Not Selling Any Alibis | Cancun cancelled: why America's drug trade is interrupting vacations to Mexico

If you logged onto MySJU at any point last week, you probably noticed a posted bulletin from the U.S. State Department warning against travel to Mexico. For college students wishing to travel to someplace fun, warm and relatively close to home for spring break, it might have come as a big disappointment. To many, though, it probably didn't come as a surprise.

For two years now, American newspapers have been reporting on northern Mexico's gangland-style wars between rival drug cartels that have been killing thousands of Mexican civilians a year. The wars, at their worst, resemble the 2005-2007 civil war that occurred in Iraq, with police officers and others working for the government kidnapped, tortured, or otherwise executed. Even beheadings have occurred.

Now we can see this violence spilling over into other parts of Mexican society, providing cover for more routine sorts of crime like robberies and muggings, which can disproportionately affect tourists-especially students, who are likely to be less cautious about their activities while in a potentially dangerous place.

Obviously, it's a bad situation. It's got a relatively easy solution for tourists, though-with the breakdown of law and society in many parts of the country, it's better to simply choose to go somewhere else.

Unfortunately, however, that is no solution for what is an increasingly critical problem affecting our closest neighbor. Ultimately, violence just across the border will spill into American cities, with drug cartels expanding their territory from cities like Juarez and Tijuana into El Paso and San Diego. To pretend that what happens across the border will never affect Americans, as long as we stay out of it, is naive.

And it's not as if we can pretend this is a Mexican-caused problem that they could solve if they wanted to, either. The guns used to execute Mexican police officers come from any of 6,000 estimated gun dealers in the U.S. who sell, often knowingly, to intermediaries for Mexican drug cartels. The money that fuels the inter-gang wars comes almost exclusively from drugs sold in America to American consumers. The violent, brutal culture of the cartels was imported from gangs in American cities like Los Angeles and Houston. The fact is that Mexico is an innocent victim of the American demand for drugs.

We caused this, and it's up to us to fix it. The most important thing we do to fix this situation is to realize that fact.

The root of this problem, of course, is the vast amount of money the drug cartels make from American consumers. Essentially, we subsidize the mass murders in Mexico every year. It might never happen, but the only possible way to cut off the massive flow of money to the cartels is to either make it easier to buy drugs legally or massively increase rehabilitation programs for addicts.

It is obvious the "war on drugs," waged since the 1980s, has not worked. That policy emphasized punishment over rehabilitation and demonized addicts, who then hid their problems for fear of punishment or of being shunned by society. It's created an underclass of people who, once they serve their sentence for drug crimes, go immediately back to using because they were never enrolled in any sort of program to teach them how to live without their dependency. A byproduct of the policy, of course, is a larger prison population that costs more money to maintain. Either legalizing the less dangerous drugs or putting more money into rehabilitation programs and less into prison sentences could help us to reduce the power and competitive brutality of the drug cartels.

The other thing we need to do is simple: we need to stop selling assault weapons. There is no reason in the world anyone would need an AK-47, an Uzi, or a silencer for a gun. You can't hunt with them and they're much less effective at defending a home than a simple shotgun or pistol. They're good for two things: gang warfare and killing police officers. And those are the two purposes, of course, they're overwhelmingly used for, mostly by Mexican gangs who hire American citizens to buy them a few dozen weapons.

So, there's a perfectly good reason we can't go to Mexico for what should be a fun spring break in good weather-we're subsidizing a civil war. Let's be a good neighbor and realize that.