South Of The Border

Well, south, anyway.

***As if Mexico wasn't enough of a corrupt, statist (i.e. liberal) basket case (whose problems they keep exporting to us), now they've "gone Netherlands":

Mexican President Vicente Fox [signed] a bill that would legalize the use of nearly every drug and narcotic sold by the same Mexican cartels he's vowed to fight during his five years in office, a spokesman said [last] Tuesday.

The list of illegal drugs approved for personal consumption by Mexico's Congress last week is enough to make one dizzy — or worse.

Cocaine. Heroin. LSD. Marijuana. PCP. Opium. Synthetic opiates. Mescaline. Peyote. Psilocybin mushrooms. Amphetamines. Methamphetamines.

And the per-person amounts approved for possession by anyone eighteen or older could easily turn any college party into an all-nighter: half a gram of coke, a couple of Ecstasy pills, several doses of LSD, a few marijuana joints, a spoonful of heroin, five grams of opium and more than two pounds of peyote, the hallucinogenic cactus.

The law would be among the most permissive in the world, putting Mexico in the company of the Netherlands. Critics, including U.S. drug policy officials, already are worrying that it will spur a domestic addiction problem and make Mexico a narco-tourism destination.

Great, just great. Now we'll get their addicts, as well as more of our own citizens becoming addicts, and all of them landing, pie-eyed and shit-faced, in our health care and/or criminal justice systems on the taxpayer's nickel.

D'ya think ol' Vince gave his pal Dubya a heads-up on this pirhouette? Or was he (Fox) himself higher than a kite - or feeling the barrel of a pistol at the back of his head - when he signed this abject surrender? [h/t Hugh Hewitt]

***While President De Pacas is turning Mexico psychodelic, another Hispanic "president" is inviting a recently minted ally and our worst enemy to steal a portion of our oil and gas reserves right out from under our very noses:

With only modest energy needs and no ability of its own to drill, Cuba has negotiated lease agreements with China and other energy-hungry countries to extract resources for themselves and for Cuba.

Cuba's drilling plans have been in place for several years, but now that China, India and others are involved and fuel prices are unusually high, a growing number of lawmakers and business leaders in the United States are starting to complain. They argue that the United States' decades-old ban against drilling in coastal waters is driving up domestic energy costs and, in this case, is giving two of America's chief economic competitors access to energy at the United States' expense.

"This is the irony of ironies," Charles T. Drevna, executive vice president of the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association, said of Cuba's collaboration with China and India. "We have chosen to lock up our resources and stand by to be spectators while these two come in and benefit from things right in our own backyard."

Cap'n Ed clarifies that the Sino/Indian-Cuban deal comes under the auspices of a thirty-year-old US-Cuban pact dividing the Florida Straits between the two nations for ownership of the oil and natural gas underneath the ocean. However, since neither side has ever drilled there - the Cubans due to inability and ourselves due to environmentalist strangulation - nobody really knows how much oil and gas is down there to be had, and where, and how much is on our side of the Straits and how much is on Castro's. Now, however, somebody will know - the ChiComms and Cubans, along with our Indian allies who are, nonetheless, economic competitors with an insatiable thirst for petroleum. Think they'll tell us?

Sorry, didn't mean to make you snort bodily fluids all over your screen. Who knows what our Mexican readers are snorting at the moment. Ooops, I did it again, didn't I?

It makes one wonder what it will take to finally motivate our rulers to finally tell the greenstremists to go pound sand and fully open up domestic energy exploration and production. We should have already sucked our side of the Florida Straights dry by now instead of keeping the black stuff in the ground for the Red Chinese (and Indians) to tap. We should have drilling platforms off every square mile of both coasts and the Gulf of Mexico. We should be tapping the Saudi Arabia-sized reserves just waiting for us in Alaska. There's no reason in the ever-frakking world why we should be paying $3 a gallon at the pump ($3.09 for regular at my neighborhood Chevron station this afternoon), or tolerating our energy shorthairs being in the hands of Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, and Adolph Ahmedinejad.

We're in this predicament because we've deliberately short-sheeted our own energy policy bed for the past generation. Now the piper has come to collect. And the potential price tag is far more than just outrageous pump prices, but economic blackmail and the resulting steady, inexorable waning of national power on the world stage. Not unlike how the ancient Roman Empire declined, actually.

'Tis a function of will, in the final analysis. Energy self-sufficiency is within our grasp, as it has been ever since we began willfully denying it to ourselves. And it has now become, as it was always destined to be, a matter of national security as well.

We can drill, drill, drill. Or we can go "up in smoke."

And that would be a real bummer, man.