How the Free Market Gave Us Drug Prohibition

Reporting on the prohibition-related violence that has claimed 40,000 or so lives in Mexico since 2006, British journalist Ed Vulliamy zeroes in on the real problem: capitalism. Mexico's murderous cartels, he explains in the Guardian, are simply "acting like any corporation":

Not by coincidence, Juarez is also a model for the capitalist economy. Recruits for the drug war come from the vast, sprawling maquiladora—bonded assembly plants where, for rock-bottom wages, workers make the goods that fill America's supermarket shelves or become America's automobiles, imported duty-free. Now, the corporations can do it cheaper in Asia, casually shedding their Mexican workers, and Juarez has become a teeming recruitment pool for the cartels and killers. It is a city that follows religiously the philosophy of a free market….

Narco-cartels are not pastiches of global corporations, nor are they errant bastards of the global economy—they are pioneers of it. They point, in their business logic and modus operandi, to how the legal economy will arrange itself next. The Mexican cartels epitomised the North American free trade agreement long before it was dreamed up, and they thrive upon it….

Mexico's war is how the future will look, because it belongs not in the 19th century with wars of empire, or the 20th with wars of ideology, race and religion—but utterly in a present to which the global economy is committed, and to a zeitgeist of frenzied materialism we adamantly refuse to temper: it is the inevitable war of capitalism gone mad. 

Vulliamy mentions in passing that some people think ending the war on drugs might improve the situation, but he deems that proposal "of tangential importance" because it does not address the corrupting influence of all the money that can be made by selling drugs. In short, he offers a long-winded, left-wing version of Hillary Clinton's remark that we can't legalize drugs because "there is just too much money in it."

[Thanks to Richard Cowan for the link.]