105 Comments

OK, let's look at this in the reverse. A couple from Canada/Mexico/England/China/fill in the blank tourist comes to one of our 50 states. Is murdered by an American due to whatever reason. They are in a mall, a church, visiting a niece's school, in a movie theater, again, fill in the blank. Would those countries be correct in taking military action against the U.S. due to our prevalence of guns?

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If we have been invading Mexican since the Mexican American War, I've been out of the loop. Having been born in Texas in 1957 and having lived there until 1977 and my family still lives in Texas, I'm quite ashamed. Please fill me in. as an American and more specifically s Texan I feel I have a right to know.

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This kind of behavior is supposed to be in the US's past. The US recognizes the UN Charter which calls for the Rules Based Order, the territory of sovereign countries is to be respected. Mexico evidenced its displeasure. Iraq did not get a chance. Mexico is a partner and we should respect their sovereignty.

Even if we did do a "policing action", you don't start talking about it in the Press. I still vote that we don't even entertain this disrespectful behavior and roundly condemn it.

The one thing that is consistent. The modern Republican Party doesn't understand how to run a country in a world where we all depend on each other to get by. I can't wait until they all trip and fall so the Republican Party can start again.

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Gosh, you'd think all those nasty drug cartels aren't merely trying to get rich by satisfying the insatiable demand of American consumers. Typical blindspot shared by too many of my fellow citizens: our outrage at the agents manufacturing, shipping, distributing, and selling illegal drugs stops at the border, shifting the blame for OUR drug crisis onto our southern neighbors in Latin America and the Caribbean, and failing to acknowledge the abysmal failure of our decades long "war on drugs." Classic blame shifting, which along with projection, seem to be the right's favored response to all our problems. How about addressing the reasons our fellow citizens consume so many drugs and begin owning our own problem rather than blaming the southern neighbor which has been ravaged by the violence and corrupting influence of brutal gangs that exist to fill the demand we create.

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Mar 11, 2023·edited Mar 11, 2023

I will briefly note that when I was a kid, in the 60s and 70s, we thought heroin was plenty deadly. But then it wasn’t a matter of simply popping lots of high-impact pills (which my mother did, at speed, back in the day, lest anyone think I’m minimizing pills—but she never managed to kill herself with them. It’s far too easy to kill yourself with fentanyl, without meaning to.)

And there’s the whole cultural impact of “hillbilly heroin” striking places where real heroin never made an appearance, nor crack, and serious drug abuse was until then something you saw on the news. Then people around you started dying. That’s why people are freaking out. IMHO.

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Generally Mexican cartels restrict their shootouts, car bombings and assassinations to Mexico. If a future President started bombing labs in Mexico and killing business and cartels, cartels would start reciprocating here. It would be so easy. Once Americans see that level violence in Brownsville, Tucson and San Diego, they’d vote that President out. The GOP is saying all this because they know it will never happen. No accountability. You can’t compare it to Columbia. It is thousands of miles away.

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So turning the "War on Drugs" into an actual War? This what passes as solutions to these republicans?

Still too early to drink.

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Too bad that politicians were not more horrified by the actions of Purdue Pharma and its ilk that made highly addictive "legal" pain meds the ultimate gateway drug. When a crackdown on opiates finally came, those whose lives were turned upside down by addiction often turned to increasingly cheap illegal drugs like heroin and fentanyl. With a rich market already created by American businesses that valued profits over lives, the cartels simply took advantage of the tragedy already in progress.

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The cartels arm themselves with US-made guns smuggled into Mexico, and these guns result in violence and death within their country. If we start bombing Mexican drug labs it seems their government should be within its right to send their bombers and cruise missiles to the US to pay a little visit to Colt and Remington and Daniel Defense and others.

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Sounds like the GOP needs to be a victim again, and show they are punishing the baddie. Yes bad things are happening in Mexico. But once again, where is the plan to take care of the Americans at home. People need health care, mental health care, shelter and jobs. If they don’t have those things they will find other means to distract (and sometimes kill) themselves.

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I was looking to see if anyone else thought of this .... and they had not. Yes Mexico is corrupt. But it is not a failed state. It has a functioning economy and even produced both manufactured goods, services and food. So if we make war on Mexico and destroy their economy.... guess how many Mexicans will cross the border?

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Sometimes you just have to state the trite and obvious. Instead of invading a neighboring country that is not our enemy, how about taking the big money out of drug smuggling (and fixing the adulteration problem) by ending the war on drugs through legalization and then focusing on treatment for drug users who want help?

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When it’s not laugh-out-loud funny, this report is quite scary. Oh dear.

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Didn’t we already make “Clear and Present Danger?”

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OK - - let's postulate that I own the home next you yours. There is no government - - city/county/state/federal. We both hold our homes in fee simple title, each with our mortgages paid off. Assuming (again) that my 21 and 22 year-old kids live with me, and have a fentanyl lab in my basement And they're selling this terror, fentanyl, to your 14 and 15 year-old-kids. My kid's fentanyl has killed your 18 year-old already. You ask me to clamp down on my kids. For whatever reasons, I say "No!" You're bigger, stronger and quicker than am I, so what else can you do? Ask me again? How many times? Grease my palm with money? With goods? Opportunities? How do you know that even if you could destroy my kids' lab that they wouldn't rebuild it? Do you think it wise to tell the neighbors, the newspapers, etc about my house and my fierce and non-cooperative attitude? So as to set up 'economic sanctions' of a sort? But what if my kids' fentanyl kills another of your kids? Can you wait? Your kids are 'hooked'! If you 'invade' my home and destroy my kids' lab, what moral principals will that violate? What will that give license to for other, lesser situations? Might you, yourself die as a result of dumping fentanyl on my basement floor? What if you, in the doing, killed my wife? Are there ways to let me know that you're deadly serious? So many considerations, aren't there? And meantime, my kids are happily making fentanyl !!! Tim

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I visited Mexico City this past summer. I felt totally safe. Cops everywhere. Everyone wearing masks everywhere. And the stats bear out the low rates of violence -- it would be one of the safest US cities were it in the US. Safer than Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Denver, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Jacksonville, and Portland, none of which are on lists of really dangerous US cities.

Mexico City has ninety thousand police officers. By comparison, the slightly smaller New York City has 35,000. But Mexico is not wealthy enough to pay for well paid police everywhere -- Mexico City is prosperous while much of the rest of the country is poor.

I don't have an answer but a US invasion would have the Mexican people siding with the cartels. The US has invaded Mexico multiple times and every one of them poisoned US Mexico relations for generations. And the most comparable situation was the almost comic failed attempt to catch Pancho Villa over a century ago.

Needless to say if Americans didn't use fentanyl, there wouldn't be a market for it here.

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