Eradicate or, at least, control and put effective limits on organized crime, particularly drug producers and traffickers, requires many more actions, beyond those that are located in the police sphere. Indeed, while having effective police forces and an apparatus for the administration of justice is a necessary condition, it is not enough to dismantle what could be called the “ideological and propaganda apparatus” available to organized crime gangs.
In the first place, an adequate addiction prevention policy is urgently needed. It is one of the areas of public policy in which less has been done in recent years and, in fact, has been reduced to information campaigns in the mass media, with totally ineffective messages and others, even poorly designed and frankly content. misunderstandings, such as the one in which it is stated that the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis was caused by the drug use of German soldiers.
How many people die from the consumption of illicit substances? How many more for the abuse in the consumption of legal drugs, such as alcohol and tobacco? It is difficult to quantify them with precision, but it could easily be said, if deaths from emphysema, tongue, lung and mouth cancer, as well as poisoning and alcoholic liver diseases are considered, we are talking about more than 50,000 deaths per year.
The precariousness of the mental health of large sectors of the population, coupled with severe conditions of poverty and inequality, generate favorable scenarios for the consumption of this type of substance to increase; However, to this is added the so-called “narcoculture”, within the framework of which there is a constant apology for crime, as well as the proliferation of identity elements that give hundreds of thousands of young people a “sense of belonging”, and It leads them to convert the vertigo of violence and the escape from reality through drug use into a desirable way of life.
It is worrying, beyond personal tastes, that more and more spaces: restaurants, bars, public parks, private ballrooms and family gatherings are normalizing the reproduction of music and video where apology for crime is made or spoken openly in a positive way regarding the consumption of addictive substances and the violent, sexist and even misogynistic world that is associated with it.
While the State has shown in the last 45 years an enormous inability to generate instruments that promote national identity and community social cohesion, criminal groups have found fertile ground to form a kind of “social support networks”, linked to who participate directly in their activities, but also a spirit of “social sympathy” or tolerance regarding what the lifestyle of drug traffickers implies.
In hundreds of popular markets, figures alluding to “protective entities” of criminal offenders are traded, but also figures alluding to the most famous characters in the world of drug trafficking, who are presented as a kind of “popular heroes” because, somehow, they are thought to be the only ones capable of confronting and outwitting a corrupt State, without realizing that, deep down, they are the worst part of it. All this translates into the construction of communities and support and complicity networks that are no longer only in rural areas, but also in increasingly widespread urban territories that support and facilitate the permanent action of criminals.
If effectively preventing addictions is a formidable challenge for authorities, confronting drug culture without violating people’s rights of thought, belief, and freedom of expression stands as one of the most important challenges for building a new culture of legality. , respect for human rights, tolerance and respect for human life.
