The President of the United States was in Mexico recently talking about issues important to both nations. What he said and what he wanted to say were far removed from one another. The main topic was that which consumes Mexico and the Mexican/US relationship these days, the drug battle that rages on Mexico’s northern border.

It has oft been stated that in the absence of a better method of governance, democracy will have to do. Here’s hoping that the search for that better way continues.

How else but for fear of the voting public can otherwise rational leaders defend the indefensible? Prohibition has created an incentive for those who would likely be otherwise engaged to seek the profit that comes from the sale of drugs and in that seeking, destroy or end the lives of far too many.

If all drugs were legalized and controlled like alcohol, there is no guarantee more people wouldn’t use, hook and die. While it beggars belief that drugs would be more available than they are now, no one can state with certainty that an increase in usage wouldn’t occur. Some of the people who speak loudest against the legalization of drugs have had experience with addiction and protest with the best of intentions. But there are far more moralists and war profiteers that have a vested interest in continuing the fight no matter the cost in human lives.

Even allowing that more people would use drugs, dubious as that may be, compared to the damage being done by current attitudes and policies, the benefits of legalization far outweigh the risk. Most persons have the capacity to figure out for themselves what’s bad for them. Not many add Drano to their daily diet. Nor will society ever be able to protect everyone from themselves. Cigarettes cause many more deaths annually than all other drugs combined. Banning them would not solve the problem. Rules are in place where cigarettes do the least damage to the general public but in their private environment, people should have the right to smoke and potentially die.

Drug use is a scourge but that people are dying by the thousands and incarcerated by the hundreds of thousands, is far less the drugs and much more the money to be had. Solve the obvious problem first and then deal with the unintended consequences. It’s more likely that if drugs were handed out by professionals not concerned with profit, distributed by those looking not to snare users but help them; there would be fewer addicts, fewer deaths.

Does it make more sense to buy clean drugs from a person in a lab coat or an unknown concoction from some street dealer or from the locker of a schoolmate? Who is more likely to care about what happens to your life, the lab coat person or the profiteer looking to have you as a permanent client? Who is more likely to break your legs when you’re addicted and in debt? Pharmacists may give out the wrong medicine once in a while but when was the last time you saw one carrying a baseball bat?

Drug cartels are not are not run by junkies. They’re directed by businessmen; ruthless, bloody, cold and loathsome. They kill without mercy, cast fear into nations and execute the grisly kidnapping and murder of innocents. The gang members and rotten officials, at least those that don’t sign up simply because they are scared out of their wits, deserve no sympathy. But scared or greedy, they all exist because there is money to be made, plain and simple. Take out the profit and they’re gone. Some of them might even do something legal and productive.

Arguments that the drug situation in the U.S. would get worse if drugs were legalized are at best uninformed and at worst a lie. It can’t get worse. It’s a fucking disaster. And the most galling and callous piece to this position is the complete lack of empathy for the citizens of countries like Mexico and Colombia who suffer the torment of corrupt and corrupting U.S. drug policies. They are being killed and maimed not because America is a nation of drug consumers, but because the U.S. government doesn’t have the courage to correct the obvious harm its war on drugs begets. It is a cruel and unthinking arrogance that places less value on a Mexican or Colombian life than that of an American.

The problem with democracy is that sometimes the voters need to be told to fuck off. It’s rare the leader who has the courage to do what’s right instead of what’s popular. Americans who support drug prohibition sign the death warrants of human beings next door and around the globe. Somehow that message has to make its way through the static.

To his limited credit, President Obama pushed as far as he dared regarding the travesty that is U.S. gun control. Perhaps if he were in his second term, he could have said what he really feels, that the U.S. policy on the sale of guns and other weaponry is insane. But even the mildest of suggestions that America stem the flow of arms that cross the Mexican border brought a dull rejoinder from one of the key players on his team. Is there no end to the idiocy? If Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says the Second Amendment is endangered by such a tentative and sensible statement, is there any hope? Imagine what the real gun morons will be threatening?

For the second great culprit in the horror that is the Mexican drug war is the arming of violent people by the world’s largest weapons dealer. Leaving the American government’s sanctioned sale of military weapons to warring nations aside, even as they come back to kill their own, the light should shine on the real pricks in this tragedy.

It’s said that if Amsterdam is allowed to exist than god owes an apology to Sodom and Gomorrah. It is equally true that if the NRA is allowed to exist, than god owes an apology to Victor Bout and Adnan Kashogi. The hands of the criminals at the NRA are stained by the blood of the people of Latin America. Just as bad, contorting a never-intended and antiquated interpretation of the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution, they betray their country and enable the deaths of fellow citizens. Guns don’t kill people, the NRA does. Their inordinate and repulsive influence at the ballot box has placed the United States among the most violent and dangerous of the semi-organized nations.

You want a gun, join the army. They hand them out free and the odd time you get to enjoy the thrill of someone shooting back. If you insist on owning what in most countries is illegal, be a farmer, buy it under the strictest of controls, register it like you do your fucking car and be responsible for its use and storage. If you live in the city, you have no right to buy a gun, just as you have no right to buy a Hummer. You want these things, move to Green Acres.

Gun shows, the gaping loophole in laws of purposeful vagueness, are death events. Any psycho with malice aforethought, anyone supplying weapons to drug cartels, can walk in and buy a military assault weapon. That these weapons end up killing overmatched US cops or, as in Mexico’s case, an army hopelessly outgunned, should weigh heavily on the minds, assuming that’s not an oxymoron, of the NRA. And those who are influenced at the ballot box by these peddlers of death should witness firsthand the anguish their ignorance unleashes on others. The NRA should exist exclusively for the promotion of gun control, not to monger in misery.

If Charles Taylor, former president of Liberia can be on trial in The Hague for supplying weapons to the rebels of neighboring Sierra Leone, why isn’t the NRA in the next docket for supplying arms to drug cartels in neighboring Mexico?

Bernard Baruch, adviser to Presidents Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, and the speaker of much wisdom said “The greatest blessing of our democracy is freedom. But in the last analysis, our only freedom is the freedom to discipline ourselves.” Someone needs to take the ruler to a great swath of the American public.

Copyright © 2009 Paul Heno