Terror - South of the Border

We are living in a society that thrives on fear. We thrive on what we must do to prevent something terrible happening. We are shown how terrorism is this country’s biggest threat to national security. Yet we allow the drug wars in Mexico to go on without any interference from our military. The Middle East is thousands of miles away. There is an even greater threat just south of the border.

I am no expert and I don’t have all of the statistics. What I do have is common sense. The death toll in this country from drugs on a daily basis easily trumps the number of people killed in our country from terrorism. Every day that we stand by and do nothing about the drug problem in this country we impose our own form of terrorism. It’s not just the low-income neighborhoods that have this drug problem. The drug epidemic is everywhere; no portion of our country is spared.

Drug overdoses occur every day in this country. A user can do the same drugs every day for years and over time will convince themselves that they will be fine. We fail to realize that every day we do survive we are still causing damage to our bodies. There’s no warning when enough is enough. One day you are getting high and before you know it your life is over. I have read that 100 people die from drug overdoses in the United States every day. Now lets look at this in a monthly perspective, that’s 3,000 people every month dying because of drugs. There’s 365 days in a year, so in a yearly perspective we will find that 36,500 people will die from drug overdoses. Now in ten years that number becomes 365,000 people dying and that turns into borderline genocide. This becomes a self-imposed genocide on our country that we continue to turn a blind eye to. I understand our mission in the Middle East but it should not be our only priority. We have an enemy south of our border that for whatever reason doesn’t really seem to matter to anyone.

I have read that in 2005 there were over two million home invasions in the United States. I would be willing to bet that at least 75% of these home invasions were committed by someone that was addicted to drugs. So 1.5 million burglaries by committed by addicts. More lives ruined because of narcotics. Then if we start to look at robbery, kidnapping, and auto theft we will see what drugs are doing to our nation. Not only the people victimized by these crimes are the victims. The people that are committing them are also victims of the drugs that are poisoning their minds. How many inmates grew up in broken homes? Grew up in family’s torn apart because of drug abuse; parents turning to drug trafficking to support their own habits leading to imprisonment and their children going into the system.

If we look at the numbers and we look at the affect on the American people. It almost begins to look like terror. Home grown terrorism that is destroying lives on a daily basis. While acts of foreign terrorism are just as deadly and shouldn’t be ignored, the terror in our own backyards can’t be ignored either. We need to stop calling drugs a problem and start calling them terror because that is exactly what it is. Minds poisoned, family’s ruined, and life’s wasted; by a war south of our border that we continue to do nothing about.

Clearly the Mexican government can’t contain this problem. If they could we wouldn’t have cocaine and heroin flooding our streets. This is not a time to sit back and do nothing. Obviously our faith in their efforts was generous to say the least. We must realize our mistakes and re-evaluate our priorities. Our troops are out of Iraq and according to Obama they shouldn’t be in Afghanistan for much longer. Our efforts must be re-directed to the nation that is destroying ours from the inside out. If we don’t, things will never change and we already know what will continue to happen. There will be no one else to blame, just ourselves.