Wars on Poverty and Drugs

What hath the 55-year-old War on Drugs wrought? Hell on Earth in our Beloved Mexico.

Mexican Cartels Overwhelm Police With Ammunition Made for the U.S. Military

Note: Link to article from The New York Times is good from 30 days of this post.

I wrote about this over 20 years ago, a week or two after the ban on military-style assault weapons was stupidly allowed to expire during the Bush, Jr. administration. Almost immediately after the ban expired, cops here started getting attacked by snipers with .50 cal. Barretts. That's one of the reasons police abandoned all their módulos in the colonias and on the highway and built a tall wall around their police station across from the Unidad Deportiva. It's when the violence in Mexico started growing quickly out of control. Though some poorly educated people snicker and mention "Fast & Furious", that little leftover from the Bush administration wasn't even a drop in the bucket compared to the quarter million firearms bought "legally" in the USA and smuggled into Mexico each year seemingly effortlessly. Presidenta Sheinbaum continues calling on U.S. authorities to do their part to stop the flow of firearms into Mexico, but the USA appears more corrupt now than Mexico ever was on its worst day.

The US had a “War on Poverty”.

The estimated Supplemental Poverty Measure rate in 2024 was 12.9 percent, statistically unchanged from 2023.

Between 2023 and 2024, SPM rates increased for those 65 years and older and for Black individuals but did not change significantly for the other groups discussed in this report

Poverty won.

The US has a War on Drugs.

In 2023, an estimated 54.2 million Americans (aged 12 or older) needed substance use disorder treatment, but only 12.8 million received it.

It appears that drugs are winning.