The information in this article has no affiliation or association with the United States Government, the United States Military, or the Department of Defense. It is not to be misconstrued as the opinion or belief of the aforementioned parties.
For the last four decades, the War on Drugs has remained a constant in both the United States and Mexico. Since its official beginning in 1971, under the Nixon Administration, the meaning of the phrase “the War on Drugs” has varied depending on who is asked. In the United States, it is presented as an assault against drug abuse and addiction, while those who oppose the struggle claim it to be an attempt to diminish minority communities. In Mexico, the War on Drugs symbolizes the beginning of a long and bloody period full of corruption, violence, and pain. Regardless of which side of the border you live on, one component of the drug war remains a constant: the cartels who are responsible for initiating widespread violence and distributing millions of pounds of narcotics. However, despite the violence and pain felt in Mexico due to these criminal organizations, in 2018 the promises of reform and a new strategy were presented by recently elected Mexican President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador. This new breath of life was explained by presidential aid Olga Sanchez: “We will propose decriminalization, create truth commissions, we will attack the causes of poverty, we will give scholarships to the youth and we will work in the field to get them out of the drug situation.”
This contradicts the position of former President Felipe Calderón (2006-2012), who had adopted policies of increased militarization and use of troops to fight the cartels in the country. American President Donald Trump seemingly agreed with his former counterpart as the “Trump administration has convened a panel to study ways to better combat the opioid epidemic; on the other hand, [former] US Attorney General Jeff Sessions believes we need to roll the clock back to a “tough on crime” stance to substance abuse. Bringing back harsh minimum sentencing means people struggling with chemical dependency could serve more time than violent, dangerous offenders.” Regardless of the debate on what is the proper course of action to end the war on drugs, data provided by the United States Border Patrol in 2015 suggest that this is not on the horizon. Instead, the data collected indicate that if anything, the War on Drugs is escalating more than ever as thousands of arrests and hundreds of thousands of pounds of illegal substances have been apprehended by tens of thousands of agents along the US-Mexico border.
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