High Country News has a good piece on the unintended consequences of our reliance on Private Sector solutions to certain Law Enforcement and Public Health problems.
The drug industry is the second-largest source of foreign currency in Mexico, just behind oil. It earns somewhere between $30 billion and $50 billion a year -- no one really knows, including the people in the industry. It also creates enormous numbers of jobs in the U.S.: We spend billions a year on narcs, maintain the world's largest prison industry, which is absolutely dependent on the intake of drug felons, and we have about 20,000 agents on the border who feed off drug importation. The rehab industry is also a source of a large number of jobs since many well-heeled defendants pick mandatory treatment over prison. Many county and local police departments now get fat off of RICO suits based on drug offenses.
Once we made it profitable for some people to fight "The War On Drugs", it didn't take long for them to figure out that it's not in their best interests to win it.
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