U.S. Border Patrol: Where Free Thought is Strictly Prohibited

More than 34,000 people have died in drug-related violence since Mexican President Felipe Calderon stepped up the war on illegal narcotics four years ago, with more than 15,000 – including 11 mayors and a leading candidate for governor -- killed last year alone. Yet drugs are just as cheap and available as anytime before, if not more so. Clearly prohibition isn't working.

But if you work for the U.S. government, don't you dare say that or you'll be out of a job. Former Border Patrol agent Bryan Gonzalez found out the hard way.

As a lawsuit filed last week by the ACLU of New Mexico alleges, Gonzalez was terminated by U.S. Border Patrol last fall after a fellow agent reported him for remarking during a casual conversation that maybe the war on drugs – which isn't just a slogan, but an actual war with actual guns and militaries – is contributing to the violence that has engulfed Mexico and begun spreading through Central America.

According to the complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District, Gonzalez was reported to his superiors – and an Internal Affairs investigation was launched soon thereafter – when he “remarked that legalization of drugs would end the drug war and related violence in Mexico,” noting that the vast majority of narcotics that pass through the country are intended to meet U.S. demand. In other words, he was fired for exercising his right to free speech.

Were drugs legalized, the production and sale of marijuana, cocaine and other currently illicit substances could of course be taken over by a legal, free market, robbing Mexico's drug cartels of the black market profits they currently use to terrorize their country. Indeed, a study last year by researchers at the RAND Institute found that legalizing marijuana alone would cut drug cartel revenues by more than $1.5 billion.

The definition of idiocy is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Idiocy, however, is official U.S. policy, so when Gonzalez suggested perhaps giving sanity a try, he was terminated for holding “personal views that were contrary to the core characteristics of Border Patrol Agents, which are patriotism, dedication, and esprit de corps (group morale)" -- and, of course, unthinking devotion to failed, violently counterproductive policies.

But while discussion of alternatives to the drug war is strictly prohibited and cause for immediate dismissal, casual bigotry, on the other hand, is apparently A-okay. As the ACLU's complaint notes, the border agent who first reported his colleague's oh-so-dangerous questioning of the war on drugs responded to Gonzalez's remarks by changing the conversation, asking “why Mexicans are always trying to enter the United States and steal jobs.” Gonzalez is Mexican American.

So, to recap: Utilizing one's mind and questioning certain aspects of national policy during a casual conversation with a colleague is to disgrace the U.S. Border Patrol. Mindlessly parroting anti-immigrant rhetoric one heard on talk radio and asking why members of a colleague's ethnicity are trying to "steal jobs," on the other hand – why, someone get that dude a medal. Or at least a show on Fox.

For a country so (rhetorically) dedicated to freedom, U.S. officials sure are awful intolerant of dissent, not even allowing debate about the measures they impose. Instead of free men with minds, they seem to want automatons who will carry out their policies without question. And it's not hard to see why: once you start thinking about the war on drugs and its lackluster record of achievement, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to keep on doing the same thing.

It's just too bad the U.S. Border Patrol's response to the failure of prohibition is to prohibit free thinking.

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Photo Credit: Octavian Cosma