As long as there is a market for hard drugs in the U.S., there will be people offering to sell those drugs to the users.
And as long as we make hard drugs illegal with very stiff penalties, the profits from smuggling them will be very high and the smugglers will be violent criminals.
Americans finance the Mexican cartels. Without our dollars, they wouldn't exist.
This is the result of treating drug addiction as a crime instead of a health problem.
If we were serious about ending the cartels, we would work to get control of our addiction to their products. The only way to do that is to handle addiction as a public health issue, like we did with cancer. Our war on cancer has had success in cutting cancer's mortality rate, but it took decades of medical research.
In the short term, the only means I see of controlling our drug problem is for the federal government to replace the cartels as a drug provider with the aim of ending addiction. Yes, I'm talking free drugs paid for with our tax dollars, and NO criminal charges.
Even if the addict never overcomes their addiction, we would see savings from lowered crime rates, lowered prison rates, and a reduced police force.
Would there be abuses of this system? Of course. But since we're not funneling all our drug money to Mexico, we should have more resources to handle those abuses. It wouldn't be perfect, but it should be better.
Prohibition was a failure, and it took us almost 14 years to admit that and reverse it. The War on Drugs has lasted 52 years so far, and it shows no sign of ending. Can we still afford it?