Politics Outside US

Once a playground for Hollywood stars and the epitome of jet-set glamour, Acapulco has been reduced to more of a local delight. Tourism is traditionally Mexico's third largest source of revenue, but drug prohibition violence in the past 3 1/2 years has claimed some 28,000 lives and sent foreign tourists looking for other holiday destinations.

Drug prohibition is responsible for a lot more deaths than drugs. Now, the Mexican government is reporting that 28,000 people have been killed since President Felipe Calderón initiated an offensive against the country’s drug cartels three years ago. The announcement, made by Mexico’s intelligence service director Guillermo Valdés, marks the second time in four months that the government has increased its estimate of the number of violent deaths caused by prohibition violence.

Last year, Professor Neil McKeganey of the University of Glasgow, one of the most respected academics in Britain, established that the authorities seize just 1% of the heroin that enters Scotland in any one year. But where are the headlines about this utter failure? Documentary filmmaker Angus Macqueen thinks he knows the answer -- our drug policies have been hijacked by the emotive rhetoric of moralists.

Drug prohibition is responsible for a lot of harm to poorer people, with unequal ratios of land distribution being a type rarely discussed. Over the years, traffickers are believed to have acquired more than 9 million acres — representing about 8 percent of Colombia's best grazing and farm lands. So far, the government has managed to expropriate only about 250,000 acres, less than 3 percent of the total land.

Gangsters, drug dealers and money launderers are playing their part in helping shore up the financial stability of the euro zone. Willem Buiter, chief economist at Citigroup, says that high-denomination euro bank notes, in particular the €200 and €500 bills, are increasingly "making the euro the currency of choice for underground and black economies, and for all those who value anonymity in their financial transactions and investments."

Incredible profits are made available to criminal organizations due to drug prohibition, and some of the money is used to keep them on the technological cutting edge. Bolivia's President Evo Morales reports that drug traffickers have more technology and modern equipment than the country's police and armed forces.

Mexico's drug war, which has not ended the gang violence and killings or stopped the flow of drugs, is failing miserably. Now, some experts fear a new level of violence in the already brutal war among drug traffickers and the Mexican government -- one that could be cutting into foreign business investment and tourism, two staples of the nation's legal economy.

Prohibitionist justice doesn't seem to work very well. Records obtained by The Associated Press show that the Mexican government arrested 226,667 drug suspects between December 2006 and September 2009. Less than a quarter of them were charged and only 15 percent saw a verdict (and the Mexican attorney general's office won't say how many of those were guilty).