Joe Martinez, Ph.D.: So welcome to the next session, which is entitled Drug Markets and Criminal Justice Systems. And we have for you a distinguished panel of speakers, and the idea of this session is to move from investigating drug use at a kind of micro level, which would involve individuals' decisions about when to take drugs, then on to the community level, what happens to facilitate or impede drug use at community levels, and finally to a more macro level, which involves the movement of drugs across borders and of production and so on.

Joe MartÃ?nez, Ph.D.: So our first speaker today is Dr. Warren Bickel, who is Professor at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and the College of Medicine and the College of Public Health, and he holds the Wilbur D. Mills Chair of Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Prevention. He's very well-published; he was former editor of the Journal of Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology. Dr. Bickel.

Warren Bickel, Ph.D.: Thank you.

Good morning. It's a real pleasure to be here. I'd like to thank the organizers for inviting me to be part of this fine meeting.

When they told me what the topic was and they wanted me to participate, I said, "I'm not sure I really fit," but only if you're interested in the markets of the mind, and that's what I can talk about.

So I'd like to talk about behavioral and neuroeconomics of addiction, tell you what I think its contemporary status is, and then briefly, oh so briefly, talk about some policy implications because I'm not really a policy guy. So I'm going to tell you where I think the beginning of policy might begin, but I'm going to need more policy experts to tell me how to get the rest of the way.

Warren Bickel:So, I'm going to start with a brief overview: what is behavioral economics and neuroeconomics, describe a new conceptual model for understanding challenges of behavior that derives from this understanding of how behavioral neuroeconomics works, and then illustrate some potential policy implications.

Warren Bickel: Behavioral economics refers to how individuals respond to a systems of constraint. You have a certain amount of income, things cost a certain amount of money, what are you going to buy?

So we're interested in how economic factors account for choices of individuals who are addicted to drugs. That's what I try to do in my work, but there's been this recent and novel approach.

Warren Bickel: I just was at the Society for Neuroeconomics meeting last week, and it's a very dynamic and emerging group of individuals. It's interdisciplinary research. There are people there who are economists, neuroscientists, psychologists, decision scientists, all coming together with the goal of building a biological model of decision-making in economic environments.

To the extent that that work is being done, one of the major tools used for it is magnetic resonance imaging and functional magnetic resonance imaging to understand what portions of the brain are involved in these decisions.

Warren Bickel: So I really see this as a translational science approach where macroeconomics has generated a whole bunch of ideas about how behavior is supposed to occur in making economic decisions.

Behavioral economics actually tells us how individuals behave, and it has changed how economists think about some of those things because some of the ideas economists had about the way rational organisms should always respond don't actually turn out that way.

And now we're in this new area of neuroeconomics that's taking that information and exploring how the brain is involved in those decisions. So I think it's a very interesting translational approach.

What I've been very much interested in is how addicts and others consider the future, and I'm going to show you how that relates to behavior and neuroeconomics.

Warren Bickel: First I want to do is show you one of the first studies we ever did on this. And when we were thinking about how addicts think about the future, we came across this old measure called a future time perspective.

It had several different elements, one of the elements was almost like a projective test. We asked individuals to fill in the back end of a story. The story went something like, "You wake up in the morning, you think about your future, you think. . ." and then we'd ask addicts and matched control participants to fill in the back end.

We weren't interested in the content of what they were saying, but rather the time frame that they were referring to. Here's the data from that study and from that question.

Warren Bickel: Controls refer to a future of 4.7 years; heroin addicts referred to a future of 9 days. Said another way, the controls referred to a future of 1, 715 days; addicts refer to a future of 9 days.

This provides context to understand the choice behavior of addicts, I believe. Their behavioral economic choice behavior because if you're only concerned about the next nine days are you concerned about sharing that needle that someone else just stuck into their veins? Any negative consequence that will occur will exceed the nine day window that you are considering.

One can imagine a similar thing regarding criminal activity and other dangerous activities that addicts engage in. So I think this becomes a context to understand how addicts operate a constraint on their behavior that influences their choices.

Warren Bickel: We were, then became much more interested in doing this in much more sophisticated ways and bringing in our interest in behavioral economics. So we actually started this procedure, use this procedure called delay discounting: how events are discounted in time.

We can measure that very precisely, but let me tell you what the latest counting is: refers to the reduction in value of a reinforcer as a function of delay to reinforcer delivery.

Warren Bickel:This concept is intuitive because if I were to say to you, "What would you prefer, a thousand dollars today or a thousand dollars a year from now," I'm sure most of you would just say, would say, "I'll take the thousand dollars today, very much, thank you that'd be great," because a thousand dollars a year from now will be discounted.

Now, we don't know exactly how much we discount it by, but we in fact discount it, and that's why we prefer the immediate option.

Well, we used the psychophysical titration procedure to measure this, originally developed by Mazur and later adapted for use with humans by Rachlin, and it works something like this. We say, "What would you prefer, a thousand dollars now, or let's say a thousand dollars in a month?"

Of course, as we just said, you'd pick the thousand dollars now. Why would you wait a month for a thousand dollars? But then we said would you like nine hundred ninety dollars now or a thousand dollars in a month? Nine hundred sixty dollars now or a thousand dollars in a month?

And if we keep on going lower, lower, that immediate option until we reach eight hundred dollars, and you switch your preference to the thousand dollars a month from now, we can infer that you discount a thousand dollars by 20% in one month.

Warren Bickel: If we do this across several timeframes, for example, one week, one month, six months, one year, five years and so forth, we can construct a curve and actually examine how people discount events over time.

Warren Bickel: Nicely, this is one of the interesting things about macroeconomics. Macroeconomics has always assumed that this function was exponential; however, the data seem to indicate from any organism that it's ever been obtained from that it's hyperbolic in form, highly oriented towards the present, and can be adequately quantified by this equation where the value of the reinforcer equals the amount of reinforcer divided by the sum of one plus the discount rate multiplied by the delay reinforcer.

Just to make this a equation concrete to you, if I wanted to increase the value of reinforcer, I could do it by increasing the amount of the reinforcer, decreasing the delay of the reinforcer, or if I was like Mr. Bernanke, who's very busy these days, our Secretary of the Treasury, we could decrease the discount rate.

Warren Bickel: Well, if you do this with opioid-dependent individuals, you get data that look like this. Here we have heroin addicts and matched controls, matched on IQ, gender, SCS, several other variables.

Discounting a hypothetical thousand dollars to the extent to which the curves hug the axis, the greater the discounting. The further they are away from the two X and Y axes, the less the discounting.

So we can see that the controls discount a thousand dollars less than the addicts, or the addicts discount a thousand dollars substantially more than controls.

One way that you can conveniently quantify this is talk about half life. How long does it take for a thousand dollars to lose half its value? Well, it's about here for controls. That's the five year point. And it's about here for addicts, and that's the six month time point. That's a tenfold difference.

