It was illegal drugs, of course, being dealt or used. From this, one of the many peaks of that species of moral panic that has swept the populace periodically during the last hundred years, much pernicious legislation resulted, as well as promises of a massive clampdown that would make us all safe forever from our own desires.
The intensification of the drug war that followed was, naturally, a flop. Systematic sequestration of the stuff (of which only a small percentage is ever seized, anyway) and mass imprisonment had the predictable null effect on the market, which is now conservatively estimated at 400 billion per year worldwide. Reports of drug-related events from hospitals -- our most reliable indicator of drug use -- rose in the last 10 years.
One of the drug war's most acute observers during the Nineties was Tucson-based journalist/essayist Charles Bowden. His latest book, Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family (Simon & Schuster, $27), concerns the murder of one Bruno Jordan in El Paso in 1995. It traces the roots of that murder back across the river to Ju�rez, where Amado Carrillo Fuentes, perhaps Mexico's most successful narcotics tycoon (according to the DEA, in 1995 Carrillo Fuentes' operation was pulling in approximately $200 million a week) was located. Bruno was the youngest brother of Phil Jordan, who happened to be the head of the local DEA. Bruno's unlikely killer was a 9-year-old boy who appeared one winter day with an automatic weapon in his hand from out of the vast, anonymous colonias that spread on the hillsides of Ju�rez, and plugged Bruno for the truck he was driving. This boy was almost immediately captured -- without the truck or the weapon in his possession -- but he magically garnered high-priced lawyers to defend him in a U.S. court, until, on appeal, his conviction was overturned.
from a review of Charles Bowden's Down By The River in The Austin Chronicle 11/29/02
