By: Rob Oldham
The normality of marijuana use on college campuses across the country can lead students to believe that drug use is a minor and victimless crime. No one is physically harmed by marijuana or cocaine except the users, some students think. They tell themselves that the police aren’t looking for college kids getting high on weekends; they are after the real criminals – the murderers, kidnappers, and terrorists. A single buyer’s contribution to the total drug trade is minuscule; and besides, using marijuana or cocaine is a personal decision about one’s own body.
According to a government poll, a rising number of U.S. college students are using marijuana. In 2010, more than 21 percent of those surveyed between the ages of 18 and 25 admitted to using marijuana. Although it is illegal, many students see limited use of marijuana and other drugs as a normal part of college life and as less dangerous than legal activities like drinking. Drug use is not a victimless crime, however, and in a globalized world, consumers’ decisions resonate across international lines.
Venture south of the border, to the home of 12 Mexican college students very similar to those here at the University of Georgia. Heavily armed men kidnapped the group of twelve in May from an upscale nightclub. On Aug. 22, Mexican authorities announced that 10 decayed bodies were discovered in a mass grave east of the capitol. Using the clothing labels as a reference point, police are 90 percent sure that these are the bodies of the kidnapped college students. Distraught relatives claim that none of the deceased were involved in the drug trade that has plagued Mexico over the past decade and has caused more than 60,000 deaths since 2006.
Once again, the senseless, random killing of the Mexican cartels shattered families and ended innocent lives. Cartels, which earn billions in profits annually from drug smuggling into the United States, have diversified their terror with car bombings, public hangings, assassinations of journalists, and gruesome torture in order to instill fear in the hearts of the citizenry. The kidnapping and murder of twelve innocent college students in Mexico City, which has been relatively free from drug violence, shows their brazen recklessness to the entire world and leaves authority figures with an unmistakable message: you cannot stop us.
The combatants of this drug war are not nations but cartels. Juarez, Gulf, Sinoloa, Los Zetas, to name a few, are akin to the American Mafia in their high level of organization and ability to survive the deaths and arrests of leaders. In addition to their murderous rampages (especially evident in northern reaches near the US border) they have corrupted police and government officials by means of bribery, blackmail, and extortion. How can one feel safe when even the supposed watchdogs of civilized society are under the thumb of the cartels? Large-scale corruption and the cartels’ extremely well-honed instincts for organizational survival, has transformed northern Mexico into the one of the most dangerous places in the Western Hemisphere, where horrific tales of murder have become increasingly commonplace.
In 2011, members of Los Zetas, founded by former elite Mexican soldiers, held up passenger buses in San Fernando (just 81 miles from the Texas border) when they suspected members of the competing Gulf Cartel to be on board. The Zetas were enraged to find the buses were instead full of migrant workers. What followed was a slew of rape, torture, execution, and gladiator-style fights that resulted in 72 deaths. The following year nearly 200 bodies from other massacres were discovered in mass graves on the same stretch of Federal Highway 101, now appropriately dubbed “The Highway of Death”.
Another narco-terrorist attack struck the luxurious Casino Royale in Monterrey in August 2011. A horrific fire and shooting claimed the lives of 52 people. The Zetas, angry at the casino’s owners for an apparent switch in loyalties, attacked the venue with blazing weapons. After gunning down several patrons, they doused the lobby in gasoline, locked all the emergency exits, and struck a match. Most of the victims of the resulting inferno were innocent women who perished from a lack of oxygen.
Perhaps nothing can match the Juarez Cartel’s unexplained mutilation of Hugo Hernandez. With nearly unprecedented brutality, gangsters cut Hernandez’s body into seven pieces, which were left in plastic containers around the city of Los Mochis. A soccer ball was found with an attached note reading, “Happy New Year, because this will be your last.” Hernandez’s face had been skinned off and attached to the other side of the soccer ball.
The United States is the No. 1 customer for the people who commit these atrocities, and marijuana is one of the cartels’ best sellers. They earn around $1.5 billion each year from its sale and supply anywhere from 40 to 67 percent of all marijuana consumed in the United States. Drug users on college campuses form an essential component of the nearly 20.4 million drug users in the United States, which is the world’s largest consumer of illegal drugs. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton characterized the United States as having an “insatiable demand for illegal drugs” and suggested that Americans share the responsibility for the crimes of those who supply these substances.
When faced with this realization, drug-using college students must ask themselves if they are OK with their role, however small it may be, in the illicit trade that props up levels of murder and corruption unimaginable in their own country? There is little room for rationalization. Even those who claim that their drugs are not trafficked through any cartel still contribute to the demand for the drugs in the United States, incentivizing the cartels to stay in business. The $10 for a gram of weed keeps the neighborhood dealer in business, who in turn pays his supplier, who collects from a distributor, and so on until the economic cycle reaches all the way to Tijuana, Mexico, where two bodies were found hanging from the Los Alamos as a warning to the local cartel’s rivals to stay off their turf.
A consumer in the illegal drug trade is responsible for the distant consequences. Unlike the complexities of the global clothing trade and the debate over the morality of the wage rates in the factories that produce them, there is no room for debate about the evils of cartel violence. U.S. consumers should have enough information about the market they are involved in to be completely aware of and accountable for the terror that the drug trade has unleashed upon the world. It is impossible to ignore the fact that any purchase of illegal drugs either benefits the cartels or gives them reason to remain in business.
It is time to end the glamorization of the harmless stoner and illegal drugs. A happy-go-lucky Saul from Pineapple Express is not the face of the international drug trade. Its true standard bearers are the likes of the Beltran-Leyva brothers who killed the entire family of a Marine involved in counter narcotics operations. These violent sociopaths had no qualms about placing a “narcomanta” on an elementary school to warn enemies of their cruel, ruthless power before torching sections of the school. No matter how difficult it is to admit, this is the horror that the demand for drugs has spawned.
Violence is permanently intertwined with the illegal drug trade. There is debate as to whether legalizing marijuana and other drugs would significantly hamper the cartels’ operations or not. However legitimate these arguments are, they do not change the fact that these drugs are currently illegal, and use of them brings woe to the innocents of the world. It is time to recognize the global implications of the United States’ demand for drugs rather than just the high obtained from using them. Now more than ever, it is important to recognize that the federal government cannot fight the War on Drugs alone, because no matter how much aid the U.S. State Department gives to Mexico to fight this war, the violence will not be at its end until the cartels are denied their profit from U.S. consumers. It is time that the United States throws off the label of the world’s largest drug consumer and refuses to give business to the cartels. It is time to begin leading the world by example.
