Four Decades Later, It’s Time to Scrap the Dead-End Drug War

I recently returned from the desert city of Durango, Mexico, where forensic officials are still trying to identify some 240 corpses discovered this year in mass graves. More than 200 other bodies have been found in similar fosas across northern Mexico. All were victims, many of them innocent victims, of the drug-trafficking violence whose barbarity seems bottomless. But it’s fueled in large part by the just as endless American appetite for illegal drugs – which itself is due in no small part to the fact that our anti-drug policies are so narrow-mindedly focused on battling supply instead of reducing demand.

Americans can summon all our gringo chauvinism and lament how savage things have gotten south of the border. Or we can wake up and acknowledge that we’ve helped los narcos dig the mass graves that are scarring Mexico’s landscape and its psyche. And today is the moment to start that…