Drug Wars, Drug Violence, and Drug Addiction in the Americas

By 2008, Smith reports, cocaine-based drugs had replaced inhalants as Mexicans' "drug of choice. "I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics", observes Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, the protagonist of Cormac McCarthy's I No Country for Old Men i .[1] Russell Crandall begins I Drugs and Thugs i with the epigram, then builds a case that militarized counternarcotics policing - making war on drugs - is as bad as the plague of illicit narcotics itself. He is certain, however, that the Mexican drug trade will continue as long as narcotics remain illegal. Quinones argues that drug supply, not drug demand, is primary. [Extracted from the article]