Okay, now if we go down here, I've reproduced the thousand dollar money curve for the addicts, and now you're having them discount a thousand dollars worth of money versus a thousand dollars, hypothetical, a thousand dollars worth of heroin. Right, we're not giving them heroin, honest.

And you could see that the heroin curve hugs the axis tightly, and at the shortest time frame that we examined, never even got to 50%. There's no amount of heroin tomorrow that was worth any amount of heroin today. So, in this case, heroin would be at least 25 times - 25-fold, discounted 25-fold greater than money, of choices of heroin, or if we compared the heroin to the monetary discounting of controls, that would be a 250-fold difference.

Those are big differences. What became equally shocking to us is that virtually every form of addiction that you can think of exhibits this greater discounting.

Warren Bickel: This is a study we did with cigarette smokers, looking at cigarettes, nonsmokers versus current smokers, and we get a greater discounting by current smokers. Interestingly enough, a group of ex-smokers looked just like controls.

So this might be something that can shift back and forth. That was a cross-sectional study; you have to be careful how you interpret it.

But we know that cocaine addicts, methamphetamine addicts, heavy drinkers, alcoholics, problem gamblers, all discount the future substantially more than controls. This seems to be a ubiquitous feature of addiction.

Warren Bickel: In fact, I think it might even be more ubiquitous than even that, and I've started thinking about ways to talk about this discounting ways that I think could help us understand how and why people make choices that hurt themselves in the long run. And I refer to that as the Tyranny of Small Decisions.

And I, I define that as - it refers to situations where an individual can be victimized by the narrowness of the temporal context in which he or she exercises choice. I would like to argue that the characteristics of this problem is that choices favor the immediately valued option and ignore the long-term consequences, and I think that type of behavior is relevant not only to addiction but to risky behavior.

Warren Bickel: I would like to argue that the characteristics of this problem is that choices favor the immediately valued option and ignore the long-term consequences, and I think that type of behavior is relevant not only to addiction but to risky behavior.

This is very relevant these days, now isn't it? Debt and the failure to save money. Perhaps over a slightly longer time frame, global climate change could be considered a comparable thing. I think many forms of crime could also fall into that category, as well as the current problems with obesity.

Warren Bickel: Well, let's explore this a little bit and think about it. Well, one of the things that have been a major advance, at least in my view, in thinking about addiction, has been a new model. For years and years and years I grew up in this field, I've been doing it for a long time, we've always been concerned about reinforcers and the limbic system and the dopamine system that feeds into it. And that's what we've been focused on.

And that makes sense because if you go into a room and you see a couple people there and one is screaming and making a lot of noise, you attend to that one, right? But there can also be someone in that room who's silent and quiet, and you'll tend to ignore that individual. Well, I think we've been ignoring one component of addiction, but recently, we've come to recognize it's a contribution through the lack of activity.

So, we have this competing neurobehavioral decision system, hypothesis of addiction, and they suggest that for me, that Tyranny of Small Decisions is a result of increased activity of the impulsive system, which is the limbic region and ventral striatum and those areas that we often think about and have been studying for many years. That's the system that says, "I want drugs, money, sex, food now, thank you very much."

And we have, unfortunately, decreased activity in the executive system where one could argue is the seat of rationality and valuation of the long-term consequences of one's actions. We're talking about prefrontal cortex and dorsilateral prefrontal cortex. What we're talking about is those areas that say, "If I do this now, I'm going to run into trouble down the road; I think I should probably not do that. That would be a good idea."

Warren Bickel: Here's a cartoon by Bechara in his 2005 Nature Neuroscience paper. The blue areas are supposed to be indicative of the cool seats of rationality, the executive system. The red areas are supposed to be the hot impulsive areas associated with the impulsive system.

Warren Bickel: Interestingly enough, in 2004, Sam McClure and colleagues published in Science a study examining with MRI or functional MRI what parts of the brain lit up when people actually did that same discounting task I've been studying for a while, what parts light up.

And what he found was that when people make choices that favor the immediate option....

Warren Bickel:...the limbic system lit up, and when they made choices that favored the future, aspects of the prefrontal cortex lit up suggesting, importantly, to the way I'm thinking about it, that our discounting measure actually summarizes the relative control of those two brain regions in the choices that people make.

So if we go back to my data on heroin addicts, it suggests that there's a less activity, less controlled by, less involvement of the prefrontal cortex in their decision-making. They're controlled by the limbic region.

So now we have this interesting synergy translation of one set of phenomena into another set of phenomena that allows us to think about it broader way. Now, instead of having one target for addiction, we have two. One that we have to decrease activity in and the other one that we have to increase activity in.


And here's just the way to be present us that the rapid decline in value that we see seems to be controlled by the limbic and paralimbic system and the frontal parietal system seems to control this part of the curve.

So you can imagine if I can move this curve up, right, so now the curve looks like this, it would say that larger, a lot more of this is going on than that, right? So, if this didn't, if it was essentially only declined a little bit here, that means that the limbic and paralimbic region's playing a smaller part. That's one way to think about it.

All right, let's think how this plays out over time in a couple different things and see if it makes sense for our understanding of addiction and other problematic behaviors.

Warren Bickel: Let's start with development. Here's a study by Galvan in Journal of Neuroscience, 2006, looking at children, adolescents, and adults, looking activity into regions of interest with the nucleus accumbens, part of the limbic region and the orbitofrontal cortex, part of the prefrontal cortex, and what I'd like to point out to you in particular is look at adolescents.

Look at that nucleus accumbens. Look at that "I want it now!" Holy mackerel. That one's jacked up! However, there's not a whole bunch of activity in the orbitofrontal cortex or remarkable amount of activity but perhaps comparable, but if we're talking about relative control, which one is controlling, which one is having greater input, we would say that they're having greater control here while with adults, there's closer balance.

Now why this is higher in children. It's always a conundrum to me. They argue it has to do with non-specific effects of the maturity of the brain system in the paper. I don't know about that. However, let's see if this plays out with behavior, now.

Warren Bickel: So we see some effects that are interesting with respect to brain activity of the relevant regions, how does it change with behavior? Well, I took every study that I could find on discounting that looked at individuals of different ages and just threw them on the same axes.

And I didn't expect that it would be orderly. Didn't have to be orderly, that's for sure, but it sure is! This is all cross-sectional stuff, so you have to treat it with care, but it does seem to play out, right? Which is the, here we have the discount rate K, the greater the discount rate, the greater you discount the future, the younger you are, the more you discount, the older you are, the less you discount.

If that's true, we should see evidence of individuals who have a shortened temporal view getting involved in more problematic behavior.

Warren Bickel: Well here's some data that we've been reanalyzing from the household survey, and it doesn't matter what year you could look at. And it doesn't matter what years these are because it's true for every year. You get the same profile results every year.

