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Here’s Why Donald Trump’s Wall Won’t Stop Mexican Drug Cartels

Donald Trump's Wall

Politics

Here’s Why Donald Trump’s Wall Won’t Stop Mexican Drug Cartels

Donald Trump’s Wall

He’s going to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, and he’s going to make Mexico pay for it.

Everyone has heard Donald Trump’s rallying cry to stop people crossing the border into the United States. He claims people are bringing drugs with them.

And while it’s certainly true that some people smuggle drugs between Mexico and the United States, you know, to supply American’s insatiable demand for narcotics, most people who immigrate to the U.S are not.

A fair amount of illicit drugs does cross the border, however. The amount of illicit drugs believed to enter Arizona alone each year from Mexico is easily in the thousands of tons, according to U.S. officials.

“Right now, the volume of marijuana that will be seized in southern Arizona will be approximately, we predict, 1.4 million pounds by the end of this calendar year. That is beyond what we’ve ever seized before,” said Anthony Coulson, the Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency District Office in Tucson.

But that hasn’t stopped Donny from promising to build a wall across the entire southern border of the United States, a move he proposes will stop not just the flow of migrants, but the traffic of drugs also.

Drug smugglers, however, know their way around a wall. And over walls. And under walls. But so do the Drug Enforcement agents tasked with catching them.

Vigil hilariously points out that “medieval technology” like a catapult could fling drugs over the wall and that hundreds, possibly thousands of smuggling tunnels are already in place.

More inventively, there’s a technique involving specially designed trucks with ramps built in the back and front. These trucks pull up next to the barbed-wire border fence and lower one of the ramps over to the U.S. side, while the other ramp slides down the back of the vehicle.

Smugglers in SUVs loaded with drugs then drive across these mobile truck-bridges into Arizona without ever touching the fence. From there they race north across the desert to offload their contraband.

That’s why ex-agent Vigil says it’s absurd to think that Donald Trump’s Wall would have any influence on drug trafficking into the United States.

The War on Drugs has long-maintained a prohibitionist stance against drugs, and has insisted that it’s possible to stem the flow of narcotics into the United States through tougher border control and enforcement.

Experts analyzing the effects of the drug war show how those policies have done nothing but make the Mexican drug cartels stronger than ever.

In fact, only one thing seems to be stopping Mexican cartels from moving illicit substances across the border: legalizing marijuana in the U.S.

Doing what the drug war couldn’t legalized medical and recreational marijuana has cut into cartels’ profits in a way that military crackdowns never could.

Legalized marijuana in the U.S. has not only hurt cartel profits, it has also reduced the demand for cannabis grown in Mexico. Mexican cannabis cannot compete with the high-quality herb available in U.S. dispensaries. With the demand for Mexican grass declining, so has the flow of marijuana over the border.

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