It’s not terribly incorrect to assume that whoever is reading this, likely a millennial student, has consumed narcotics or knows someone who has. Many college students experiment with narcotics or indulge in them, and I fear that the majority of them do not give a second thought into the drugs that they encounter at parties and take into their homes.
Many self-proclaimed humanitarians and compassionate people will take to the streets to protest a range of issues, from animal abuse and factory farming to fair-trade coffee and quinoa, while consuming drugs brought to them by people whose evils surpass that which they protest against.
Illegal drugs are a fuel for capital to criminal organizations that have ravaged South and Central America for over three decades. In both drug production and trafficking areas, there have been waves of violence, corruption, erosion of rule of law and heinous crimes against humanity caused by the emergence of these powerful criminal organizations that profit off the illegally-sourced drugs purchased by Americans.
Consequentially, the Drug Policy Alliance claims Central America now harbors some of the world’s most dangerous cities, with Honduras having the highest global homicide rate, at 82.1 murders per 100,000 inhabitants. The region is largely unsafe to those who expose the violence there like journalists and human rights defenders to law enforcement and politicians who stray from being corrupted by the cartels. But, ultimately, it is primarily unsafe for the citizens caught in the violence. According to the head of the National Crime Agency’s Drugs Threat division, buying cocaine funds the exploitation of impoverished people, destroys and pollutes large areas of rainforest and forces people from their homes so coca can be grown on their land. More statistics from the National Crime Agency state that Mexico’s drug war alone has claimed nearly 164,000 lives from 2007 to 2014 alone, including more than 3,000 police officers and soldiers. With the cartel reaping anywhere from $18 billion to $39 billion a year in drug sales alone according to The New York Times, Mexican cartels surely don’t wish to subside in their efforts.
The allure of intoxication may be foreign to many, but it is familiar to more people than I can count. As strong and fervent as this allure may be, is it enough to overcome compassion for human lives? Does apathy ultimately win in this matter, or can the youth radicalize and take a stand in the age where they are the primary target in the drug market?
Many people speak ill of Central and South America. They believe that Mexico is too dangerous to visit, or that as beautiful as Colombia may be, the streets of the country run with blood because of the crime there, so it is best to stay away. They say these things while putting illegally-sourced marijuana into a pipe and smoking it afterward. They say these things and stay silent when they know friends who are indulging in cocaine or heroin. They speak ill of these countries, but each bag of drugs they buy is compensating a cartel member who will, in turn, increase the amount of blood in the streets of those countries that they speak so dreadfully about.
