U.S.-Mexico border

There’s been a lot in the news on the violence related to the drug war near the border. Grits for Breakfast reports from near the front line:

This is nuts. We train Mexican anti-drug forces, the drug cartels hire them. We ban meth precursors, the drug cartels get richer. […] Gunplay on both sides of the border has become common as dirt. […] Honestly, can anything good be said about our current approach to border security? Even so, the only proposals you ever see are to throw more money at the same failed strategies.

This is going to get out of control. And unfortunately, as Grits notes, the only strategies allowed are those failed ones we’ve been using, partly because nobody is even willing to talk about alternatives to prohibition.
One group of prohibitionists advocates dumping more wood on the fire with the idea that if we put enough wood on it we’ll smother it. The other group says we should blow the fire out and if we just blow hard enough, we’ll defeat it. So they keep adding wood and blowing… with predictable results.