by people who are not allowed to have guns. These killers are members of a hundred billion dollar industry which specializes in smuggling contraband across international and internal borders. The implications on the United States' gun control efforts are profound. Even if the United States repealed the Second Amendment and outlawed all private gun possession, the drug cartels could build their own gun factories with spare change (the annual sales of the entire gun industry are relatively insignificant in comparison with illegal drug industry's $100 billion in sales) and smuggle guns across our borders. And the killers would still kill each other.

So, the next time the media highlights a politician's attempts to pass more restrictive regulations, remember that gun violence in the United States is primarily committed by people who live outside the law and that law-abiding citizens almost never use guns irresponsibly.

Original image: http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/09/19/article-1058104-02B6FA7000000578-895_468x286.jpg