It may go up a little bit or down a little bit but you get the same, so what we got here, same per curve, each participation curve. So what proportion of individuals used illicit drugs in the last month as a function of age, starting in the early teens, increasing to around early 20s, then slowly dropping off.

Marijuana use goes higher, but it's the same looking curve, at least to my way of thinking, and then declines. Up, then declines. Up and declines. Heavy alcohol use, binge alcohol use, cigarette use. Well, it looks like the maturation of these brain systems are relevant, in how people discount the future as a function of them, are relevant to the risks they take.

Well, if this is true, it's not just specific to drugs. If it's really true, it has to be true across a whole broad range of risky behaviors.

Warren Bickel: Here is data on criminal activity. You got to love England and Wales, right? They get, they got good data from 1842 to 1844. United States to 1990. You tell me the differences? I don't see any. I see the same shape function.

Now here we got males and females separated. Males and females separated. But even the females show that same shape function, though, at a certainly much lower level of participation. Early teens it increases, peaks around 20, drops off. Same thing with crime United States. What about even more serious and challenging behavior?

Warren Bickel: Homicides. First thing I got to point out in, here's counting in Chicago. Canada? 56. Chicago? A bunch higher. But you see the same shape curve.

Warren Bickel: So as I try to rapidly wrap this up. So what should we be thinking about? Well, the other thing we should be thinking about is how does our environment change it? And, you can make stories up that perhaps, there are reasons our environment can change how we think about the future, and we have to be able to think about both.

And perhaps you could make the argument, and we were hunter-gatherers for oh so many years in our evolutionary history. We were pretty much immediate focused, and then with the advent of farming, we had to become much more concerned with the future. That's just like a just-so story. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not true.

Warren Bickel: But you got to love science because there's actually data that speaks to this. Here's data from anthropologist Tucker, 2006. This is data from Madagascans, people from Madagascar. These are natives of Madagascar. Every reason to believe that they're genetically homogenous.

One group developed the farming technology. The others remained hunter-gatherers. And he measured discounting, the same exact thing that I've studied. And look! The hunter-gatherers discount the future substantially more than farmers.

How we do our economic activity, the economic context of our choices, influences our consideration of the future. And as we move into what is certainly a probably a long-term recession, if not worse, that's relevant.

Warren Bickel: And in fact, we know that in income and discounting are closely related and econometric studies of U.S. data suggest that time preference is negatively correlated with labor income.

Warren Bickel: And I would like to suggest to you that since we know that all sorts of diseases are related to socioeconomic status in what is, to all the socioeconomic status gradient, it wouldn't surprise me that these economic consequences of being poor are influencing the time perspective of those individuals, and those individuals therefore are engaging in somewhat riskier behavior. And therefore, they are experiencing mortality and morbidity at a much higher rate, those individuals who consider the future greater.

That's a hypothesis. We'll have to test it, but I think it could be true.

Warren Bickel: So what factors could influence a short temporal horizon? Well, I argue our culture is involved with immediate gratification. There's all kinds of erosion of civic and community bonds. The family, we used to have this extended family. Now, we have this nuclear family, often the family is just one parent. And economic deterioration is very relevant today.

Warren Bickel: Well, if that's true, and if our contemporary culture can either make us think long-term or short-term, we should imagine that if we're thinking a lot about the short-term these days, it should show up, there should be evidence that would suggest that.

Warren Bickel: Let's look at some evidence and let's look at several different dimensions of that evidence, and you help me decide.

Here is data from Warner, et al. a national cohort study of addiction. This is the probability of dependence given that you've used at least once. So that somehow equates somewhat, not completely, for availability.

The later, so this 1936, 1945; '46 to '55; '56 to '65; '66 to '75. The later you were born in the last century, the more likely you are to be drug dependent.

I think -- wait, here's the interesting thing. Television came in right in the middle of that generation. Not that television is the cause, but television is symbolic of a whole series of changes that revolved around instant gratification. TV dinner.

Warren Bickel: Here's data from JAMA. Percentage of overweight kids 6 to 11; 12 to 13; '63 to '70, to '99 - 2002.

Warren Bickel: U.S. household savings rate. 2005 was negative numbers. If I only would've thought just a little bit further ahead to today when I was first looking at these data, maybe I could've pulled my money out.

Warren Bickel: So what does it mean for policy, quickly, as I wrap up? It means that we have to think about policies across a broad scan of issues that increase executive function, push that up, and decrease or constrain impulsive behavior, push that down.

Warren Bickel: Very quickly, I think contingency management-like procedures constrain the impulsive one, but it has to be done in ways that are very, immediate short-term consequences for that behavior. You have to have like immediate that following their behavior.

Replacement medications could work, developing other reinforcing alternatives that could engage that impulsive part could be relevant for hypoactive to try to develop or remediate the hypoactive executive system. There could be medications.

There are some people working on executive function therapy. I think we should start thinking about executive function training as a prevention measure. That's a different way of thinking about prevention.

Warren Bickel: So, to conclude, we need to broaden our view of mechanisms to those relevant for multiple disorders and problematic behaviors. Align our understanding of disease disorder with treatment and policy.

A Tyranny of Small Decisions may provide one of those mechanisms and suggest that we need to develop alternatives to our culture's emphasis on immediate gratification.

Warren Bickel: I'm concluding with this wonderful quote by Melges. "Time is both a medium and a perspective. It is a medium through which we live as the future becomes present. As the future becomes present, we become also aware of duration and succession. Also by transcending the present and looking at it from the past or the future, we gain perspective on the present. These time processes are fundamental to our construction of reality. If they are disturbed, our view of reality may become distorted." Thank you.

Joe MartÃ?nez: So thank you so much, Dr. Bickel, for that interesting discussion of what goes on at an individual level. We're now going to move on to a higher level and talk about community, and Dr. Avelardo Valdez is going to speak to us about that.

He's a professor at the University of Houston, a former professor at the University of Texas, San Antonio. He's a member, he's a member of the Steering Committee of the NHSN and has been heavily involved in guiding this organization for the number of years it has existed. Dr. Valdez.

Avelardo Valdez: What I'm going to do is present some of Franscisco's slides and some of the data that he has which, when we organized this panel, we really thought of this as, as Joe had said, we thought of talking about drug markets at the micro level, which I think we just heard an excellent presentation of that.

Of how people make decisions, and it wasn't direct- make decision in terms of not only buying my drugs, immediate decisions, but other kinds of things. And of course, and studied using that, but I think as Warren finished up his talk, I think he started to contextualize this within the environment.

So people make these decisions and always it's a very micro level, but they make them within an environment. And so what I want to talk about today and our intentions of this particular presentation was to talk about how, in fact, the drug market works at the environmental level, I mean at the community level, and at the sort of what I call the mid-level. And the next presentation we'll talk more kind of at the systems level in terms of trying to understand drug markets.

