Recently, I’ve heard political rhetoric that says we can lay blame for the fentanyl crisis on Mexico and the cartels — AND we should take direct military action against them.

If you’re interested in learning more about these talking points, Politico published an article highlighting the issue. You can read it here.

My thoughts are…

No, don’t bomb Mexico.

Here’s the thing: Humans like making money. When we forced the market for so many drugs underground through prohibition, we basically took a massive pile of consumer cash away from legal businesses and put it in a big pile. Only people who break the law can get it, and the more ruthless they are, the more cash they can get.

We’ve been wringing our hands and raging against the people who looked at that pile of cash and said, “I’d like some of that.”

Drug prohibition doesn’t fight crime … it creates a huge cash incentive to engage in it. Cartels aren’t the core problem and going to war with them will solve absolutely nothing. We’re at war with our own laws. Until we change them, fentanyl and the overdose crisis are here to stay.

I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, even people who disagree with me, but it fails logic, experience, evidence and common sense to think that somehow launching a full-scale war with cartels is going to beat the laws of supply and demand once and for all.

Fentanyl is in the street drug supply because, as a country, we refuse to allow adults to make a broader range of choices about their drug use.

The cartels are simply responding to the financial incentives the law has put in front of them. If we want to show how serious we are about fighting fentanyl, we have to look inward at our laws, not outward at the people taking predictable advantage of the incentives the laws set up.

That’s why I’m so passionate about the work End It For Good does. We want to show people that if we change our laws and bring drug markets and consumption back into the rule of law rather than the free-for-all of prohibition, crime — as well as overdoses — could be significantly reduced.