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Friday, May 30, 2008
Mexico’s drug war: Perry talks addiction
So it was perhaps somewhat surprising to hear Gov. Rick Perry bring up the issue of addiction when he was in Mexico City this week for a meeting of border governors with President Felipe Calderon.
“We were talking about some of the ways that the universities, with technology and DNA and science, can help with finding out why people are addicted,” Perry said in a phone interview as he sped toward the Mexico City airport yesterday afternoon (the governor graciously called back four or five times after his cell phone kept cutting out). Perry said the governors discussed joint research between Texas schools and universities in Monterrey.
The lack of funding for addiction treatment has been one of the chief complaints of human rights groups when it comes to the so-called Merida Initiative, a proposed military aid package to help Mexico fight the cartels. And since the Nixon administration, treatment has taken a distant back seat to law enforcement strategies. Do Perry’s comments signal a fundamental shift in drug war strategy? Probably not. But they do add another element to the discussion.