Avelardo Valdez: So, this presentation that Francisco was going to make was actually, is actually based on a publication that he did for the National Council of La Raza and you can actually go to it on their website and get this. And it's called Lost Opportunities, and it talks about how the criminal justice system has discriminated against Latinos in this country.

And we find when we look at this closely is we see that Latinos, Hispanics, are overrepresented at every stage of the U.S. criminal justice system from arrest and detention to incarceration and parole.

Avelardo Valdez: We're only 13% of the population, yet we are 31% of incarcerated individuals in the federal criminal justice system and in probably other systems as well, depending on where you are in the United States. And this is at all levels, for juveniles, adults, and so forth.

Avelardo Valdez: Latinos are imprisoned three times as often as Whites, and as was indicated earlier, this doesn't necessarily mean that they're committing more crimes, just that in fact that they're imprisoned more. And this is based on data from the United States Department of Justice.

Avelardo Valdez: They're overrepresented not only in prison, but their jails and also in parole populations. And you can see these data as they appear here.

Avelardo Valdez: They're also, Latinos are in the system because they're often detained before trial, twice as often as Whites, and you can see this difference here between detention rates. I mean it's almost a 50% difference in detention rates, i.e., they don't get paroled or they don't get bailed out and they stay in the system. And until in fact they come to trial, and then they're going to more likely be incarcerated.

Yet if you look at the data, look at the criminal justice data, crime data, Hispanic defendants are least likely of all groups to have a criminal history. All right? So, it's not that they have a, that they're being prosecuted and convicted because of their, their records. There's something else that's going on here, of course, in regards to our place in this system.

So why are Latinos so much more likely to be arrested and detained than non-Hispanics? And we've talked, some of this I heard this morning, some people addressing this in their talks.

Avelardo Valdez: But first, what we're seeing here and what Francisco has discovered in his work is Latinos are particularly likely to be arrested and incarcerated for low level drug offenses.

This is important for us to understand, and in terms of also the public policy implications of this in that there's - the arrest, the focus of law enforcement as it's played out in Latino communities is not on drug traffickers or drug dealers, but tends to be on, who gets caught up in the system tends to be on people that are possession of drugs, of small amounts, usually for their own consumption.

If they're selling at all, it's sort of more of a user-seller sort of dynamic than somebody who's actually trafficking, so a lot of our police and our criminal justice law enforcement is focused on these small individuals that are captured in this process.

Avelardo Valdez: It also has to do with discriminatory practices of arrest and prosecution. We see that there's racial profiling. We see this very, we can see this more obviously in terms of the black community, African-American community, black community, but we also see it among Latinos where they're going to be more likely to be stopped, they're more likely to be detained, and they're more likely to be arrested than other groups. Or as has been described by some people, you can get stopped for driving while Brown, right?

And so oh, here's a, let's stop this guy, right? And also, police tend to target high crime, what they consider high crime neighborhoods. This is, that is police and strategies that they use often target Hispanic low-income communities which they perceive as high crime neighborhoods.

Things like gang units, special task forces, and so forth are targeted Hispanic communities, so you're more likely, then, to be stopped and detained and then arrested even though, and this is just interesting data by Sampson and by Martinez and others, even though Hispanic communities, especially those communities with a high proportion of immigrants have low crime rates, right?

And you can see this in the data on Chicago, Los Angeles, El Paso, anywhere where there's high Latino immigrants tend to have lower crime rates than do other communities. But because they're targeted, there is over-criminalization of certain behaviors, and such laws such as loitering, by adolescents, school violations, truants and violations and curfew violations and so forth.

And one of the things that we have in Houston, now, is the State of Texas passed a law that you can't have those decorative plates. You have plates where it says, I'm alumni, I'm a Hurricane or University of Houston or University of Miami, license plates. We, a lot of us have those, right? Well, now that's against the law, right?

Now, it's selectively, what's interesting though, it's selectively enforced, so you, a cop has every reason to stop you because most of us have them, now who do they stop? Well, they tend to stop minorities, in this case, we're talking about Latinos and so you're 18, 19 years old, 20 years old or you're driving around, you probably have a beer and you're going to get stopped. Then you're going to be searched and you're going to be arrested and so forth and so on.

Avelardo Valdez: Also problems with defense and sentencing. The disproportionate reliance on public appointed counsels, i.e. that low income people aren't going to be able to afford their own attorneys and what usually happens when you have a public appointed counsel or lawyer, he's going to plead out on you, right?

And any of you who have friends that are lawyers, especially young lawyers, they'll tell you how that's, I don't even go to court, we just plead out and that's it and you're out. And so, they're likely to fight the case, therefore you're like, as opposed to others.

Harsh but mandatory sentencing which over the years this has been documented, I think, pretty extensively as draconian laws, drug laws in particular. The zero tolerance: 1, 2, 3 and you're out. Those all kinds of things that that have been passed by California have all resulted in and contributed to this, this change in policies. And of course biased attitudes in the system itself.

Avelardo Valdez: So, incarceration, and we look at drug offenses, incarceration for drug offenses skyrocketed from 16% in 1970 to 55% in 2002. Now, I know some of these data, there's some questions about. I mean there's a lot of controversy, or not a lot, but there are some questions about some of this, some of this data. But I mean it still is pretty clear that there's this, there's this process going on, right?

In 2002, you see Hispanics arrested by the DEA at a rate nearly three times their proportion to the general population. And Hispanics account for nearly 43% of individuals convicted of drug offenses in the year 2000. This is the latest data that Francisco has on this.

Avelardo Valdez: Yet, states report that as many as 70 to 80% of individuals imprisoned for drug offenses were convicted for violations that were of the small, 50 grams or less, so it's like get back to this whole idea of who's being arrested for the small possession of drugs. So that's who you see in this prison.

Of course, when you get into this whole thing about once you, once you're in prison, once you get convicted, once you get a felony, and then you come back into the community. And your chances are reduced in order for you to be a, to integrate as a full-fledged citizen as a convicted felon. And we have a lot of that in our communities, and they're highly concentrated in the low income areas.

And according to federal health statistics, drug use rates per capita of minorities and Whites are remarkably similar. In other words, if you look at overall, the drug rates, we don't see Hispanics using drug rates more than others.

There may be some exceptions in some of the subgroups but overall, there's not a big, big difference, yet the consequences are much more severe. So because Latinos are disproportionally charged with drug offenses and because prison has become the sentence of choice, sentence of choice for such offenses, more and more Latinos are being consecrated for these low-level crimes.

Avelardo Valdez: So, what are the, so what are the background and foreground factors that contribute to these disproportionate arrests? And this is where I'd like to talk a little bit about some of my research in, over the years, primarily among Mexican-American populations.

