Border walls won’t stop drugs coming from Mexico

In recent weeks, our national politics have been consumed with President Donald Trump’s proposed wall along our border with Mexico.

Much of the support for it is rooted in the opiate epidemic and the feeling among many, including the president, that a wall will stanch the flow of drugs coming from Mexico into our country. Many regions that voted for Trump have not only been hammered by jobs going to Mexico, but they also now watch as Mexican drugs are part of why their neighbors and loved ones are dying. I share their outrage. Drug trafficking north from Mexico is a pestilence, and it’s an essential factor in our national epidemic of addiction and death. (And it is no less serious than the savage violence in Mexico fueled by equally pestilential guns trafficked from the United States, by which the gravest security threat in our hemisphere is arming itself.)

Mexican drug supply — cheap, prevalent and horribly potent — hinders users attempting to recover from addiction and makes any relapse a deadly gambit.

Because it is so serious, because people are dying in record numbers from drugs smuggled up from Mexico, it must be met with serious proposals.

A wall — or better put, another wall — along our southern border would do little to stop the flow of drugs from Mexico. If walls worked in that way, no drugs would enter our prisons or jails.

We already have hundreds of miles of border walls. They are where they need to be. I don’t believe they are immoral, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested. The rule of law is precious; I learned that living for a decade in Mexico, where it is too often absent. Part of the rule of law is an orderly border.

In an era of heroin and fentanyl, the only true bulwark against these horribly potent drugs is built through robust alliances with neighbors. Working together in small, incremental ways. That takes time. Takes willingness. Takes learning about the neighbor. (How many members of Congress can name the six Mexican states bordering our country?) It takes honestly facing our role in this — our drug demand and our guns smuggled south — and Mexico facing its historic complacency regarding its traffickers and the deadly supply of dope they provide.

Another border wall would impede a serious approach to this problem by alienating allies. It gives an excuse to those in Mexico who like to believe that any collaboration with the United States is akin to treason. Plus, it embodies the delusion that we can go it alone against an international scourge, with the added promise that it will magically transform the country. Instead, it is, I believe, a distraction, allowing us to avoid the hard daily work of building alliances, and confronting our own accountability for the knotty problem of international drug trafficking.

The opioid addiction crisis began because we believed in an easy answer to a complicated problem: one pill for everyone’s pain. Doctors could prescribe narcotic painkillers, derived from the opium poppy, indiscriminately to all pain patients without risk of addiction. The drug catastrophe we’re now living with is rooted in that myth.

The drug scourge that resulted is today too deadly to waste time on another.

Sam Quinones is a freelance journalist and author of three books of narrative nonfiction. Follow him on Twitter: @samquinones7