Mexico's economy is deeply invested in trade with the USA. Simply declaring that the drug gangs will be openly allowed to use Mexican territory to try to deliver drugs to the USA however they want would lead the USA to retaliate. The most likely response is a closed border and an end to trade.
Mexico is a prosperous country now, in spite of gang problems, and that will continue only as long as trade is open.
But small personal use amounts of drugs are already decriminalized in Mexico. I see plenty of people buy, sell, and smoke mariguana in front of cops in broad daylight. To stop the cartels, you need to allow major companies to compete and the USA politicians can't ignore that.
And for all the trouble drug gangs cause in Mexico, they kill fewer people than car crashes. The federal legislature isn't making it the top national priority or overriding all other concerns for that level of violence.
And, to make a final note, the Supreme Court of Justice keeps threatening to make mariguana legal nationally as a matter of human rights. The USA probably wouldn't go as crazy if it happens through a judicial process.
> And for all the trouble drug gangs cause in Mexico, they kill fewer people than car crashes.
Debatable, actually. War on drugs related deaths are >250,000 in 10 years by some counts. Car crash related deaths average 24,000 a year in Mexico. But the thing is that violence related deaths are worse than car accidents in one significant way: they erode people's trust in others and the feeling of safety. They lead to more conservative risk-taking behavior and have far reaching consequences on people's mental state (would you react the same if you hear that a university classmate died in a crash than if you learn he was killed by armed cartel members or the army as collateral damage in a clash?). Also, beyond the deaths: large-scale organized crime exacerbates corruption, imposes costs on businesses (extortion), harms free press, etc, etc. Drug trade in Mexico is definitely a national crisis, in a way I don't think people who don't live there quite understand (no, is not a Mad Max-like hellhole, no, not everything looks like in the movie "El Infierno"[1], but that doesn't mean is just a "localized" crime problem in the sense that gang violence in certain cities of the US is, is an entirely different beast when parts of the country are known to be primarily under organized crime control).
In terms of the original comment, Mexico can't easily go against the US in these matters. But even if it did, the US market would still be both lucrative and illegal, which means the drug cartels would continue operating much as they do now. It would still not be worth it for them to obey Mexican law and it would still be worth it to them to fight for control of drug routes. Legalization in the US would mean competition from Pfizer, GSK and the like, which might actually hurt the cartels. Legalization in Mexico would be pretty much meaningless on its own.
All homicides in Mexico don't add up to 250k per decade. And at most half of the total is drug-related.
And car crash related deaths have even more negative externalities than drug war deaths. They disproportionately kill children and innocent non-criminals. People isolate themselves from dangerous traffic by avoiding walking, avoiding healthy neighborhoods, and by driving more in a vicious spiral. They both have negative social side-effects but car crashes are even worse by most measures.
> All homicides in Mexico don't add up to 250k per decade. And at most half of the total is drug-related.
Homicides were 20,525 in 2015 by official government numbers [1]. Same in 2014 (see same report). Far more than half are crime related, which in Mexico often means it can be connected to drug trade or other activities of the cartels (extortion, people trafficking, etc). This has been a 10 years drug war, and official numbers under-report deaths dramatically, since executions by army and police are rarely counted as homicides and many other killings by drug cartels end up never being investigated and reported as "missing person" cases. This also mostly affects non-criminals, unlike in the US.
Say it is 20,000 a year for 10 years, which seems reasonable based on the figure in the second page of the report. That adds to 200,000 with only the official numbers, only counting homicides classified as such. Add all the missing person numbers (which sure, might partly count displaced migrants, but just as often means dead and thrown in a clandestine burial) and 250k sounds conservative.
I believe the US has a similar mortality rate of car crashes to Mexico, and I can tell you, having lived in both places, that the social side-effects are not even in the same ballpark. This is not a "terror attacks in developed nations kill a few hundred a year, cars kills tens of thousands, we over-react to the first!" kind of argument (which is an argument I agree with), this is a "we have a death toll from the war on drugs that puts us as the 4th bloodiest conflict currently ongoing in the world in absolute numbers[2]".
From that article: "Based on the survey results, INEGI estimated that in 10.7 million households in Mexico (33.9 percent of the total) at least one member of the household was the victim of crime in 2013, or some 22.5 million people -- a rate of 28,224 victims per 100,000 residents". I don't think you can quite understand what it is like to know that in a given year, almost 1/3rd of the population will have to deal directly with crime happening to them. Even if it is mostly theft or extortion, rather than outright murder.
Mexico is a prosperous country now, in spite of gang problems, and that will continue only as long as trade is open.
But small personal use amounts of drugs are already decriminalized in Mexico. I see plenty of people buy, sell, and smoke mariguana in front of cops in broad daylight. To stop the cartels, you need to allow major companies to compete and the USA politicians can't ignore that.
And for all the trouble drug gangs cause in Mexico, they kill fewer people than car crashes. The federal legislature isn't making it the top national priority or overriding all other concerns for that level of violence.
And, to make a final note, the Supreme Court of Justice keeps threatening to make mariguana legal nationally as a matter of human rights. The USA probably wouldn't go as crazy if it happens through a judicial process.