Former Mexican president: ‘US must legalise drugs to stop violence’.

As insane as it sounds, there is no other promising solution to the damage that America’s drug demand is inflicting on ourselves or Mexico.  Can anyone blame Vincente Fox for his campaign against the drug war’s damage to Mexico?  By January 13, 2011, 34,612 people were reported murdered in Mexico in the past four years.  Look for a minute at America’s demand for the drugs that fuels this carnage.  For every drug related incarceration, there are 20 substance abusers waiting for their turn in jails and hospitals.  It never seems to end.  More than half of our 2.4 million inmates are locked up for drug related charges.  Consider that even half of them need drug rehabilitation and we are talking about 25 billion dollars that could be spent reducing demand by treating drug addiction in stead of punishing it.  Add in the cost of emergency rooms,  lost workplace productivity, related homelessness and mental illness,  judicial costs, and the cost of fighting demand on the streets,  we are into numbers that approach a major federal government program in the hundreds of billions of dollars.  Ending this carnage is not a pipe dream.