We know why thousands flee the chaotic country next door. They run from Mexico and the impoverished countries in Central America. We can now add once-wealthy Venezuela to the list, the oil-rich country ground down by the misguided dreams of Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro.

We know that it is simply impossible for masses of people to live peaceful, productive lives in these countries. Hundreds of thousands make the perilous journey to our southern border hoping for asylum and a chance to escape the hopelessness, the poverty, joblessness and rampant crime and violence at home. If you and I lived in one of those narco-states we’d run, too. They’re called “narco-states” because it’s the drug cartels who call the shots.

People come to us and we take many in, living up to our time-honored cultural practice as a nation of immigrants. But we turn just as many away.

This is ironic because we are the ones mainly responsible for their predicament. Our war on drugs has created a vast underworld of vicious criminal gangs against which there seems to be no defense. This is the main cause of instability in so many Latin countries.

“Instability.” What a mild word that is. But it masks the horrible pain and suffering of countless human beings yearning to breathe free.

We know that opioids, cocaine, even the now Colorado-legalized marijuana, and all the myriad things people consume to get high, to forget their troubles, or to dull their pain are no good. They can drive you to addiction, they can addle your brain, they can even kill you. This is why we’ve made these things illegal, to keep them out of the hands of people who can’t control themselves. We have the best intentions but anti-drug laws have unintended consequences. Our policy of prohibition doesn’t work. It’s high time we faced that truth and did away with it.

Instead of saving lives, the evidence is mounting that drug prohibition just kills more and more users. According to the Centers for Disease Control’s National Center for Health Statistics, in the 12-month period ending in April 2021 100,306 Americans died of drug overdoses. These are the fatalities, but they don’t count the addicted survivors whose lives are warped by the poisonous substances. The increase from the previous year of drug overdoses was 28.5%. And the toll just keeps getting higher.

Of the many cruel push factors propelling people northward, the worst is crime. Latin American criminal gangs are a law unto themselves. They are predators. The “the law of the jungle,” hardly describes their methods. Read the newspapers.

Every day you can read stories of atrocities and the powerlessness of governments in Mexico and Central America to protect the lives of their people. So they come to us. This is the main reason why Joe Biden is letting 30,000 desperate people a month in and at the same time kicking 30,000 back to Mexico.

If we end drug prohibition, some good things would happen. The incarceration and crime rate would drop. Addicts would get treatment instead of jail. Prison never cured anybody of their addictions. Government would take in much needed tax revenue to pay for the rehab. The common practice of lacing pills with deadly fentanyl would be curtailed.

There was a tragic story in this newspaper recently of a young man who died because of a fentanyl-poisoned pill. He likely would be alive today if the illegal market was legal and controlled.

The best thing that would happen is that the suffering of millions in the Latin countries would lessen.

With the cartels deprived of their livelihood, some measure of peace would descend on those countries. The pressure on our southern border would ease. The border would be under control.

And we could begin to devise long-term strategies to help Mexico and Central America regain stability and keep their people at home.

Joe Barrera, Ph.D., is the former director of the Ethnic Studies Program at UCCS. He teaches Mexico/U.S. Border Studies and U.S. Military History. He is a combat veteran of the Vietnam War.

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