Each year, Mexico spends millions of dollars in an attempt to combat drug trafficking. This is spent on high-tech operations in airports and along the border aimed at stopping drug flow on its way to the United States. In fact, about 90 percent of the cocaine that enters the United States is trafficked through Mexico. Cocaine is an illegal and highly addictive drug that is often smuggled across the United State’s Mexican border. Cocaine smugglers are able to make money off of it because people who are addicted will pay a lot for the drug. And, because of the risks involved with smuggling drugs across the border, cocaine is expensive. Cocaine trafficking is hard to stop because as long as there is profit involved people will try to smuggle it. Even through all of the efforts of the United States and Mexico to stop drug trafficking across the border, cocaine and other drugs are still seeping their way into the United States.
This is happening because the United States and Mexico are trying to stop drug trafficking in an ineffective way. Take the case of Benjamin Arellano Felix, for an example. Arellano and his brother, Ramon, were caught in 2002, and were, at the time, Mexico’s most powerful drug suppliers, supplying the United States with a third of its cocaine. After nine years in hiding, they were finally caught, and along with them the thousands of tons of cocaine that they were trafficking. These brothers were able to go for nine years without being caught. Currently, the Mexican and American governments are employing military and using high-tech operations to try to catch people smuggling these illegal drugs. Some argue that the best way to stop this drug war is to legalize cocaine and similar drugs. These people reason that the demand would remain relatively the same, but the supply would greatly increase, lowering the price of the cocaine, and consequently giving it little value to those who used to make a profit from it. Though this approach might help, there is a risk of the demand increasing, which is why legalizing cocaine in the United States would be a dangerous solution.
The idea of legalizing cocaine in the United States is to lower the demand, which is what needs to be done, but it must be done differently. The most effective way to lower the demand on cocaine is to educate the youth in the United States on the risks of cocaine and similar drugs. According to the Central Intelligence Agency, the United States is the worlds’ largest consumer of cocaine, which is why the United States needs to be the target area. By educated youth in the United States on the risks of drugs like cocaine, the demand for drugs would decrease in the future, and therefore would be the solution to stop cocaine trafficking in Mexico.