“Poor Mexico: So Far From God, So Close to the United States”

from flickr user marca-pasos

1. Are you the kind of person who won’t buy a T-shirt made in China or tennis shoes sewn in Myanmar? If so, are you also the kind of person who believes you’re “not hurting anyone” when you smoke a joint?
2. Do you believe that “more enforcement” is the answer to our border problems?
3. If the U.S. legalized say, tennis shoes, do you think that would stop all exploitation and suffering associated with their manufacture and sale to Americans? No? Imagine that.
4. Do you like the idea of American soldiers in long-term military action inside a massively corrupt, destabilized nation, with little possibility of long-term success? What if the dead soldiers were only coming home from a few hundred miles away? What if this hypothetical conflict were, say, ten or twenty years in the future, so your kids could participate?

If one consumes mainstream news, one will perhaps build an image of Mexico as a corrupt, backward banana republic forcing its scary illegal immigrants and nasty, nasty drugs on America with no gratitude for our condescending tourism dollars. Much of that is wrong. More importantly, much of it is our fault.

Immigration is a separate issue, so let’s talk about the drugs.

I shake my head whenever a “news” organization implies that Mexico is somehow “pushing” its illegal drugs on Americans. Right. The same way Sweden pushes its affordable yet stylish Ikea furniture on us, or France compels us to buy its wine. In other words, there’s no coercion or trickery to speak of. We buy the products. We are the consumers. We ask, they provide.

There is some debating out there about us giving the drug cartels guns, and cantcha see it’s the Mexican corruption that’s causing the problem. These are not distractions from our own complicity and guilty consciences. Mexican corruption is not really the cause of the problems associated with drugs. It’s more of a symptom.

Now to qualify: causation is tricky business. Yes, Mexican corruption makes more corruption and enables the drug trade to keep running. Because the drug trade is wedging its money and its people into the Mexican government, which is now compromised at every level and in every institution. It’s not as bad as some other governments, but it’s plenty bad. However, if your search for causality ends there, it’s like insisting that the shooter didn’t kill the guy, the bullets did. It’s true only as a meaningless technicality. The corruption is a cause of, and contributor to, the bad stuff happening, but it has been, and continues to be, caused and encouraged by other things.

You could take a different tack and blame all our drug-related ills on Nixon’s (and Reagan’s) “war on drugs”, but that doesn’t work, either. In fact, I think it’s an even less defensible position. Sure, it’s cost us a trillion dollars, our bloated prison system is a massive bureaucratic entitlement program for half a dozen different public and private industries, it’s criminalizing and institutionalizing large portions of otherwise-noncriminal citizens, and it’s arguably made individual drug abuse problems worse… also we’re the laughingstock of the industrialized world as far as prison policy goes… but the idea at least made some sense back when enforcement seemed like a real possibility. We could have prevented an awful lot of the misery of the past few decades if we’d somehow been able to get Americans to stop buying and using illegal drugs.

But the drug war is not the main cause of all our drug-related ills, either. The main cause is incredibly simple and embarrassing: the American market for drugs. We buy them. We do it so reliably and in such large quantities that these few products keep virtual nations of individuals employed. Not employed in anything that will help the world or any nation’s official economy, but employed.

It’s taken decades for the problems we cause to get bad enough to come back home to roost. Now, the border is getting more dangerous and more divided because of drug traffickers, who are motivated by exactly one thing: the money they know Americans will pay for their product. Violence is increasing in the world because this product drives it. Mexico is on the path to either crumbling under drug-cartel corruption or perhaps entering a horrible period of civil war because so many of us insist on our “right” to buy and consume these substances. Read something written in the past ten years about life in Colombia and Bolivia with the cartels. We are largely responsible for that, and we’re bringing something similar to Mexico. Our entitlement is destroying the lives of millions. Our drug war may have been mismanaged in some ways, but it’s been carried out by people who are trying to stop the consequences of the American insistence on a ready supply of recreational drugs. Now, half an hour from my home, innocent people are being killed–both accidentally and as intentional terror–police and military personnel are dying, entire cities are turning into no-man’s-lands, because Americans gotta have their drugs.

Is it morally or ethically defensible to tell Americans they should not smoke weed? That question can’t be answered as phrased, because it leaves out the rest of the world. You might as well ask if it’s moral to research stem cells, without considering the possibility that a fetus might be involved, or discuss tourism in China while conveniently forgetting to mention China’s human rights situation. Artificially isolating part of a question to make it more comfortable to answer does not clean up its morality; it just prompts questions about the egocentrism of the person asking.

I don’t know what the answer is, either to the moral issues raised above or to the problems caused by the drug trade, though I’m getting some pretty crazy ideas. Long-term, I think the the answer is conceptually simple. The US needs to dedicate itself, heart and soul, to making the rest of the world as rich as we can possibly make them. We need large, stable middle-class societies to populate the globe. I don’t even have any serious problem with the existence of the ridiculously wealthy, per se (except that they and their business networks tend to exert undue influence on governments… oh yeah, that’s called corruption, and it’s where this discussion started). I just want there to be fewer and fewer truly poor people. People with homes and bank accounts are less likely to swallow condoms filled with cocaine or torture and kill their business rivals in the desert.

As long as our focus remains narrowly zoomed in on our own domestic issues, ignoring both the state of the rest of the world and–critically–the consequences of our lifestyles for everyone outside our boundaries, we contribute to the suffering around us. And it will bite us in the butt, even if we try to whitewash it away with a coat of liberal or libertarian rhetoric.