El Paso

At some point yesterday I came across the curious snap above in the FT, said to be part of a surge of migrants coming through or from Mexico (left), across the Rio Grande (centre) and on into the US (right) at El Paso.

Wanting to delve, I turn to gmaps and after a while I find what appears to be the place in question, Parque Las Tortugas in Ciudad Juárez. The former translating as Turtle Park and the latter being a city with a million and a half people, across the river from El Paso. Turtle Park, complete with turtle flavoured climbing frames, does not look that different from similar parks here in Epsom. While to the right we have a dense grid of streets full of single storey houses. Houses which look well enough in the bright sunlight, but some of which would probably not look too clever at close quarters.

While on the US side of this rather unimpressive river, we have rather better looking housing, plus, for example, the downtown branch of the El Paso Community College, a college sporting a number of rather grand facilities scattered across the area. What we would call a large and well-endowed university. See reference 1.

I then thought about the mayhem wreaked in Mexico and central America generally by the US hunger for cocaine. And then about why cocaine was so very illegal - as it turns out to be more or less everywhere in the world except for some South American countries and for Portugal. But I did not come up with any very convincing explanation of why this should be so, so that remains work in progress, with references 2, 3 and 4 being what I have turned up to start with. With the story so far at reference 2 being that the drug which did far and away the most damage was alcohol - legal more or less everywhere in the non-Muslim world. 

Reference 1: https://www.epcc.edu/.

Reference 2: Drug harms in the UK: a multicriteria decision analysis - David J Nutt, Leslie A King, Lawrence D Phillips – 2010.

Reference 3: Effect of drug law enforcement on drug market violence: A systematic review – Dan Werb, Greg Rowell, Gordon Guyatt, Thomas Kerr, Julio Montaner, Evan Wood – 2011. 

Reference 4: Drugs Research: An overview of evidence and questions for policy - Charlie Lloyd and Neil McKeganey – 2011.