While Karen Tandy touts triumphs against traffickers, taxi drivers are treating drug-trade terrorism like a tourist attraction. From Reuters:

Streetwise cabbies in northern Mexico are cashing in on the chaos of a violent drug war by whisking wide-eyed visitors about town in macabre tours of seized narco properties and famous murder scenes, Mexico City's Reforma newspaper reported on Sunday.

Taxi drivers in the Pacific coast city of Mazatlan satisfy tourists' ghoulish fascination with a battle between cartels that killed 2,000 people last year, for about 200 pesos ($18) a trip, the newspaper said.

This is great. But we must extend these tours to more fully represent the worldwide horrors of the drug war. From the overflowing prisons in Texas to the barren fumigated hillsides of Colombia, the drug war touches everything and infects everything it touches with hopelessness and decay. Spring for the deluxe package and you can see a drug addict get executed in Thailand.

I'd just as soon not touch this with a 10-foot pole, but I fear that ignoring it could make us look scared. We're not.

The highly publicized video of toddlers being forced to smoke marijuana is disgusting. It's child abuse, and when confronted by such provocative images it's important for reformers to remember that we're the only people with a plan for protecting children from drugs. After all, the drug war certainly didn’t protect these children.

There's nothing the drug war can do to prevent outrages like this, but there are a few ways in which it makes them more likely to occur. The drug war eliminates age requirements for drug purchases by creating a black market. The drug war has incentivized drug dealers to actually employ children, and it creates new job opportunities with each arrest.

More importantly perhaps, the drug war has broken up families at alarming rates, creating vast opportunities for events like this to occur. Perhaps widespread media coverage of this story will reveal more about the circumstances surrounding it. We've heard from a grandparent, but we don’t yet know anything about the parents. Whether incarceration plays a role here remains to be seen, but the odds of that are unfortunately quite good.

Still, for all its failings, the drug war provides no excuse for the conduct of the teenagers depicted in this video. They're criminals and they're exactly the sort of people we want police going after. Now if we could somehow manage to stop arresting so many people who don't deserve it, perhaps we could better attend to creeps like these.