Drug rehab may sound like a panacea, but as it's practiced and administered in America, rehab centers seem to respond to their perverse incentive to treat addicts enough to get them out the door and relapsed back into treatment.
I think we're doing a lot to treat addiction, but Mexico can't count on us to solve the hard problem of addiction. Mexico would be much better served by doing the comparatively easy task of reducing corruption and violence rates to something that reflects its status as a middle-income country with European institutions. Simply making it harder for cartels to thrive and for Mexican politicians/police to profit off of drugs would reduce the amount of drug pushing here in America.
The drug cartel has better funding. This is why you see El Chapo housed in the US and not Mexico anymore.
Why do you think the Mexican drug cartels have better funding than a government with a budget of $300 billion/yr?
IIRC, El Chapo is in America because Mexican prisons couldn't contain him. All his prison breaks involved corrupt guards, in fact, during his trial it was claimed that El Chapo paid a $100 million dollar bribe to the sitting President of Mexico. I think it's more plausible that Mexicans would rather join in the festival of corruption, saying that the Government is outclassed by the resources of the cartels seems false.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_drug_trade_in_the_Unit...
Because the cartels have made so much money from drugs that they threaten Mexican sovereignty in a lot of regions. The cartels literally operate their own private armies capable of waging war against any government forces that try to police their regions.
This is all due to the fact that the US economy is so big, its appetite for drugs so insatiable, and its arms industry so powerful that the Mexican government can't keep up.
Illegally funding the contra through cocaine sales is a proven thing in the 80s with confessions of continuing alliances in the the 90s.
The second truth is that it doesn't help that the Spanish governed like they did or further that James K. Polk conspired with Santa Anna and started a war to "acquire" the West, or that the U.S. never paid its half of the deal.
The basic state function is to protect citizens from unorganized violence.
Fending off organized violence (other than from the state itself) is a goal, but it is frequently not achieved and often not attempted because it's so unrealistic. If Germany really wanted Luxembourg, it would take it, and Luxembourg wouldn't be able to stop it.
For example, see the Jerry Epstein case in Florida: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article220097825.html
Other examples might include the water problem in Flint, the deterioration of Detroit, or even the violence problem in South Chicago.
RE drug rehab: "Solving" drug addiction would be a sufficient, but unnecessary, way of stopping violence in Latin America. You don't have to tackle that whole big problem; all you have to do is legalize across the board. That makes drug production the province of legitimate businessmen right here in the US, not a vocation that only the poorest/most desperate/most violent/least risk-averse will take on.
Interesting. Unrelatedly: how's OkCupid going for everyone?
I don't think rehab will have nearly as big of an effect as legalization/regulation. We should be looking for safer alternatives to more dangerous, often abused drugs. For examine, "magic mushrooms" are generally safer than other psychedelics, and LSD can be relatively safely used under supervision (and has potential for medical uses as well), so we should be considering those for legalization as well once marijuana is legalized.
It's far easier to control a problem if you control distribution than if you don't. Attacking it from a rehab angle doesn't solve the biggest problem with drugs: trafficking. Legalization solves that aspect, and taxes on drugs could fund rehab, so it's a win win situation.
Therefore, I want drug legalization as the primary focus for curbing drug-related violence specifically, and violent crime generally, since I believe it will have the largest positive effect for zero cost (in fact, it should be a net win).