Screenshot from CBS News website

A loyal NORML reader notes the unintended irony in the AP photo accompanying CBS News’ coverage of the 28,000 Mexicans who’ve been killed in the drug war south of our border.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has remarked that “Clearly what we’ve been doing has not worked,” and “Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade.” Sec’y Clinton notes that “Neither interdiction [of drugs] nor reducing demand have been successful.”

Yet Americans have a far more insatiable demand for beer than they do cannabis and drugs.  Some of those beers, like Corona, even provide an export market for Mexico and jobs for poor Mexicans.

And nobody turns up tortured and dead under a Budweiser banner, either.

If what we’ve done for thirty years hasn’t worked, if our demand is insatiable, if interdiction is not successful, what other possible way could we deal with marijuana – a product more than half of all Americans under age 50 have tried and 10% of American adults enjoy annually?

The solution to the problem in that photograph isn’t found by going after the murderous criminals who put that banner on the ground.  It’s found in the lessons we learned seventy-seven years ago that led to a beer company putting its banner on the wall.