According to a new U.S. Department of Justice Report Mexican drug cartels now operate in more than 1,000 cities in this country, up from only 230 cities from a similar report two years ago.

Here is a press release about the report from Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.

WASHINGTON, DC – A newly released report by the U.S. Department of Justice shows that Mexican drug cartels are rapidly gaining ground inside the United States, despite expensive efforts by the government to crack down on trafficking. In light of the findings, a group of border patrol agents, police officers and judges is saying that it is time to legalize and regulate drugs in order to de-fund the cartels that make so much money from the illicit drug market.

“As someone who fought on the front lines of the failed ‘war on drugs’ for decades it is really no surprise to me that our prohibition policy isn’t helping to achieve any reduction in drug trafficking,” said Terry Nelson, a board member for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition and a retired U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent. “We should have learned this lesson decades ago with alcohol prohibition, but let’s hope that the data in this new government report helps more members of Congress and Obama administration officials to realize that their ‘drug war’ strategy is an abysmal failure and that it’s time for a new direction.”

The DoJ report, the 2011 National Drug Threat Assessment, says that Mexican criminal organizations have set up shop in more than a thousand U.S. cities, a sharp rise from the 230 cities reported in the 2009 assessment. The new report also says that, “The threat posed by the trafficking and abuse of illicit drugs will not abate in the near term and may increase.”

In a separate recently leaked memo, U.S. Customs and Border Protection admits that enforcement operations against the cartels have no “discernible impact on drug flows.”

“Innocent civilians and hardworking law enforcement officers are dying every day because of our failed policies,” said Nelson. “The fact that we keep ramping up the ‘drug war’ instead of changing course is unconscionable.”

The 2011 National Drug Threat Assessment can be found at http://www.justice.gov/ndic/pubs44/44849/44849p.pdf

The leaked memo from U.S. Customs and Border Protection can be found at http://info.publicintelligence.net/CBP-NoChangeDTOs.pdf

At this point is should be impossible for anyone to claim we are winning the War on Drugs and do it with a straight face. Violent cartels, once thought to be a problem for our neighbors to the south, are now our problem.

Those against the drug war predicted this outcome long ago. The current way has failed miserably.

- Joe Klare