Remember: We’re Winning the War on Drugs
Tuesday 6 September 2011 - Filed under Uncategorized
Since President Felipe Calderón took office in December 2006, declaring war on traffickers, roughly 43,000 people have been killed in drug-related homicides here, according to government figures and newspaper estimates. The pace of killings is escalating. More than half the dead, 22,000, were killed in the past 18 months, a rate of one every 35 minutes.
In just one attack this past Thursday, 52 people were killed—mostly women playing bingo—when gunmen torched a casino in the business capital of Monterrey.
The conflict between gang members has descended into a contest of cruelty. One gang in Acapulco removes the faces of its victims. Another in Monterrey hangs victims upside down, and alive, from bridges, then shoots them from below.
Places like Ciudad Juárez, one of the most violent cities in the world, keep a tally of the dead. But in other parts of Mexico, the murders aren’t even counted up. Authorities and journalists in the northern border state of Tamaulipas, across from Texas, are so cowed by drug gangs that neither publicly reports drug-related homicides. Instead, people track drug murders on Twitter and other social networks.
Mexico’s murder rate has more than doubled, to 22 deaths per 100,000 residents in 2010, in just four years, a period that parallels the drug war. Before that, it had been falling steadily. In the U.S. the murder rate is about 5 per 100,000.
There simply is no valid intellectual defense of prohibition. Anyone who argues that people dying at the rate of 1 every 35 minutes in order to keep people from ingesting what they will are fucking depraved and needs to go fuck themselves.1
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1. And that’s not even to mention the 1.5 million people arrested annually in the US for drugs related “crimes”. How many lives need we take? How many homes need we invade with armed thugs? How many families need we destroy before drug warriors will realize that prohibition does not fucking work?
2011-09-06 » madlibertarianguy