WATCH: Rise of the Super Drug Tunnels: California's Losing Fight Against Smugglers
"You can't fight markets," says David Shirk, associate professor of international relations and director of the Justice in Mexico project at the University of San Diego. "When a market reaches a certain size, you can't fight it."
Joe Garcia, a deputy special agent with the Department of Homeland Security and head of the San Diego Tunnel Task Force, would beg to differ. He and his colleagues have spent much of their careers doing just that, discovering more than 200 drug tunnels under the California-Mexico border since the inception of the task force in 1990.
"We want to make it so unattractive to do the type of work that they do, that they'll go somewhere else," says Garcia.
Watch the video above to see how this tension between market forces and prohibitionist attitudes has played out along California's border over the past several decades, or click below for the full text, associated links, and downloadable versions. Subscribe to Reason TV's YouTube channel for daily content like this.
Approximately 6 minutes. Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Camera by Paul Detrick and Weissmueller. Music by Chris Zabriskie.