For those wo fixate on the 2,000ish mile US-Mexican border, here’s a reminder that we have 5,000ish mile border to the north via the NYT: Violent New Front in Drug War Opens on the Canadian Border

The drugs move across the Canadian border inside huge tractor-trailer rigs, pounds and pounds stashed in drums of frozen raspberries, tucked in shipments of crushed glass, wood chips and sawdust, or crammed into hollowed-out logs, in secret compartments that agents refer to as “coffins.”

Kayakers paddle them south from British Columbia across the freezing bays of America’s northwest corner, and well-paid couriers carry up to 100 pounds at a time in makeshift backpacks, hiking eight hours over the rugged mountainous terrain that forms part of the border between the United States and Canada. Small planes drop them onto raspberry fields and dairy farms in hockey bags equipped with avalanche beacons to alert traffickers that the drugs have landed.

Again we see the overriding power of markets: where there is demand, there will be supply:

This new wave of drug trafficking, with Northwest Washington and Seattle a major transit point, comes as an enormous challenge to United States law enforcement agents stationed along the often invisible northern border. They are already dealing with the threat of terrorism, the flow of immigrants and new human smuggling operations - some run by some of the Canadian criminal organizations that move the marijuana south and cash, cocaine and guns north, American and Canadian law enforcement officials say.

[…]

Wholesale, B.C. bud sells for about $3,000 a pound, though the price rises the farther from Seattle it is sold - $3,500 a pound by the time it reaches California. Marijuana smuggled across the southern border sells for $400 to $1,000 a pound in the Southwest United States, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The utter impossibility of sealing the US-Mexican and US-Canadian borders to drug trafficking should be manifestly obvious, nonetheless the likely reaction to this situation will be greater spending on a futile cause.

And this sounds oh-so-familiar:

Efforts to combat the flow can be seen vividly in places like Blaine, Wash., a tiny border town along the shore in the northwestern part of the state, where agents patrol the waters, mountains and airways in brand-new boats and planes. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, agents have seen their manpower and technological resources double or triple, helping them seize growing amounts of B.C. bud. Along the Washington border alone, agents seized 20,500 pounds in 2024, worth more than $60 million, up from 4,000 pounds in 1998.

But with possibly more than 1.5 million pounds coming south, according to the Canadian estimates, many acknowledge they are making a mere dent in what is coming across.

Really, it seems to me we would be far better off legalizing the stuff and spending on prevention and treatment for those who need it, not to mention focusing border security on counter-terrorism. I would argue that the societal threat from marijuana hardly justifies the spending in question.

The real irony is that all of the crime and violence is not the result of people tokin’, but of the black market that is created, and the commensurate violence required to protect turf and profits, not to mention to elude police. The story notes that Seattle fears growing violence and crime related to the drug trade, but if the substance was legal, there would be no turf to protect, and no need for gangs.

A companion piece also notes the following depressing facts about the Drug War sink hole: Stopping Illicit Drugs Is Still Uphill Battle, Report Shows

Twenty years after a federal law took effect authorizing the United States to penalize countries that do not control illicit narcotics production, the same countries, by and large, are producing large quantities of heroin, cocaine, marijuana and other drugs, according to the State Department’s annual drug-trafficking report, published Friday.

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The United States has been providing anti-narcotics aid to more than a dozen nations for more than two decades - roughly $1 billion a year in recent years. Each year the government reports large-scale eradication of crops and seizures of illicit drugs. But this year, as every year, reports of progress are overwhelmed by the weight of the problem.

For example, the State Department said in 1985 that in Peru, one of the world’s largest producers of coca leaf and cocaine products, the government had eradicated 7,500 acres of coca plants, which are used to make cocaine, but that narcotics trafficking was nonetheless “flourishing.”

The new report says Peru eradicated almost 25,000 acres of coca in the last year but acknowledged that “dense coca cultivation is increasing.”

[…]

Also, the report lauds Colombia for seizing large quantities of cocaine and eradicating many acres of coca plants and opium poppy. But it concludes, “Colombia is the source of over 90 percent of the cocaine and 50 percent of the heroin entering the U.S.”

We will never stop the production and consumption of illicit drugs, so by definition the “war” on drugs is unwinnable. We would be far wiser to find a way to manage the reality of the fact that there will be drug users, rather than fooling ourselves into thinking that we can actually eradicate the products being consumed.