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May 23, 2010
Border Unreality; a sign of the times
The last entry referred to the formal state visit then in progress between Presidents Obama and Calderon. Given the gravity of the immigration, crime, and economic problems facing their two nations, the public statements of the two leaders were a travesty, as was media coverage of their meeting.To appreciate the enormous gap between reality at the border and what was not said in Washington, one has only to compare current murder rates in the neighboring cities of El Paso and Juarez. The Texas city, which has been becoming steadily more “Mexican” in terms of its inhabitants, is still a very safe place to live, while just across the Rio Grande, Juarez is now the murder capital of the entire world.
One does not have to look far for the reason. It’s the drug war; or more precisely, America’s feckless war on “marijuana,” which has been growing more futile and incoherent every year, as illustrated by our cable TV coverage. On any given evening, one is liable to encounter a police reality show featuring bully-boy detectives with shaved heads celebrating a big bust because it took large amounts of “narcotics” “off the street,” and led to the arrest of a gaggle of low-level “bad guys.” On an adjacent channel, one is just as likely to find one of the innumerable re-runs of “Marijuana Nation” documenting the unexpected success of California’s medical gray market.
One the fastest growing demographics in my registry of cannabis applicants has been the cohort born between 1982 and 1992; all of whom would have been much too young to qualify for a "recommendation" when Proposition 215 passed in 1996. Once one appreciates that long term chronic use has been based on the anxiolytic appeal of inhaled cannabis for the latest crop of adolescents to enter our junior high schools since about 1965, and that nearly all have been trying alcohol and tobacco at nearly the same average age (14.9 years) since 1971, one can readily understand the failure of a federal policy based on keeping "kids" from trying all three. It never had even a remote chance of success for exactly the same reasons parents have classically been unable to keep their adolescent "kids" from doing the same things they did.
The answer to the logical question raised by our national dilemma is two more questions: how do we get the federal government to admit a huge, costly mistake? After we do that, how do we induce some of its most powerful bureaucracies to either commit suicide or radically re-think their mission?
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at May 23, 2010 06:03 PM