And I want to discuss, I kind of want to contextualize this. What does this mean, how does this actually play out in communities? And look at some of those factors, and what I mean by foreground factors, some of you may be not familiar with that term.

By foreground factors, I mean those short-term conditions or situations and contexts and how they interact with background factors, kind of larger, societal factors, and how these interact and produce these kinds of behaviors that result in drug use and arrest.

And so I want to use as a case study the U.S.-Mexico border, and I think this will then kind of relate to the following presentation, which will focus more on Mexico and the drug markets there.

And this is based on a, this is based actually on a paper that I wrote with my colleague, Dr. Kaplan, over at the University of Houston. It came out of the Journal of Drug Issues last year, and it's called "Conditions That Increase Drug Market Involvement: The Invitational Edge and the Case of Mexicans in South Texas."

Avelardo Valdez: And this is, of course, the U.S. border. This is an area, obviously, that, that is in direct proximity to Mexico, and Mexico is the major source of illegal drugs into the United States, and here you have the U.S., you have this part of the country, that's adjacent to that nation.

Along that shaded area is identified by the Department of Justice as a high-intensity drug trafficking area. There's about, I don't know, about ten of those areas, I mean, eight of those areas in the United States: South Miami, Southern California, Arizona.

And so that's where a lot of the efforts where the law enforcement or federal law enforcement makes a lot of effort. Most of the, the majority of drugs that come into the United States come through this conduit, come right up through this area. This area not only has a large amount of the drug trafficking, it also has a lot of international trade and commerce. This is one of the major conduits again for products from Mexico, legal products from Mexico, into this area.

So you have this corridor from Monterrey, from Mexico City, that comes right up the middle, and you have these huge volume of trade that goes on that's been augmented by of course, NAFTA and other trade policies. So you have this condition there where there's a lot of traffic.

Also, this area is, the Department of Homeland Security has targeted this area over the last few years, and so this area now is completely militarized. There are so many different police, I mean so many law enforcement there, you can't keep track of them: from sheriffs, to local police, city police, to U.S. Marshals, to border patrol to FBI to everybody. It's militarized, a militarized area.

It's also one of the poorest areas in the United States. The counties along this border by any kind of economic indicator that you want to look at, they're the lowest. Poverty, under/unemployment, single head of household, no maybe not single head of households, children in poverty, et cetera, et cetera.

I mean it's like I said, the poorest area in the United States. This area also has a lot of informal economic activity, legal informal economic activity. You want your roof done, you can have it done. You want your street paved, your driveway paved, you'll have it done. Off the books. There's a lot of informal economic activity.

And of course there is, there is a lot of Mexican, I mean this is predominantly a Mexican area, Mexican origin area. Probably 99.9%, or maybe not that high, are either Mexican-Americans or Mexicans that live in this area. It's a very transient area; there's a lot of circular migration or trans-migrational process that goes on there.

So I think that it's important to understand that in terms of and understanding this context and culture and the proximity to Mexico that explains the kind of drug market that has emerged there and has emerged there actually going back - this didn't happen yesterday, this happened all the way back from probably right after World War II.

Avelardo Valdez: This market in South Texas, the way it existed, I'll talk about it as kind of the mechanisms of, I mean the structure of, is consistent with literature, with other markets. It's comprised of three different actors in kind of specific roles which I'm going to talk about here, but remember that this market is, people that are in this area, in this South Texas area, have more direct access to illegal drugs like marijuana, heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine than any other part of the United States.

So the opportunities to engage in illegal activities and drug trafficking is very tempting. And again, it's distinct in that it involves people of Mexican origin, diverse levels of this market including those in legal activities.

I want to emphasize that legal activities, and of course it operates bi-nationally. All right? So you have this kind of bi-national environment there.

Now, here's what kind of the lesson today is, this invitational edge that I think exists down there. I mean, this is what I think is one of the distinguishing characteristics of this area, and it's this presence of this invitational edge and the relationship between legal markets and illegal markets down there.

This invitational edge and the opportunities that engage in this kind of activity, both by legal and by people who are involved in legal activities and illegal activities is there, and it has increased corruption.

Somebody told me, "Well, can you document that?" That's what happened when I turned this article in. Document the corruption, right? Yeah, because we always hear about corruption in Mexico, verdad, porque? But we never hear about the corruption in the United States, in the United States in law enforcement, and so forth.

But if you look at the data and you look at people who've been indicted over the last 15, 20 years, you'll see that there's this big increase of people who have been indicted. Whole array of elected officials, including county sheriffs, border patrol agents, elected officials, and so forth and so on, have been involved in drug trafficking, as well as businessmen, civic service workers, government employees, retirees, students, and so forth.

So there's this, this involvement of legal people who are conventional, non-criminals that become involved in this, in drug trafficking down there.

This has created a greater tolerance of criminal activity in South Texas. Now my Chicano Study friends don't like to hear this, and but, that I call this South Texas down there, I call this sort of a, what exists is a moral ambiguity about what's right and what's wrong. And it's a really distinct narrative on normative order down there. Where people because of the huge amounts of capital dollars down there; it's very tempting to people to participate in this.

They kind of drift. It's in economic theories; they kind of drift into this behavior. This invisible edge idea is something that is used to describe political corruption, so it's a really kind of a political science term.

Avelardo Valdez: Now, the drug market. I mean that's kind of a standard sort of model of the drug market, but if you look at that, it's really not a lot different than the regular market. You have producers, you have traffickers and transporters, dealers and distribution.

Think of a legal market. It's kind of similar to that. I mean what does; this is the way in which you organize the provisions of goods and services. So the drug market kind of operates in the same way.

But what's different about the drug market, obviously, is that it's not regulated. Well, it's not legal and it's not regulated, right? So it has to regulate itself, and therefore what starts when, when people don't? On a legal market, if you do something illegal there, you produce something you're not supposed to produce, you have regulations, and regulations come in.

Well, in the illegal drug market, you don't have that, so they have to self-regulate. And I'm sure that's what Jorge's going to talk about when that market gets deregulated? Well, a lot of different things happen.

Avelardo Valdez: But what is interesting about this drug market, which is different. And this is stuff that, this goes back to the 1950s when they talked about this, Casey and Bruce Johnson has talked about this, I mean this is not something that's new, this kind of structure, but what's new here, what I talk about what is new is the participation of non-criminals, criminal, and immigrant roles involved in this invitational edge.

So if you go back here and you say, "Well, the producers, who are the producers?" Well, you talk about those, but what's different about South Texas is that along, on all those different levels, you have people that are non-criminals participating in this process, more so than anywhere else. And this is what emerges is this, what I call, this invitational edge.

So, this role, I think is best understood in reference to this invitational-like process where people are in direct personal and secondary relationships and seduce and recruit each other to participate in this market.

