Tunnel at the Border - Drugs are Big Business

Take a look at this video regarding the most recent tunnel under the border funneling drugs into this country. This the second tunnel discovered in the last few weeks.





Link here for another report.

The tunnel's length and sophistication presuppose considerable wealth and incentive to literally build an underground railroad into the United States. In a related note, hardly a day goes by that we don't see a news story about the horrors visited upon the Mexican people by the drug cartels. As many Arizonans will point out, this violence is spilling over into the United States.

I am sick of this, because the answer to this issue seems obvious to me. Drug legalization that would allow cultivation of marijuana on U.S. soil would go a long way to eliminating this violence and lawlessness, because the profits and the violence stem from the fact that this is a business operating outside of the rule of law.

Why should the Tea Party care?

• The drug trafficking is making the border more difficult to secure. Securing the border will be expensive and difficult; it needs to be done, but making the effort more so is hardly in our best interests. The same tunnels that move marijuana across the border can move illegals as well, but there isn't enough cash in the moving of people to make it worthwhile to build tunnels for that purpose alone.
  
• We are increasing the costs of law enforcement. First, we spend on interdicting the supply of drugs. Second, gangs on both sides of the border obtain large sums of cash to purchase weapons and fund other illegal activities.
• As a matter of principle, the drug laws are an excessive intrusion into the lives of consenting adults. I get that the use of currently banned drugs may not be a net positive for many people, but so what? So are cigarettes, alcohol and video games. We need to ratchet back the amount of control we allow any level of government to exert over our lives. If this isn't a core Tea Party principle, I don't know why I'm wearing that yellow flag on my shirt.