For too many people living in the United States, it has been easy to ignore what’s happening in Mexico. But the plain truth is that the money that’s fueling this war is coming from one place: the United States. And it’s our job to stop it.

First, of course, there is the amount of money that drug traffickers make selling narcotics, marijuana, and amphetamines here in the U.S.: even conservative estimates put this at $30 billion each year. The drug trade is so profitable that one UN official argued that during the global banking crisis in 2008, drug money was the only thing keeping the world banking system afloat. So the drug habits of people here in the U.S. are making billions of dollars for the cartels – and therefore for the big international banks – every year, providing the monetary incentives for the kind of graft and corruption that has infected the Mexican state from top to bottom.

And then, of course, there is the money that the U.S. government spends trying to battle our drug habit offshore. At home, rather than treating drug use as a public health issue and focusing on treatment, criminalization and the over-policing of communities of color has contributed to this country’s epidemic of mass incarceration. Abroad, on the supply side, the United States has waged a failed four-decade long military war on drugs that has steadily increased violence and human rights abuses while failing to decrease the supply of drugs.

 

In Mexico alone, the U.S. government has spent nearly $3 billion just since 2007. Much of this money comes through the Mérida Initiative, also known as Plan Mexico, after its predecessor, Plan Colombia – a $5 billion effort against the drug trade in that country that was widely regarded as a failure but contributed to pushing more trafficking north, into Mexico. Created by then-president George W. Bush, the Mérida Initiative was extended indefinitely by President Obama, and its $2.4 billion has paid for helicopters, surveillance equipment, and security training for state forces in Mexico.