So, if you have, for instance, you're living in San Antonio and you have a brother that's working as an insurance agent and he's got a family and everything else. And he's working down in Laredo, and you may want to recruit him to put a kilo of cocaine in his suitcase while he comes up with his family to go to Sea World because he's least likely to be stopped. And in fact that happens a lot.

And the temptation is there because of the huge profit that can come from that end, so in this paper we talk a lot about, give examples of how this invitational edge actually works out in regards to this thing.

So that these individuals and groups are frequently offered temptations to obtain profits and willfully taking the risk, including illegal drug markets and operations in the course of their ability to engage in this process. So in the paper, I talk a lot about, I give examples of how this actually works and, and you're more than, I hope some of you might want to look it up.

Avelardo Valdez: So one of my, one of my conclusions here is this drug market is highly decentralized and diverse. Mexican, Mexican immigrants play, the whole immigration process is a very important part of this, of this market, and I want to emphasize what I mean by that is that the market is not only is it directly, by proximity, geographically, the market's right there, Mexico's right there.

But also culturally it's accessible. So, that if you're a criminal or you're a non-criminal in Mexico, in South Texas, you have access to Mexico. You can go down there, you can explore where I might be able to find a pound of weed, or whatever, an ounce of heroin and so forth.

It's not that difficult because you have this facility, which is not the same if you're up in Ohio, or you're in Columbus, Ohio, or you're in St. Louis. That process, that invitational edge isn't as dominant.

So the market is very decentralized and diverse, or it has been in the past, so it's a very open kind of a marketplace. The model reflects a thick edge of corruption that defines the boundary between legal and illegal drug markets in South Texas.

And the findings, I think, are, we can get into this, I'm a sociologist, so I'm into postmodern criminology and of course differential opportunity. Cloward, Ohlin, those of you who took your introductory to sociology classes remember that. And I think that kind of explains this.

But if certainly, when we talk about drug markets and we talk about accessibility and so forth, that we need to take into consideration the context and culture of the U.S.-Mexico border region and how this has developed, really.

This didn't develop yesterday, it developed over a long period of time, so there are a lot of issues here that I've touched upon and I'm more than willing to expand on them during the question and answer. So, thank you.

Avelardo Valdez: Oh! There's my acknowledgments. This work has emerged from two major projects that we've had with NIDA.

Nelson Tiburcio, Ph.D.: Great, great pinch-hit, Lalo. That was great.

Avelardo Valdez: I get off base? I get on base?

Nelson Tiburcio: You actually got a double. Right?

As an almost perfect segue to our next presentation, U.S.-Mexico relations, drug-trafficking and public security will be Dr. Jorge Chabat's focus.

Dr. Chabat is a full Professor at the Department of International Studies at the Center for Research and Teaching and Economics in Mexico City since 1983 and from 1996 to 1999 was Director of that Department. He studied his Bachelors at El Collegio de Mexico and a Master's and Ph.D. in international affairs at the University of Miami.

He has published extensively in books and journals including Current History, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, about affairs and Mexican foreign policy, U.S.-Mexican relations and drug trafficking. He co-edited with John Bailey the book Transnational Crime and Public Security, Challenges to Mexico and the United States.

He has recently published Narcotrafico y Estado, El Discreto Encanto de la Corrupcion and Mexico - The Security Challenge. He is a political commentator from Imagen Radio and the Mexican TV network Televisa and writes a bi-monthly op-ed for the newspaper El Universal. Dr. Chabat.

Jorge Chabat, Ph.D.: Well, thank you. I still wonder why I was invited here. I'm not a real scientist, I'm a political scientist. Even worse, I'm an international relations person, even for political scientists we're not really scientists.

But well, anyway, I would like to thank Avelardo Valdez, Antonio Cepeda-Benito, and Mariela Millamora for making possible my stay here. And my presentation will deal with drug trafficking and U.S.-Mexican relations basically as a way to show the limits of the strategies and whether the problem is that Mexico's facing drug trafficking and why this strategy basically offers two, two bad options. I would say two worse options, and we're in a kind of Catch-22 as I will present in this presentation.

Jorge Chabat: Very briefly, just how it began, how the drug trafficking was in the past a minor issue in the bilateral relationship. Until the 1960s, the issue did not generate important diplomatic conflicts. There were isolated scandals and sporadic complaints from the U.S. but well, was not a big issue.

Mexico used to support the international agreements promoted by the U.S., Mexico used to sign everything we can sign. The problem is when we try to enforce agreements, but signing is not a problem. And production and traffic of marijuana to the United States was present for many years, but it had an increase in the 1960s because it was a time of drugs, sex, and rock and roll as you may remember.

Jorge Chabat: So, well, the first conflict began to appear in the late sixties and early seventies. United States demanded more cooperation from Mexico at the time, basically the big, the first big conflict we had was Operation Intercept in 1969. The United States putting pressure on Mexico, and the U.S. decided to stop all the cars at the border to check if there were drugs there.

Usually they never found many drugs, but it was a very efficient way to put pressure on Mexico, and after two weeks, Operation Intercept, the Mexican government said, "Okay, okay. Yeah, I'm going to collaborate with you, no problem."

There were some responses to these pressures. The Permanent Campaign that started in the 1950s continued and Operation Condor and actually, they were very successful. Mexico reduced the production of marijuana, heroin in proportion, at least for awhile. The problem started again in the 1980s.

Jorge Chabat: In the 1980s, we went back to the conflict, big conflicts. The Permanent Campaign was weakened, and there was a resurge in the preparation of marijuana, heroin in Mexico. And one important fact, the Colombian cocaine began to go to the United States, and Mexico became an important point of transit of that cocaine. And that's when the problem really started.

Drug-related corruption increased at the time in an important way in Mexico, and one other factor is that there were the first signs that the Mexican political system could not guarantee civility anymore.

There was an event in 1985 that some of you may remember, the killing of the DEA agent Enrique Camarena in Mexico. He was killed by drug traffickers with complicity of Mexican authorities. I have to say that. And both governments were unable to manage the conflict.

And the origins of these conflicts were basically about at that point Mexican corruption, and obviously there was a big distrust from the United States. At that time, it was impossible to think in projects like Merida Initiative and make U.S. giving Mexico four hundred million dollars, no way. I mean that was a big, big problem of distrust, and yeah, corruption was the cause.

Jorge Chabat: After this, the 1980s, there were some attempts to isolate the drugs issue and the bilateral agenda. Both governments developed some mechanism to do that. Mexico seemed interested in approving NAFTA, helped to increase the collaboration with United States.

There was, you may remember, the certification process that generated rhetorical conflict, but in the end, Mexico was certified every year. Certification became a ritual because it was so costly to certify Mexico. So they invented this, saw a lot of indicators that basically were a measure of political will, not results. I mean, "Okay, they're not doing very well but they're trying so, let's certificate Mexico." "Okay."

