International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 1, Winter 2019/2020 | Page 157

International Journal on Criminology
ment, under pressure from its powerful neighbor to the north, this domination
through fear has become even more pronounced. As a consequence of this policy,
for the last 15 years Mexico has become, it can be seen, the largest theater in the
war on drugs. Mexicans’ daily lives are now directly impacted by drug trafficking.
Corruption is now rife, while the economy is in recession. And crime of all types
has exploded: kidnapping, violence, thefts, trafficking, and tens of thousands of
murders each year, which in general are preceded by barbarous torture that traumatizes
survivors, carry on alongside score settling between drug cartels as they
fight over the transit routes that feed into the United States, the largest consumer
of illegal drugs out of all the world’s countries.
On September 15, 2017, Donald Trump had to bring in a Prescription Opioid
and Heroin Epidemic Awareness Week because a wave of more than 60,000
overdose deaths in a single year, approximately 100 people per day, had been detected.
121 This wave was caused by the mass and uncontrolled prescribing of these
drugs, a response by physicians to a highly aggressive campaign undertaken by the
pharmaceutical industry at the beginning of this decade.
As cannabis increasingly becomes legal across the United States, criminal
organizations are currently redirecting their activities toward trafficking illegal
opiates and heroin from China (though Mexico has also become a producer of
opium poppy); these groups represent an alternative for users in the face of restrictions
from the U.S. federal government on access to the painkillers in tablet form
that millions of people in the United States have become dependent on. 122
What is to be done in the face of what have become powerhouse cartels that
are vastly wealthy, better organized, and more determined that many U.S. states
are? Will they be “legalized” as well through their being relabeled as entrepreneurs?
Throughout Central America, as well as in many other regions of the world,
this “parallel economy” has been constructed out of decisions pertaining to “drug
control,” and not only of cannabis, taken by the United States. Will these tentacular
cartels really let democracies harm their economic interests? Isn’t it the case that
they already carry weight in decision making in some states? How can the power
of these globalized cartels that are built on the theoretical control of certain drugs
be measured?
After the 2008 global financial crisis, Antonio Maria Costa, then the head of
the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, stated that drug money was what
had saved the banks and the financial system, with around €350 billion originating
in cartels apparently having been absorbed by the global economic system. 123
121 https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/president-donald-j-trump-proclaimsseptember-17-september-23-2017-prescription-opioid-heroin-epidemic-awareness-week/.
122 https://elpais.com/internacional/2017/08/10/actualidad/1502396000_722428.html.
123 https://www.theguardian.com/global/2009/dec/13/drug-money-banks-saved-un-cfief-claims.
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