There is, of course, a link between Mexico’s murders and America’s overdoses. The murders are rising because of wars between ever-more-brutal drug cartels, who are competing to ship the products on which Americans will overdose. Mexico’s murder rate is slightly deceptive, because it varies significantly across the country, and some areas experience far less crime than many other Latin American countries. But in states like Baja California, the homicide rates match those of the world’s most violent countries. Unsurprisingly, the areas with the highest rates of violent crime tend to be those near major ports or U.S. border crossings, or areas which have some other strategic value for the drug trade. The state of Guerrero, where more than half of Mexico’s opium-poppies are grown, has seen its murder rate escalate over the same period that heroin overdoses have skyrocketed in the U.S. It is strange to think that the deaths of people so far apart geographically—a taxi driver in Acapulco, a struggling addict in Kentucky—could be so intimately connected.
Everyone has heard the gruesome stories about cartel violence in Mexico, which is not just shocking quantitatively but also qualitatively. People beheaded, boiled alive, fed to wild animals: the Mexican notas rojas graphically document the depravity and extremity of cartel killings, which terrify rivals and civilians alike. But the lurid spectacle of border state violence is not something Americans should feel comfortably distant from. One big reason for the ferocity of inter-cartel competition is because Mexico, a highly unequal country where nearly half the population lives in poverty, happens to be situated next to a very rich country willing to pay high prices for an illegal product. There is a certain “logic” to drug violence: if there are fortunes to be made from a commodity that can only be provided through criminal enterprise, people will desperately seek those fortunes through whatever means are necessary. There are political, economic, and cultural forces that contribute to a growth in violence, but while the causes are complex, they are not random or inexplicable.
Before trying to analyze those causes, though, we should make sure we truly appreciate the human toll. As always, behind the statistics are lives, and we can take a moment to think about the level of human suffering that stems from the entire process of manufacturing, distributing, and ingesting illegal drugs. Mexican border cities like Reynosa and Juarez have turned from lively border towns into sad, despondent ganglands where fear rules many people’s lives. Of course, it’s important not to excessively caricature the situation: even cities with high murder rates aren’t continuous gun battles 24 hours a day. The residents of these places still go out in public, throw parties, attend school, and so on; a bold tourist may still visit on the right day and have a more or less normal experience. Nevertheless, in the areas they control, the power of cartels is one of the dominant facts of everyday life. Cartels are the final arbiters of most of what appears in print: a journalist who writes the wrong thing can expect to receive a threatening phone call, or even a summary execution. Many Mexican journals have shuttered, or have been reduced to simply putting out carefully-worded catalogs of daily murders. Bodies are left in public places, clearly as a message to someone, though it is often unclear whom. If you fall afoul of the cartel—and you may well do so without even realizing it, or because they’ve mistaken you for someone else—not only you, but your entire family may be at risk, down to your little children. This past summer—to give just one example—a family of five, including four children aged between 5 and 10, were murdered in Coatzacoalcos because the cartel suspected that the father, an out-of-work taxi driver, had acted as a lookout in an attack by one of their rivals.
All of this is just the suffering that occurs from living alongside criminal trafficking syndicates. Then we have the human consequences of drug use itself, which is felt on both sides of the border. The 70,000 who die annually in the U.S. are people’s parents, children, friends. Many are people who struggled hard to free themselves, to avoid a fate they could see coming, but who were unable to escape addiction. It’s hard to conceive of what the attempt to free oneself is like, the near impossibility of using sheer willpower to overcome a dependency that is chemical in nature. Journalist Ioan Grillo quotes an addict friend: “Imagine the worst flu and multiply it by ten. Then, know you can make it go away with one more hit.” Who could resist a medicine that instantly relieves the most extreme torment? And for many addicts, it’s not simply the physical torment of withdrawal that drugs alleviate: it’s the deep psychological trauma of past abuse, of profound depression, of a consuming, self-annihilating sense of failure. Whole American communities have turned into places of death and dependency.
Repairing the lives of addicts, and ending the carnage caused by the drug trade, is a morally urgent issue that requires a humane, careful, and immediate political response. Sometimes, when we think about U.S. drug policy, it’s easy to get caught up in abstract arguments about whether the government should have the “right” to regulate individual drug use, or cultural debates about whether the use of certain drugs has net positive or negative impacts for society. It’s not that these questions are entirely worthless, but they are, at best, secondary concerns. The overwhelmingly more important question is, what can we do to stop all these deaths from happening? What will actually work?
