Drugs and OIl

There are two topics in the headlines right now about problems with commodities that the United States consumes in larger quantities than any other country in the world.

Oil

One problem is the major oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Since the oil rig explosion on April 20th of this year millions of gallons of oil have been flowing into the gulf of Mexico and will continue to do so for some time. Wildlife is being devastated, 11 workers lost their lives, the people living along the Gulf Coast have lost their livelihoods, many people along the gulf coast will lose their way of life, and a major oil company has shown that with all the technology we have today we cannot plug a hole in the ground on the bottom of the ocean. There is a man made disaster going on and many blaming the lax standards of a greedy oil company.

I don't want to pick a side in that fight. I want to point out only that oil spills happen. In fact this is not even the worst one to occur, it is merely the worst that has been in United States territory. The bottom line is that drilling for, bringing up, transporting, and using fossil fuels is going to always involve risk and until we as a society find another source of energy we are not going to be able to eliminate the impact of those risks.


Drugs

The other is the problem of illegal immigration from Mexico and boder security. I saw a report yesterday detailing how the Mayor of a Mexican border town was assassinated by cartel lords who did not like the fact that he was in faovr of law and order. What amazes about this story and the broader debate about immigration is that somehow the United States consumption of illegal narcotics is almost always overlooked. Our society is funding the war lords of that region by buying narcotics at a tremendous rate and yet we don't want to acknowledge that the real reason so many people are trying to cross the border is that Americans are destroying large regions of thier country.

This is not to say that I blame drug addicts for border problems. I don't. I have scarcely any understanding of why we as a society consume so many narcotics. What I do know for certain is that our policies for managing the use of illegal narcotics have not been successful in limiting their use. I also know that hundreds, if not thousands of people in the border area of Mexico die in fights to control who gets to supply our demand for narcotics. I can't come up with some simple solution that is going to solve this problem. I do think we should at least start by acknowledging that a tremendous amount of the instability down there is a result of narco trafficking. Continuing to pretend that cutting off the flow of drugs and people is a more reasonable solution than cutting off the demand is a hypocritical way of blaming our problems on another country.


Conclusion

While we seem to be obsessed with how oil is damaging the livelihoods of Americans and we are in the mood to start innovating a way to cut our consumption of oil, we may want to think about how we can cut our consumption of narcotics as well.

On the other hand, we could just continue to condemn the lawlessness of the Mexican side of the U.S. Mexican border and the greed/recklessness of oil companies and wait for more people to die.