The results of these policies have flattened the drug trade, to the point that in these nations the evil has been eradicated at the root and has almost stopped being a problem for their inhabitants and government. The social cost paid by these nations has also been very high, since both countries are known for their social intolerance and fierce authoritarianism. And each one, with its economic limits has a common denominator of repression and control that is inapplicable in a country like our own. In the United States more than 20 million people are daily drug addicts and the apparatus of production, transport, storage and distribution that is needed to supply this immense number of people daily has to be colossal, efficient, sophisticated and highly productive, and it generates profits much higher than those of the largest legitimate businesses in the world. Faced with this overwhelming criminal apparatus, the governments of these nations have lost ground day after day, in spite of the economic and political efforts made by thousands and thousands of people involved in this fight, from police to judges and prison guards, and the untiring rhetoric that defends this policy also fails daily.
Nobody gets it right to correct the problem.
The production and transit countries for drugs, like Cambodia, Colombia and Mexico, live with their own hell, while their institutions are infiltrated by drug traffickers and suffer a constant decay, their social structures brutally erode without finding answers or viable solutions. The third path has worked for countries like Holland that try to end the economic pressures of drug trafficking and recognize that drug addicts are ill, taking charge to allow the free use of drugs by those addicts inside of a therapeutic project, so that those who have irredeemably fallen into this vice do not become instruments of the economic interests of crime. This option has the merit of recognizing a reality and confronting it in a scientific and social form, and has provided small but satisfactory results. From the three options, I believe it is possible to design the one most viable for our country. From the first would come legislation that is fundamentally more effective with greater penalties that establishes an efficient and well supervised vigilance in schools and neighborhoods to eradicate drug commerce from these places that are so important to the community.