So it was very costly to decertify Mexico. President Salinas improved all the indicators in the fight against drugs: seizures, eradications, arrests, budget, international agreements, and institutional reforms. But they didn't work very well.

Jorge Chabat: In 1993, Mexican government created the National Institutes for the Combat of Drugs, the Mexican drug czar, but it, this Institute would disappear in 1995 when its director was arrested and accused of drug related corruption. I mean, so, well. General Gutierrez Rebollo. You saw the movie Traffic was more or less that story. The general that appeared was supposed to be this guy.

And there were changes in 1993, the criminal and fiscal goals were modified in order to harden penalties for drug trafficking and money laundering. There was more cooperation with the United States like the Northern Border Response Force in 1990, but despite all this collaboration, conflicts persist.

There was the kidnapping of this Mexican doctor, Humberto Alvarez Machain, accused of being part of the torture of Camarena, big diplomatic conflict.

Jorge Chabat: During the Zedillo Administration, there was hope in collaboration with the States in the area of drugs. Zedillo made a lot of legal modifications in order to strengthen the tools to fight drug trafficking. Many laws failed against organized crime. In 1996 the creation of the Special Unit Against Organized Crime, and then constitutional reforms in 1999, and the National Crusade Against Crime, forget about the Delincuencia.

In 1998, the Federal Preventive Police was created in 1998. Operation "Sealing the Border," a lot of modifications. And there were mechanisms to collaborate with the U.S., the High Level Contact Group, cooperation of the FBI in the investigation of some narco-graves in the border, U.S.-Mexico border, temporary extradition to the United States. The Mexican Supreme Court actually authorized the extraditions in 2001, and the United States participated in the selection of Mexican antidrug agents.

Jorge Chabat: Also, the Mexican government authorized U.S. airplanes in vessels to enter into Mexican territory chasing drug traffickers. There were rumors that the agents were carrying guns in Mexico. That was officially denied by the Mexican government, but if I were a DEA agent in Mexico, I would carry many guns, obviously. And probably that happened.

But even though there were still conflicts. The New York Times published in 1997 a story about some governors in Mexico related to drug trafficking and the arrest of General Gutierrez Rebollo, as I mentioned, in 1997, and Operation Casablanca in 1998 was a covert action in Mexico trying to find money launderers. Big scandal because the U.S. government didn't inform the Mexican government, obviously, again the problem of trust.

Jorge Chabat: During the Fox Administration, well, there were some arrests of drug lords and unintended consequences. As you may know, the United States' focus on terrorism moved the drugs issue to be a secondary point in the American priorities, and Mexico made a lot of arrests of big drug lords.

United States congratulated Mexico; however, these arrests provoked some unintended consequences. There was a huge increase in violence at the U.S.-Mexico border and overseas in Mexico, and there was a war between the Sinaloa Cartel and the Gulf Cartel that we're still seeing. I mean, people kill everywhere, beheading corpses. I mean all this terrible violence that we are experiencing now in Mexico.

Despite all these efforts of the Fox Administration, the flow of drugs to the United States remained constant, which shows that probably that's not the best way to deal with these kind of problems. Mexico created the Federal Agency of Investigation in 2001 a kind of Mexican FBI, well, was part of these efforts to deal with this problem.

Jorge Chabat: What happened in the Calderon Administration? When Felipe Calderon took power, he inherited a lot of problems. Territorial control of some parts of Mexico by the drug cartels, high levels of drug-related violence that still persist. Well, they're even worse now. And the tradition of the previous Mexican administration of reluctance to use public force.

The Fox Administration didn't want to use public force because he didn't want to be accused of violating human rights, and the best way to not being accused of that is not use the police. Well, it works for that, but obviously it doesn't solve the problem. So he decided not to use the police because we're not going to be accused of human rights abuse as well. That's not exactly the best solution, no?

And there were, again, these conflicts with United States, but this is very interesting because the origin of this conflict was not corruption anymore, was drug related violence. I mean, in the past the U.S. government used to complain, "Oh, you have a lot of corruption, we cannot trust you guys."

And well, Fox, the Fox Administration, the Calderon Administration made some efforts to fight corruption. It's still there, but it's at a lower levels. But the consequence of that, of fighting drugs, is high levels of violence, so it seems that the U.S. has to choose. What do you prefer, corruption or violence? Like the Rolling Stones used to say, "You can't always get what you want." That's life.

There was also a war between cartels provoked by Fox's actions, among other factors. I mean, the arrest of big capos led to some imbalance between the drug cartels, so one cartel saw the opportunity to take advantage of that an attack the other cartel. There was also an increase of domestic drug consumption in Mexico. It also made the size of the pipe bigger, so there were more reasons to fight for the new market.

Also, these were, the Fox policies, generated some extradition to the U.S. that also complicated the panorama in terms of the fight of drugs, and some people have, there's something to be said that in the past, there was a mediator in the drug trafficking world. A guy who used to facilitate pacts, pacts among the drug cartels, and well, that's probably was, that was probably true.

Some say that Amado Carrillo was the guy who approved these kinds of alliances, but with the arrest of the big capos, the young guys who took over the cartels were more aggressive. They were not disposed to negotiate, and that also explains why we had this war.

Obviously, the flow of drugs to the United States continued without major changes. Mexico is still an important exporter of marijuana and a point of transit for South American cocaine to the U.S.

And also Calderon inherited a serious problem at the municipal and the state level. The police forces at that level are really bad. I mean, they are bad trained, with some exceptions, but they're really the Achilles heel of the Mexican security system.

There was a partial decrease in drug-related violence by mid-2007, but and another high increase during 2008. So the situation is, is very bad.

Jorge Chabat: What is the Calderon strategy? Well, the Calderon strategy was based basically in using police, the military operations in some parts of Mexico. That generated originally an increase in Calderon's popularity. The cucaracha effect, I mean, it suggests that when you have cucarachas in your house, you use some exterminator. And the cucarachas don't die; they go to the other, to the house of your neighbor.

That's what happened with drug traffickers. You begin to chasing them, and they move from one state to another. So violence move from MichoacÃ?n to Sonora or Veracruz, Nuevo Leon, other states in which we have never seen this kind of violence.

So, it's like the balloon affect that we use to explain drug trafficking, that you put pressure in one country, so the production of the drugs moves to another country. And the global problem remains the same.

However, despite Calderon's popularity, there were criticisms for the use of military in fighting drugs. These criticisms are still there. The problem is that it seems that we don't have many options on that, that's a real problem. I mean some say, "Don't send the army to fight drug trafficking because they are going to get corrupt by drug money." That's true.

But so don't send anybody, and nobody will get corrupt. That's all the options.

Calderon also proposed a security reform. Part of it was approved by the congress. He's proposing another and other reforms right now. Calderon also extradited drug traffickers to the United States. There was an improvement in police and army capabilities. The Merida Initiative is part of this process, and I think this is the police forces, at least federal police forces in Mexico, are better now than in the past. But the problem is still there.

