| > Those people who are capable of those things and that level of corruption to make a few bucks on illicit drugs would still exist. Those people exist everywhere (including, in no small numbers, in the United States), though not everywhere has as much poverty as Mexico combined with as much money being tossed onto both sides of the illegal narcotics trade as Mexico due to its proximity to the US. > If you take marijuana out of the equation, 80-90% of Americans think drugs should be illegal. They don't want drugs in their communities and in their society. Manifestly, making drugs illegal has not stopped drugs from being in their community or in their society. So either the unsupported support numbers for prohibition you presented are wrong, or they don't mean that people don't want drugs in their communities and in their society, or the people involved have tenuous grasp between cause and effect. (I suspect all three are involved, to varying degrees.) > And they're the bad guys for exercising their democratic right to regulate their own society, because some opportunists in Mexico are deranged enough to kill a bunch of people to circumvent those rules? If your policy choices knowably have negative impacts, and don't achieve the positive ends that you cite to justify them, and you continue for decades to make the same choices, yes, there is culpability there. That doesn't mean the people making that choice are the bad guys -- responsibility is not exclusive. |