Former President Bill Clinton apologized to Mexico during a speech there last week for a backfired U.S. war on drugs that has fueled spiraling violence.
“I wish you had no narco-trafficking, but it’s not really your fault,” Clinton told an audience of students and business leaders at the recent Laureate Summit on Youth and Productivity Summit. “Basically, we did too good of a job of taking the transportation out of the air and water, and so we ran it over land.
“I apologize for that,” Clinton said.
Clinton was referring to U.S. drug enforcement policy that began under his predecessors, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, who invested heavily in shutting down the Caribbean Sea as the favored trafficking route between the U.S. and South America and Central America. That effort pushed smuggling west, over land in Mexico.
Clinton made his own contribution. Opening Mexico’s border with the U.S. encouraged land-based trafficking, and enforcement efforts that broke up Colombian cartels empowered Mexican drug gangs, who until then had largely been middlemen. With more power came more money. With more money came more violence.
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The return of meth — or, more precisely, the evolution of meth — was a throw-your-hands-up moment for drug warriors. Federal surveys show a long and slow decline in the use of amphetamines in the United States from 1981 to the early ’90s. But between 1994 and 1995, meth use jumped in the United States. Among 19- to 28-year-olds in the Michigan survey, annual use ticked up by a third. (It remained lower, however, than the American media would have you believe: Even after the jump in meth use, only 1.2 percent of the survey’s total respondents admitted to using it.)
The shift of meth from localized production in California to big-time assembly lines in Mexico didn’t go unnoticed by enforcement agents in the United States. But the eventual crackdown brought another unforeseen consequence: As California tightened its border in response to both drug smuggling and illegal immigration in the ’90s, the drug runners gradually moved east. “The eastward expansion of the drug took a particular toll on central states such as Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska,” notes the 2006 National Drug Threat Assessment. The Midwestern methedemic, as it came to be dubbed, was born.
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Portions of this article are excerpted from the book This Is Your Country On Drugs
