WASHINGTON POST: CUERNAVACA, Mexico — By many measures, this country has made great strides in recent decades toward becoming a middle-class society, with broader access to education, consumer goods and professional careers that promise upward mobility.
And yet, while prosperity has expanded here, researchers and polling experts say Mexico remains stricken with a form of social poverty that presents a vexing obstacle to the emergence of a more developed, democratic neighbor on the southern U.S. border.
It is a deficit of social trust, characterized by weak levels of confidence in public institutions — police, courts, politicians — but also the erosion of interpersonal trust among neighbors and co-workers… (more)
EDITOR: Just as was alcohol prohibition, attempts to enforce drug prohibition have been doomed to failure from the outset. Despite the need for a Constitutional amendment, drug prohibition was reversed in a dozen years. Now over forty years of drug prohibition has continued, enriching the most ruthless criminal class, and bringing hardship and disease to a huge portion of the populations of many countries.
Can we not learn from history? Can we not learn from current events? What does it take to have been face the facts?
