Our Unending War

Someone finally said it. It was an unspoken truth hiding in plain sight. In a recent interview, former Attorney General Bill Barr stated that we should treat the Mexican Drug cartels “like ISIS.” And he is absolutely correct. The Mexican drug cartels are one of the biggest threats to this country. They are killers. Their business model is to create as many addicts as possible. And addiction destroys lives, destroys families, destroys communities, destroys countries, and eventually kills the addict.

The cartels are living off the death and destruction of Americans. Over 100,000 people died of drug overdoses last year, many of them under the age of 18. Supplying a drug addict a lethal dose fentanyl or heroin is tantamount to murder. There’s no two ways around it. Drug dealers are exploiting another person’s serious medical condition, knowingly putting them at risk of their lives for their own profit. Three days after Barr’s statement, former President Donald Trump said that we should institute the “death penalty sentence for drug dealers.” He went onto say, “you execute a drug dealer and you’ll save 500 lives, because they kill, on average, 500 people.”

But there has been a lot of talk these days about decriminalizing drugs because it supposedly is a “non-violent” offense, but that should only extend to the drug user, the addict. We should never decriminalize the sale of drugs. In fact, we should increase the penalties to life imprisonment, or even death for the drug dealers, the drug smugglers and the cartels as Donald Trump has advocated. The drug addicts are the victims of our drug crisis. They are the only non-violent drug offender in the entire equation. The drug dealer is violent whether he uses a gun or not. Knowingly selling the drug addict, the drugs that kills him is a violent act. If you sold a gun to a person who you knew had suicidal or homicidal tendencies, and he kills himself or other people, you would have aided and abetted a homicide. It’s very similar with drug overdoses.