drug war futile

Even though the drug war may be a success if you look at it solely from an American perspective, it is an absolute disaster for the Latin American countries in which drugs are produced for consumption by people in wealthy countries like the US. Because of this drug trade, many Latin American countries have been mired in horrific violence for decades. And that may make them prime candidates for taking the first step toward ending the drug war.

Take Mexico: After President Felipe Calderón stepped up his country's drug war in 2006, partly with the backing of the US-funded Merida Initiative, drug cartels didn't just go away. They fought back, leading to tremendous levels of violence. Public decapitations have become a particularly prominent tactic of ruthless druglike Colombia and Bolivia are merely the sources of production, and Mexico, much of Central America, and parts of Africa act as transshipment hubs in the drug trade.

As economists Daniel Mejia and Pascual Restrepo wrote in a 2014 paper, this scheme is not a trade-off that developed countries like the US would likely be willing to accept:

Suppose for a moment that all cocaine consumption in the US disappears and goes to Canada. Would the US authorities be willing to confront drug trafficking networks at the cost of seeing the homicide rate in cities such as Seattle go up from its current level of about five homicides per 100,000 individuals to a level close to 150 in order to prevent cocaine shipments from reaching Vancouver? If your answer to