“The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories…. Men will walk upright, women will smile and children will laugh….”
–The Rev. Billy Sunday, 1920, welcoming Prohibition with open arms
As you probably know, a multi-front war is currently being waged over drug distribution routes in Tijuana. More than 400 people have been killed in TJ since January, nearly 4,000 in all of Mexico and untold numbers throughout the U.S. as Mexican-cartel-related violence seeps over to our side of the border.
The main syndicate of Tijuana is led by the Arellano-Felix family, which is battling other gangs and the police for control of the highly strategic border city. In the last month, violence has grown increasingly more vicious with kidnappings, torture, executions and full-blown, gun-blazing street battles, all of which tell me that now, more than ever, we need to stop this idiotic war on drugs.
Now, I know some folk say that it’s not the so-called war on drugs that causes this violence; rather, it’s the narcotics user who is to blame, because he or she creates the demand. I know of some people who believe that my recreational use of drugs is just as bad as if I were pulling the trigger myself. And, yes, emotionally, there is a part of me that agonizes about my level of culpability for these bloody travesties, but, intellectually, my gut reaction is to say, “No way, José! You cannot pin that shit on me.”
Is it my consumption of illegal substances that creates a black market? Or is it the unconstitutional, arbitrary prohibition of them?
Put another way, which came first, the bong or the bongload?
The way I see it, all drugs were born legal: Alcohol, cannabis, opium, meth, cocaine, ibuprofen, caffeine, steroids, mezcal, mescaline–all of that stuff was legal first, and then, somewhere along the line, some humorless member of the Morality Brigade decided he or she knew better than you do about which consumables were not OK to use and endeavored to take them away from you, with varying degrees of success.
