Readers might also like to check out http://www.thetruthaboutmexico.com

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/outposts/2009/03/mexicos-drug–1.html

with the excerpt specific to our areas:

“… blue states listed as zones with the fewest murders…

Two other blue states are Yucatan (0) and Quintana Roo (4), home to Cancun. There are numerous yellow states classified merely as violent zones.”

• Despite declining demand, North America remains the world’s largest cocaine consumer, with an estimated 7 million users consuming perhaps half of the world’s supply.
• The heroin market is largely contained within the hemisphere, with Colombia and Mexico supplying most of the demand of the 1.3 million users in North America.
• Cannabis demand is universal and mostly supplied by domestic sources, but Paraguay,
Colombia, Jamaica, and Canada are significant exporters to other countries in the region.
• Production of methamphetamine to supply domestic demand was initially most acute in the United States. Precursor controls pushed large-scale production southward, into Mexico, and increasing enforcement there may push it further southward still. All
countries of the region have the potential to be used for precursor diversion or
manufacture. Canada has recently emerged as a global source of ecstasy-group drugs.

We think that the consumption of drugs is a universal truth… since the beginning of time, humans have ingested substances to change their consciousness in one form or another. It is the criminalization of these drugs that creates the problems with power, violence and money. Decriminalization and regulation (a la alcohol, a legal and regulated drug) take the violence and excessive amounts of money out of the equation, leaving only the issue of dealing with addiction, which is an issue to deal with for a small section of the population whether it is legal or not.

Those excessive amounts of money find their way into the coffers of some of the largest and most powerful factions governing our planet. We saw a glimpse of that with the Iran Contra scandal when people from our own government were funding an illegal war with gains from illegal drug trade. Did that stop it? Far from it. It continues to this day, with the “little people” the ones who die, are beheaded and who are generally caught in the crossfire.

It behooves those of us who live in Mexico to speak up and say that this isn’t a Mexican problem… it’s a much bigger problem than that. It doesn’t make Mexico wildly unsafe… there is unsafety as well in the streets of Chicago and Houston, in the suburbs of Los Angeles and anywhere that illegal drugs are traded.

We think we must work together to solve this problem… not make Mexico the demon and punish the whole country for something all the countries of the Americas and the world play a hand in perpetuating.