There was an offensive against the structure of the drug cartels and surgical strikes, and that's very important because Calderon, contrary to what happened during, well additionally to what happened during the Fox Administration, the Fox captured the drug lords, the big capos, Caldron has been attacking the structure.

I mean not only the CEO, but the Directors of Financing or I mean the mid-level guys of the structure. And that has really hurt the cartels. And that's why we are, why they are responding in this way because they have been really harassed and really hurt by these measures.

Finally, in the Calderon strategy, one result that we're seeing right now is a fragmentation of drug cartels. There is a response of these cartels against the police, the federal police, and obviously that means a revert of drug-related violence because Calderon is really attacking them. And they are responding, and they're killing other drug traffickers. They're killing police forces, and they're killing civilian population, which is really a serious problem.

How can we belay the drugs war in Mexico? I think that, well, the evaluation is that we have basically two bad choices between the bad and the worse. I would say between the worst and the worst.

Jorge Chabat: Under the PRI hegemony there was a policy of tolerance, vis-Ã?-vis drug trafficking. What produces low levels of violence? I mean it doesn't mean there was no violence, but compared to what we have now, there were low levels of violence and high levels of corruption. The conflict with the U.S. was provoked by corruption at that time, and obviously, the result was distrust from the U.S.

With the arrival of PAN to the Mexican presidency, there is a policy of confrontation against road traffic and especially with President Calderon. What has produced lower levels of corruption. I mean corruption is still there, but compared to what we had in the past, is lower, and high levels of violence.

Now, the conflict with the U.S. has been provoked by violence. So the U.S. has most trust in Mexican government, but now the U.S. is complaining about violence. Okay, well, again, you can't always have what you want.

So there is a tough choice for the Mexican government: tolerance or confrontation. Those are basically the two policy options the Mexican government has. Corruption or violence, what is the bad and what is the worst? I think that we have two worst options, and basically, the origin of that is that we have laws that cannot be enforced. That's the origin of this problem.

Many countries have laws that cannot be enforced. The United States has laws that cannot be enforced. Migration laws cannot be enforced, so when you have laws that you cannot enforce, you have basically three options.

You try to enforce law, like Calderon is doing with fighting drugs, and you have violence. So bad option.

You can tolerate or simulate that you enforce laws but you don't enforce really. What happened in the past, and it's a bad option. You have corruption, so it's a bad option.

The third option will be change the law, which basically means that you have to end prohibition. But since this option is not available at this point, to say the truth, well the Mexican government has to deal with two bad options.

What do you prefer, violence or corruption? Do you confront the drug traffickers or not? Both are, from my point of view, very bad options. Both have political consequences, social consequences, so we're in a kind of Catch-22 to say the truth.

Jorge Chabat: But what are the perspectives? Well, I would say that as long as the Mexican government maintains the policy of confrontation against drug trafficking, conflicts with the U.S. will be provoked by violence; however, collaboration between both governments will continue.

Actually collaboration is much better now than in the past because there is some, there's more trust in Mexican authorities. The Merida Initiative is a sign of this U.S. trust in the Mexican government.

However, public opinion, discontent with high levels of violence can put pressure on Calderon and force him to go back to the policy of tolerance. There are some voices that are saying in Mexico, "Oh, let's stop this violence, why don't you negotiate with drug traffickers again?" That can happen. That can happen.

If that happens, corruption will increase again, and relations with the U.S. will be affected, but will be affected also. And we will be in the times of distrust. So I don't see that we have many choices, and from my point of view, I've been saying this for many years, the drug problem should be treated as a health problem. It should be treated by medical doctors, by educators, by social workers, not by police or not by the army.

But unfortunately -- I'm not saying that end the prohibition is a good option. It's also bad, no? But from my point of view, the others are worse. Obviously, it's between choosing the bad and the worse. Now unfortunately, we have to choose the worst and the worst.

And we're trapped in this game of having corruption or having violence or having both, and I don't see that we're going to find a solution to this problem soon. I shouldn't say that because if prohibition ends, my research topic will disappear. So I should,
I should say that let's go against drug traffickers, and I will have a lot of things to research on. But from my point of view, it doesn't lead us to any way.

Thank you very much.

Nelson Tiburcio: We're running a little bit late, but I think we have time for questions.

Audience: Question for Mr. Chabat. _________which I'm sure you would be _________ by any other country. Very recently, it's not new, but they have proposed that. Some politicians in Mexico are proposing to legalize drugs. That they, I assume that they don't even know what they mean by saying that, but they are proposing that, that there are some political parties that support that proposition. What would you think about that? I mean, thoroughly, what's your opinion on that?

Jorge Chabat: I prefer not to use the word legalization because it probably means some kind of approval, which is not the case. I mean, I prefer to use end of prohibition.

Well, to tell the truth, I think this is not very possible right now, basically, because the U.S. government doesn't like that option. And I understand why the United States is not supporting that option basically because the problem you have in the United States is consumption. And obviously, ending prohibition does not solve the problem of consumption; actually it can increase it a lot, at least in the short term.

I've been hearing this discussion in Mexico for years. The arguments are more or less the same but politically, it is not possible. I mean, basically the party who is proposing, which is proposing that is Social Democratic Party, which is a very small party. And this is not going to happen soon.

My position is not that this is the ideal option. The ideal option would be that we don't have drugs. But that option is not possible, we have drugs. So I think this is the least bad option, but it's not going to happen soon, so governments will have, we'll have to decide what do you want?

If you go after criminals and maintain this policy and you confront them, you will have a lot of violence. If you simulate that you are going after them but don't confront, you will have corruption.

There were many years that I thought, "Well, if you enforce law, corruption will decrease." Yeah! Corruption will decrease, but you have all these beheaded corpses and killings everywhere.

Honestly, I don't know what is worse. I mean, I'm really disappointed at this point, but what can I tell you? It's something that the governments have to deal with, and in the short term, they only have these two bad options.

Avelardo Valdez: Can I make a comment on that? What about, what about the, people have talked a lot about the reform of the judicial system. Do you see that in the future? I mean, the whole criminal justice system, the reform of that system in Mexico as an option, possible option?

Jorge Chabat: Yeah, I think that it will help. I mean, yeah. We're in the process of moving to oral trials in Mexico. It will happen during the following eight years.

Yeah! I mean, if we have better institutions, the situation will be better, no? We have had corruption for a long time, impunity, that's a problem that has been mentioned before. Yeah, okay.

And the option that the U.S. government, I'm sorry, that the Mexican government has is basically to do the best it can, and one way is to strengthen institutions, yeah, that the better option under these circumstances.

You can do it probably better than we're doing right now, and you're absolutely right, legal reforms are necessary in Mexico. And some of them are happening, and probably we will see some little change in the following years.