Legalize Drugs To End The War In Mexico: One Former Federal Agent With A Cowboy Hat’s Argument

Yesterday Mexico’s president Felipe Calderon signed into law a bill that makes it legal to carry small amounts of formerly illicit drugs including cocaine and heroin, something former Federal Drug Enforcement Agent with a white cowboy hat Terry Nelson has been saying needs to happen in this country for some time. “It’s time we quit treating our drug problem as a a criminal problem and start treating it as a social or medical ill,” he told a reporter in the below video back in March. As a law enforcement agent on the Texas-Mexico border, Nelson was told it wasn’t his job to think creatively about helping to end the violence that plagued the area due to drug trafficking, so when he retired after thirty years of service, he joined Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, one of the many groups working for the regulation of drugs in America. And it’s not easy to argue with his experience.

Nelson has worked for the US Border Patrol, the US Customs Service, and the Department of Homeland Security, where his work took him beyond the border into Mexico, Central America, and South America. According to him, the success of the law enforcement individual is not measured by reducing crime, but by making arrests. “That’s the way the game is played. That’s how you keep score in police work.” In essence, Americans are making money from the continual drug trafficking and violence emerging from Mexico because enforcement agents are rewarded for capturing traffickers, not for eliminating the illegal drug industry.

Felipe Calderon’s decision to legalize the possession of small amounts of drugs like cocaine, marijuana and heroin, amongst others, may be seen by many Americans as crazy, but as they say, necessity is the mother of invention and if ever there was a country in need, it’s Mexico. The question becomes, if Mexico’s crazy idea begins to work, where will that drug trade go to make up for lost revenue? Next door, perhaps? And does the violence have to become as commonplace north of the border for America to wake up and smell the cocaine? We hope not.