Looks like ‘someone’s’ getting their RDA of Crack.

octopus, you’re right. Sadly, any significant drop in tourism will pull the Mexican economy farther under, leaving the young and unskilled even fewer ways to earn a living outside the drug trade.

My husband’s father spent the last 30 years of his life in Guadalajara, also where the fine Spanish historian Sr. Leon-Portilla lives; a young Berkeley history graduate moved to Mexico City with her Mexican fiancee about six years ago; an elderly woman of 80+ years drives herself from central CA down to her trailer house in San Felipe (Baja) several times a year. These non-tourists apparently life in Mexico worth the risk. However, poverty and discrimination (generally based on the ratio of Indian to Spanish blood) has produced a hardened caste system and levels of political corruption that are staggering even compared to our own system with our economic policy hostage to oligarchs and those who enable them because they aspire to the same privileges, in the know and on the make.

If I had another lifetime, I’d spend a lot of time studying precisely which factors create such distinctions in the New World’s countries. All present NW societies are products of colonial systems—Spain to the South from Mexico to Argentina, Portugal in parts of South America, England and France in Canada, and all four of those powers in various parts of the U.S. There are of course similarities among modern New World countries, but differences in economy and government, civil liberties at home and aspirations abroad are strikingly different. (Canada’s complicating variable is that it’s still tied to British apron strings.) 

jackpine, our war on and policy re drugs has always been a disaster, both in and out of our country. In the ‘60s and early ‘70s a Harvard professor ran around advocating use of hallucinogenics that sooner or later pretty much destroy one’s little grey cells. It’s not just down in the ghettos among the poor and hopeless that cocaine and heroin flourish and ways to finance such expensive habits vary. Some fine 19th and early 20th-century writers enjoyed their opium pipes; some became addicted, others simply enjoyed it from time to time. And yet in California, you can still go to jail if you grow marijuana for medical purposes—largely pain control. (Our son used it struggling with cancer and its aftermath, and I personally know four dear, intelligent people who, in the latter stages of AIDS, found marijuana to be the only pain relief that also enabled them to be clear-headed enough to carry on conversations with their friends.)

If I had the power, I’d put some federal monies into 1)research on identifying addictive personalities so that people considering drug use could find out if they were prone to addiction then if so, decide whether they wanted to make life difficult for themselves and 2) learning enough about the nature and effects of all the various drugs and their potential longterm problems to determine which should be completely prohibited (perhaps crack and ecstasy, e.g.) and which could be legalized along with providing adequate information to people so they don’t damage themseleves or become addicted if they follow recommended dosage etc. People can overdose on aspirin and other accepted drugs, RX and otherwise, not to mention the dangers to oneself and others that alcohol presents. And is there any smoker in this country who doesn’t know that particular pleasure also increases the risk of a painful or untimely death?

The ONLY thing that will ever eliminate the drug problem—both at home and in terms of the messy, nasty deals our government involves us in abroad—is to create a society from which people do not feel the need to escape. And we are still running away from that option as fast as we can.

The dirty secret, the one they so carefully hide, is that the the drug cartels in Mexico conduct two-way smuggling traffic: illegals and drugs going north, automatic and military-grade weapons going south.

Another is that, compared to say the US military in Afghanistan or Pakistan or Iraq, the cartel bosses in Mexico are very careful to limit ‘collateral damage,’ so that the likelihood is that an overwhelming majority of the victims killed in Mexico by the cartels—not including cops and journos, of course—are drug warriors of one cartel or another.