Without a Head, Still a Snake

Mexico’s drug gangs have become staggeringly violent, even slaughtering children if they get in the way of their criminal trade. President Bush applauded the news last week that Mexican authorities had beheaded that nation’s most brutal drug cartel. Now let’s hope he recognizes that the body count on both sides of the border will quickly rebound unless the United States gets equally tough in attacking the demand for the products that cause such mayhem to flourish.

In a surprisingly smooth operation in Puebla, near Mexico City, soldiers captured Benjamin Arellano Felix, the reputed brain of the infamous organization bearing the family name. Police say that a month earlier they killed one of his younger brothers, Ramon, the cartel’s top enforcer (DNA tests are expected to confirm the dead man’s identity). As a result, a fearsome drug empire, which spread to at least 15 Mexican states and across the border by air, sea, land and even underground tunnels, is writhing like a rattlesnake that’s been whacked with a machete.

Unfortunately, narcotics trafficking operations are like serpents with magical powers of regeneration. Demand keeps the beasts alive. Yet in the United States, only four cents of every dollar spent fighting drugs goes to prevention and treatment. Approximately 5 million people consume an estimated 75% of all the heroin, cocaine and amphetamines that come from abroad. According to experts, these hard-core users are disproportionately poor and unemployed and account for most of the crime, child abuse, overdose deaths and other most serious consequences of drug use.

Interning addicts in residential rehabilitation programs is just one way to help break the supply-and-demand connection--and a relatively cheap adjunct to fighting Mexican drug lords while incarcerating U.S. addicts.

As important as it is, the arrest of Benjamin Arellano Felix just adds another prisoner to a long list of drug lords imprisoned since police captured Rafael Caro Quintero in 1985. In fact, Benjamin is now jailed alongside his brother Francisco, captured in 1993. If the United States really wants to win the war on drugs it must hit the cartels where it hurts, cutting the heart out of the profit motive.