SO MUCH FOR THE GREAT WALL OF MEXICO. MR. OBAMA, TEAR DOWN THIS WALL!

So today the news reports bring us another huge Duuuh! It seems that illegal Mexican immigrants and drug smugglers are taking to the seas to get around the Great Wall of Mexico being built between America and Mexico and the crazed vigilantes who like nothing more than shooting people on sight and not having to show anybody any stinking badges, since thy don't have any, thank you. So Mexicans, being an intelligent and pragmatic people, simply decided to go around these obstacles. Why nobody ever thought this would happen is a huge mystery. There are still plenty of maps around, no?

The most cursory glance at a map of where America and Mexico meet reveals no shortage of contiguous coastline joining both nations, and anybody deciding to sail from one nation to the next doesn't even have to venture out into the open sea, just hug the coast and hop out at any convenient beach. And that's exactly what's happening, in water craft of every possible description, with some of the tiny decrepit rowboats simply being abandoned off the trendy beaches of San Diego while several Mexicans hotfoot it past the indifferent sunbathers to the nearest highway. Who knows, maybe some of them are selling sun block and cold beverages to these same people the next day at the same beaches?

The best guy was one enterprising Marijuana smuggler who was caught paddling his surfboard north with a duffel bag full of the sweet weed on his back. This was probably his fortieth or fiftieth time doing this and he was only caught by dumb luck. Surfboards and rowboats cannot be detected by radar, and barely be seen by the naked eye out in the rolling waves. Now that the drug cartels in Mexico have grown so wealthy and brazen that they have fielded armies that are engaging the Mexican Army on an equal basis, many Northern Mexicans are fleeing their war-torn country, on top of the usual large migration of people seeking work. So, what's America to do?

First, admit how incredibly stupid an idea it was to try to replicate the Great Wall of China in the American Southwest. History tells us what an abysmal failure it was in China, and is only now paying dividends 2,000 years later as a tourist attraction, its only success ever. Then we can hunt down and prosecute the vigilante murderers shooting Mexicans and leaving them to die in the desert just for sport in the guise of patriotism. There can be few viler people running around this country today and most of us would prefer a Mexican neighbor to one of these Neanderthals any day of the week.

Then, we can help our neighbor Mexico. Legalize all the drugs that earn the cartels easy fortunes, and that will eliminate the immediate threat of billions pouring into the coffers of murderous gangsters who are hell bent on subverting an entire nation to their own criminal ends. Most people feel legalizing drugs is an insane move that would harm our own nation, but the exact opposite is true. The War on Drugs is an even bigger failure than Prohibition was. While banning booze for a dozen years gave rise to a series of American organized crime gangs that grew wealthy and ever more brazen and murderous as they squabbled over the incredible profits to be had by dealing in illegal substances, we somehow felt that banning recreational drugs would be different. Why? Did we skip that chapter in the history books like we did the one about the Great Wall of China repelling exactly no invaders?

America now has more prisoners per capita than any other nation on earth, well over half of them incarcerated for drug-related offenses, while the most harmful and deadly intoxicant of them all, alcohol, is tolerated, regulated and a steady source of billions of dollars to the local, state and federal governments in the form of taxes. Just as the repeal of Prohibition created no new alcoholics, legalizing drugs will not create a single new junkie. That's not how addiction works. 10% of humanity are potential addicts, 90% are not.10% of Americans consume 90% of the alcoholic beverages sold here. The rest drink moderately and responsibly. Ditto for the drug figures. The domestic production, regulation and taxation of recreational drugs will bring the price down to the levels of a beer or whiskey habit and fatten the governments' treasuries while denying the gangsters and people like the Taliban the opportunity to remove billions of untaxed dollars from the American economy year in and year out, rivaling the drain on our wealth by the petroleum cartels. Can we afford both?

With Mexico having the dagger of the drug cartels removed from its neck, America can help its neighbor with education assistance, foreign aid and incentives to reform a corrupt nation. Having a strong and prosperous neighbor to our south will be in both our interests. Mexico has everything a nation needs to be successful: farmland, seacoasts, oil, minerals, rivers, many beautiful tourist destinations, livestock, timber and the most vital asset of all, a hard working population. The fact that the vast majority of Mexican people have been exploited, impoverished and oppressed by a wealthy ruling elite forever has crippled their chances of becoming a first rate nation on the same continent that boasts two of them. That does not have to continue forever and America can help them change that by openly helping and by exerting unambiguous political and economic pressure on the government of Mexico to radically change.

Is any of this likely? No, no it isn't. There are too many people committed to the status quo to even consider legalizing drugs or engaging Mexico in a completely different way. Too many people view recreational drugs as a moral issue, even though they look the other way on the two biggest killers of Americans, alcohol and tobacco, content to print tiny warning labels on these deadly products (the same tiny labels can be affixed to legally packaged drugs). And they don't even mind that continuing the status quo costs countless lives to violence and prolongs the oppression of our Mexican neighbors that will ensure that they will continue sneaking across the border seeking an honest paycheck. Look for the vigilante rednecks to start investing in speedboats for their human sport hunting.

Don't be shocked that the Taliban will continue to be able to arm themselves with high tech weaponry courtesy of the Afghanistan and Pakistan poppy fields that now produce 90% of the world's heroin. If heroin were legal, it would be ridiculously cheap to produce. Heroin addicts buy it anyway at the current extremely high price, and cocaine addicts continue to send billions to South American gangsters by way of Mexican cartels and smugglers. All of which serves to undermine legitimate nations and stymie their social progress and their agricultural and industrial development, to say nothing of the drain on our own economy. And our nearest neighbor Mexico, always a friend and never hostile to America, is maimed and bleeding while we do nothing. Do we allow Mexico to become Somalia with a population of 110 million on our doorstep? Mr. Obama, tear down this wall!