Cartels and US deaths in Mexico have been much in the news lately. Much of the associated blame has been put on Mexican President Lopez Obrador's abrazos, no balazos — "hugs, not bullets" — strategy. This seeks to de-escalate tensions with the cartels, but has been widely criticized, for example, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed:
Traffickers read this as weakness and do what they please. A string of recent law-enforcement defeats, including the murder of 14 policemen in the state of Michoacán, have undermined national confidence. On Oct. 17 in the city of Culiacán, security officials arrested Ovidio Guzmán, son of the notorious El Chapo, who is in prison in the U.S. But the Sinaloa cartel reacted by unleashing its paramilitary army against the city and forcing the release of Mr. Guzmán—a humiliating blow to the Mexican government.
What is going on down there?
As readers know, we treat illegal immigration as a black market in labor, and therefore we keep an eye on other black markets affecting the US southwest border, both because they affect immigration policy and because they serve as templates for what to do -- and what to avoid.
Mexico began its current war on drugs under pressure from the US back in 2006. This has had entirely predictable consequences. Murders, which had hovered around 10,000 / year through the first half of the 2000s, began to soar. This year, Mexico is likely to post a new record above 36,000 homicides. For purposes of comparison, Pew Research reports that the US recorded 14,542 gun homicides in 2018. That extra 25,000 Mexicans deaths in the war on drugs is more than six times total US gun homicides when adjusted for population. The principal achievement of the US-driven war on drugs in Mexico has been 200,000 excess deaths there in the last thirteen years, along with untold corruption and a society spiraling out of control.
But surely all this death and horror must have accomplished something great, perhaps the end of the drug trade in the US?
Alas, no.
Under President Trump, seizures of hard drugs in FY 2019 -- and the assumed volume of drug trade it implies -- have increased by 130% compared to the last two years of the Obama administration. Cocaine in particular is the hot product, with seizures -- and presumably smuggled quantities -- up by nearly 80% over 2018.
Thus, Mexico's war on drugs, those 25,000 excess deaths, have yielded a near doubling of cocaine imports. That's the big achievement, the value of the ultimate sacrifice we have asked of 25,000 Mexicans.
Given this unending and pointless stream of death and corruption, what should President Lopez Obrador do? The history of the US prohibition of alcohol provides some insight. Implemented in 1920, Prohibition ostensibly prevented the public from consuming alcohol until Repeal in 1933. That intervening thirteen years was the time necessary for prohibitionists and the wider society to concede defeat in the war on alcohol.
We are now thirteen years since the start of the War on Drugs in Mexico, and fatigue is setting in there as well. Clearly, President Obrador wants to end the conflict. Without legalization, however, this will be hard to do, and even harder to maintain. Even now, the Mexican military is chafing at the bit to take the stick to the cartels. Sooner or later, the impulse to re-establish sovereignty over territory now controlled by the cartels will erupt in fierce fighting and yet more deaths.
The only viable alternative is some sort of legalization. This is not a panacea. Some problems will become worse, but most will improve. Specifically, historical precedent tells us that legalization would:
increase drug usage, and presumably the number of addicts, by 10-15%
decrease mortality related to hard drugs by 95%, just as the experiences of the Netherlands and Portugal show
reduce the Mexican murder rate by 2/3, saving 170,000 lives over the next decade and almost 500,000 to 2040, and
vastly improve the security situation in Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries, fostering better governance, faster GDP growth, and fewer migrants looking to settle in the US
Of course, legalization does not mean a lack of regulation--the purpose of this analysis is not to argue for legalization per se, just as we are not arguing for unlimited immigration. Further, demand suppression -- going after users -- is historically effective if properly applied, just as it would be to prosecute the employers of migrant labor. Since the customers for Mexico's hard drugs and migrant labor are essentially all in the US, the US must lead such an initiative. But either way, Mexico must end the war on drugs. Mexican society simply cannot handle the destruction wrought by the black market. The cost/benefit is not close. Even in the most liberal environment, nothing like half a million Mexicans would die of drug overdoses in the next twenty years, not by an order of magnitude. The war on drugs, however, will kill them in all certainty. The historical record is not ambiguous.
Indeed, the black markets on the southwest border with the most aggressive enforcement -- hard drugs and migrant labor -- have seen the greatest increases in activity in the last year and are well up on the Obama era. Enforcement, far from working, is inevitably facing a losing battle, as it always has.
By contrast, marijuana smuggling over the unsecured southwest border has collapsed, even though it has been legalized in only eleven states. Border Patrol seizures have dropped by 42% in FY 2019 alone, and 81% since President Trump took office. Since 2009, marijuana smuggling is down 93% -- exactly the result a liberalization might be expected to deliver. And yet, no disaster has followed. Neither the economy nor US society has ground to a halt because pot is legal.
Nor would it grind to a halt if we ended the Prohibition in Migrant Labor and instead used a market-based system with a soft cap. All the pointless suffering and expense would be saved, no one would die crossing the border, millions would be spared existential uncertainty, and hundreds of thousands would avoid crushing incarceration. And the US does not have to be overrun with migrants to achieve that goal.
Black markets are phenomenally destructive -- an order of magnitude worse than you think. Mexico will only escape the cartels with some sort of legalization, however difficult and unpleasant that may be for all of us.
But let us start with illegal immigration first. The stakes are so much lower, and the outcome so much more positive. Migrants are not heroin or cocaine, but rather poor people looking to work hard in the hopes of a better life. Both theory and history tell us this is a problem we can solve without undermining the foundations of our society.