Since Mexican President Felipe Calderon declared war on Mexico’s four major drug cartels four years ago, an estimated 28,000 people have died.  In the process, the hand of the cartels has been strengthened. 

Calderon’s drug war has killed or imprisoned an impressive list of prominent drug lords; but this superficial success has created opportunities for new players to fill the void or move up the money ladder.  Most of the violence flows from an intense internecine struggle for influence and control.

A major shift in Mexican policy took place in 2000 when Vicente Fox and his PAN party (National Action Party) ended the long political rule of the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional).  Traditionally, the PRI related to Mexico’s drug cartels the way a referee relates to competing prize fighters.  Each cartel was given a protected sphere of influence, the quid pro quo being that politicians from small town mayors to the president would get their allotted cut of the ill-gotten gains. 

Fraud on this massive a  scale partly explains the moral appeal of Mr. Fox and the PAN, but a simple shift in ruling party couldn’t end corruption this endemic.  Four years and 28,000 corpses later, Calderon finds himself in deep political trouble.  His critics are calling Mexico a failed state and, as many Mexicans feel a surprising nostalgia for the bad old days, the PRI is staging a comeback.

Desperate men take desperate actions and President Calderon is no exception.  He recently raised eyebrows around the world by suggesting that drug legalization is worthy of serious consideration.

As a recent article in the Guardian makes clear, Calderon isn’t placing his personal stamp of approval on the legalization idea.  He says it would lead to a spike in drug usage and place generations of Mexican children at risk.  The president’s legalization talk is best interpreted as a dig at the United States.  Were it not for America’s insatiable appetite for marijuana and cocaine, the argument goes, the cartels would never have come into existence. 

Calderon’s comments come on the heels of a call for marijuana legalization from three former presidents of Latin American countries: César Gaviria of Colombia, Fernando Cardoso of Brazil and Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico.  Since marijuana accounts for between 50 and 70% of illegal drug use (depending on whose figures you accept), cartels would take a major financial hit if the drug was legalized and regulated. 

But it wouldn’t help much if Mexico decided to unilaterally legalize marijuana or any other illegal drug, the huge American market would continue to fuel the Mexican drug trade.  Cartels wield enormous power and enjoy considerable prestige in Mexico because, in a world of poverty, they are bristling with cash.  They make sizable donations to churches; they buy off priests and politicians; they dictate news coverage; and they have little trouble recruiting new employees.  Economically, the cartels are often the only game in town.

Even if Mexico and the United States moved in the direction of full drug legalization, the cartels could survive.  They have invested a large slice of the narco-pie in legitimate business ventures for the purposes of money laundering and have developed extensive international connections.  If they lost the North American trade, they could ramp up their operations in the rest of the world. 

But there is no doubt that drug legalization would suck much of the money out of a burgeoning Mexican drug trade, shifting the fight in the government’s direction.

The legalization debate may be moot.  Barack Obama understands that drug legalization makes sense as public policy, but since Richard Nixon declared war on drugs in 1976, it has been smart politics to pour ever-greater sums  into SWAT teams, interdiction and prisons.  The Obama administration has been talking about enhanced treatment for drug addicts and has been reticent to bang the drug war drum, but increased funding for the Byrne grant program suggests that the president understand the game he has inherited.

As pubic safety policy, the war on drugs makes no sense at all.  By now, most sentient Americans understand that the best way to ensure a lively market is to make a commodity illegal and then declare war on it.  The higher the risks involved in getting the illicit item to the consumer, the higher the potential profits.  Arrest one player and two more rush forward to take his place. 

Unfortunately, the war on drugs has never been about public safety or public health.  Presidents Nixon and Reagan declared war on drugs for strictly political reasons.  In America, illicit drug use had been (falsely) associated with people of color for generations.  From the mid-1960s on, hippies and political radicals were added to the suspect list.  Therefore, by declaring war on drugs, conservative politicians were demonizing poor people of color and young white radicals for political gain.  It was a code language everyone could understand.  Better still, no one could oppose a war on drugs without appearing to side with Lucifer and the hosts of hell.

