Drug War: a 2-Way Street

Back from a trip to Mexico and a meeting with President Ernesto Zedillo, President Clinton now faces an annual predicament: to certify or to decertify Mexico as being cooperative with Washington in the fight against international drug trafficking.

The answer should be clear. You don’t punish the partner from which you seek help. To reduce the illicit production, trafficking and consumption of narcotics and to help eliminate crimes related to drugs, the governments have to work together. To that end the two presidents have established a set of “performance measures of effectiveness” designed to address drug control problems that apply to both countries.

For instance, the measures will increase the number of primary-care professionals working in treatment of drug abuse in the United States. In Mexico, the emphasis will be on reducing production and distribution of drugs. Quarterly reports will be made on eradication of drug crops, destruction of laboratories and results of raids and other seizures. And these are only two of 147 performance areas that will be tracked.

Standing in the way of certification in the House is a group of representatives who point out that the amount of drugs seized by Mexican authorities in 1998 was smaller than 1997’s haul. They say also that Mexican authorities failed to arrest or extradite drug kingpins last year, a charge that the Mexicans dispute.

Rep. John L. Mica (R-Fla.) goes as far as to suggest “closing our borders to trade with them until they develop a will, a pattern in Mexico of really doing something about the drug scourge.”

Despite this rhetoric, it seems unlikely that Congress will decertify Mexico, a process that would block a number of bilateral programs that in fact help to diminish the drug problem. Decertification, which takes a majority of both the House and Senate, has failed in the case of Mexico ever since the law was passed in 1986. A decertification of Mexico would probably be vetoed by Clinton, an action that could be overturned only by a two-thirds vote of Congress.

The proposals presented by President Clinton in Mexico are not the only answers to the drug addiction problem in the United States, but they are a major step forward and certainly better than the politically charged circus that surrounds the certification issue each year.