That’s one way to measure success
“If the drug effort were failing there would be no violence,” a senior U.S. official said Wednesday. There is violence “because these guys are flailing. We’re taking these guys out. The worst thing you could do is stop now.”
That was in response to statements made by a commission of Latin American leaders on the failures of the U.S. war on drugs. Read all about it here.
Yes, that’s one way to measure success. I’m just not sure the “more dead bodies, the more successful we are” approach is very effective in advertising your cause. What it’s very effective at doing is making it plain and clear that the war on drugs is a complete waste of time, money and people’s lives. I don’t understand how policy makers can believe that it makes any sense to continue trying (and failing) to keep drugs out of this country. No matter what they do, the situation will not change.
It’s simple supply and demand. My guess is that demand for drugs is relatively unchanging since they’re not hard to get and people are going to do what they want despite arcane prohibitive laws. So the price of drugs will be determined by the supply. Every time drug police confiscate a cache of drugs, it decreases the overall supply and thereby raises the price. When the price rises, it makes the drug trade that much more of a lucrative option for people looking to make money. More people enter the business supplying more drugs and things return to the original equilibrium. The same works for killing drug gang members. If a cop kills a supplier, the number of suppliers goes down, increasing the value of suppliers. Then more people want to become suppliers and things return to normal.
And what is the overall outcome? Last year, more than 5,000 people were killed across Mexico in connection with the drug war. Of course most of these people were killed by gang members and not drug police. But that doesn’t change anything. The only reason the drug business is run by gangs in the first place is because it’s illegal. In normal commerce, businesses solve their disputes through the use of contracts and the court system. Since these are not options for the black market drug business, the only recourse is to solve disputes with bullets.
President Obama just announced his appointee for the Office of National Drug Control Policy. If he really wants to change things, this would be a great place to start.
By Matt
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