On a recent trip to Mexico, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did not seek to deflect the blame that America deserves for the Mexican drug problem: "Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade." This drug trade has been costly for Mexico and other Latin American countries. According to The New York Times, there have been over 7,200 deaths due to drug-related violence in Mexico alone since last year. In addition, the U.S. spends around $40 billion each year to combat the spread of drugs. As much as we'd like to pretend otherwise, much of the blame for these problems lies squarely with us.
A few weeks ago, The Economist ran a feature on this problem and concluded that the "least bad" solution would be to legalize soft drugs in America, reducing the need to go through such nefarious channels to acquire drugs. While I agree that this is a good solution, I'm guessing that the people in a position to make those decisions (congressmen) have already read The Economist and aren't going to read my column. So, I'm going to make an argument directed more towards my audience: college students need to be more conscientious in their drug use.
When drugs came to the forefront of American culture in the 1960s, their image was associated with hippies and the peace movement. While this image still persists in popular culture, it's much less accurate now than it was back then. Drug money now often indirectly supports violence and instability. American money helps drug cartels pay for weapons and assassinations. Many judges and policemen in Latin America who stand up to drug cartels are murdered, and many others are bribed, which further contributes to injustice and instability. We need to recognize this.
Illegal drugs aren't the only product that comes with guilt attached. Purchasing soccer balls and sneakers from certain companies indirectly supports sweatshops, and buying certain cosmetic products indirectly perpetuates animal testing. We should certainly be conscientious with our consumerism in these areas, but drugs take it to a level that most other goods don't: murder. And while one could debate the pros and cons of animal rights or labor laws in the developing world, I think we can all agree that murder is unacceptable.
Certainly, some drugs are worse than others in this regard, and this is where our consciences need to come into play. Softer drugs like marijuana and psychedelic mushrooms are relatively likely to be grown in the United States because they can be grown in many climates -- even indoors. While there is inherently some level of crime involved in getting softer drugs from the soil where they grew all the way to the drug user's brain cells, such crime is not as likely to be violent as the crime associated with harder drugs. These harder drugs, like cocaine and heroin, are almost guaranteed not to originate in the United States: over 65 percent of the cocaine in the United States enters over the Mexican border, much of it crossing many more borders along the way. Such distances greatly increase the probability that violent crime will occur somewhere along the line.
There are many good reasons for people to avoid hard drugs, but most of these reasons are relatively personal. People can destroy their bodies or their bank accounts, and they must at least subconsciously consider these consequences when they do hard drugs. What most people don't consider, though, are the effects that drugs have before they are consumed or even purchased.
The point of this column is not to convince people not to do any drugs. I'm not trying to make a moral argument against illegal drugs, either. Everything that we do has consequences that ripple throughout the world, sometimes in unintended and undesirable ways. But we can do at least a little to control the negative effects that our actions have.
If you're going to do drugs, do a little research beyond their health effects. Learn how they're made, where they come from and what the likely path is that brought them to you. If the trail is long and bloody, pick some other drug and don't allow your dollars to support the violence. Or, if you want to be a truly conscientious drug user, ensure that the path from the drug's creation to its use is violence-free -- grow your own.