Then, late in the Jimmy Carter years, America entered the period of “malaise” and “stagflation” that conservatives associate with failed liberal policy.  Inflation had reached unprecedented levels, unions were strong, and corporate profits were dropping like the anvil in a road runner cartoon.  The bi-partisan response was neo-liberal economic policies emphasizing free trade, outsourcing and a variety of similar strategies designed to strengthen the standing of international corporations at the expense of American labor. 

At the same time, the American workplace was going high-tech.  As demand for highly trained technicians rose, the need for unskilled labor plummeted.  The impact of these economic developments in small agricultural communities and in the urban core of major American cities was utterly devastating.

After three decades of post war economic expansion, America found itself with a large pool of surplus labor, disproportionately people of color.  What to do?

The war on drugs dovetailed perfectly with the nation’s economic crisis.  No one in the political world talked about mass incarceration, but that was the new game in town.  From a suburban perspective, the prison boom was largely invisible.  But poor black communities were being gradually ripped apart.  By the time the shift to mass incarceration hit full stride in the mid-1990s, half of the adult males in many neighborhoods had done time or were doing time.  In these communities, life for the average black male was a soul-destroying rotation from prison to the streets and back to prison.  It was virtually impossible for convicted felons to break the cycle.  This was by design. 

In her stunning book, The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander puts it like this: “We need an effective system of crime prevention and control in our communities, but that is not what the current system is. This system is better designed to create crime, and a perpetual class of people labeled criminals, rather than to eliminate crime or reduce the number of criminals.”

Successful “progressive” politicians have lacked the political courage to stand up to a hulking monolith that was devouring more and more citizens every year.  Typically, Democrats have survived a harsh political climate by embracing the cruel logic of drug war and mass incarceration.  The people bearing the brunt of these policies didn’t vote and the rest of the country didn’t care.

If America legalized drugs, the drug war balloon would pop.  For decades now, law enforcement has been richly rewarded for rounding up as many low-status people of color as the prisons could hold.  When we ran out of prison beds we built more.   Texas had 40,000 prisoners in 1980.  Now we have 173,000. 

If drugs were legalized in America, the profit motive driving the street level drug trade would disappear overnight.

But think about it, how would we control poor communities of color with unemployment rates at Great Depression levels if we didn’t have the drug war? 

As more and more attention is paid to the fraudulent mechanics of mass incarceration, conservative politicians have gradually turned their attention to the immigration issue.  If we lose one pretext for demonization, another must be invented. 

But how can you fill 2.4 million prison beds apart from the drug war?  You can’t. 

The jobs of  2.4 million Americans are directly dependent on the criminal justice system?  That’s right: the system requires one criminal justice employee for every prisoner.  If we legalize drugs, at least one million of these folks will be out of work.  Some of them will be prison guards; others will be courthouse bureaucrats, defense attorneys and prosecutors.

Of course, we could divert the money we are currently using to fund the machinery of mass incarceration into job creation programs and elaborate public works projects.  But would an electorate raised on drug war hysteria and racial stereotyping support such a common sense venture?  Not a single American politician is betting on it.

Drug legalization is a policy fraught with moral ambiguity, but the same, in triplicate, can be said of the drug war.  When the problem is a voracious human appetite for mind-altering substances, all the solutions come in dismal shades of gray.

So what do we do?  First, we start telling the truth about the drug war and mass incarceration.  If the politicians can’t summon the courage to address the elephant in the room, let’s address it for them.  Looky there, an elephant!  It’s that simple.

Secondly, we must learn to live without demons.  Or, to put it a bit differently, we should become more concerned about the demons inhabiting the nether regions of our own hearts.  That’s where the problem lies.

Finally, we must realize that neo-liberal economic theory and full employment are antithetical.  America can put everybody to work if we want to badly enough.   Where the private sector falls short, the public sector must find its role.

You can’t do criminal justice reform without dreaming of what Martin Luther King called “The Beloved Community”, a place where love supplants hate and what’s good for us trumps what’s good for me, a place where Mexicans, Americans and Canadians work for mutual prosperity.

At the core, our biggest problems are always spiritual.