In recent years, rotted corpses have been unearthed in mass graves throughout the country. Fifty-five bodies were found in a dilapidated silver mine near Taxco. Fifty-one cadavers were exhumed in Benito Juárez. Seventy-two carcasses were discovered near a ranch in Tamaulipas. Two hundred and fourteen bodies were plucked from mass graves in Durango. Another two hundred or so were dug from pits near San Fernando. All of them are collateral ex-human debris in the endless clash over controlled substances.

Complicating matters further is an increasingly blurred line between criminals and the government. It’s not as if los Federales ever had a sterling reputation in Mexico. Los Zetas, currently deemed the most balls-out ruthless of Mexico’s cartels, was founded by Mexican Army deserters and currently includes former police officers from all levels of Mexican government. An astonishing 150,000 members of Mexico’s Army were said to have deserted between 2003 and 2009, many of them undoubtedly taking their automatic weapons with them. In November 2008, the head of Mexico’s INTERPOL office was arrested on suspicion of being the cartels’ puppet. As of June of this year, 127 US Customs and Border agents had been busted on suspicion of working hand-in-hand with the cartels. And there’s an ongoing controversy over whether the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, via “Operation Fast and Furious,” has been complicit in arming the cartels in the name of disarming them.

Is all this madness necessary merely because people like to get high?

In 1929, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre turned public opinion against Chicago’s gangster culture, and by implication, the national alcohol ban that had allowed it to flourish. In that incident, seven people were murdered. Less than five years later, Prohibition was repealed.

Why, after 40,000 or so murders in Mexico, aren’t people getting the message?

Mexican President Felipe Calderón has made a habit of sternly lecturing America while his own country seems hellbent on becoming the planet’s only Fourth World nation. After Thursday’s mass human incineration at Casino Royale, he blamed America’s “insatiable” appetite for drugs in helping create Mexico’s ubiquitous climate of ultra-violence.

An estimated 90% of the cocaine in the USA enters through Mexico, as does a majority of the marijuana and methamphetamines, as well as a huge share of the heroin. Mexican drug cartels control approximately two-thirds of the foreign narcotics that reach this country and help sate our “insatiable” demand. It’s estimated that in return, anywhere from $15-$50 billion leaves America yearly and winds up in Mexico. And their cartels have already infiltrated an estimated 200 American cities. How long before Mexican drug violence is imported in levels equivalent to Mexican drugs?

I say we cut them off.

I know Mexicans are a proud people, but I don’t know why. In a vague way I respect that they’re all about “respect,” but I see little that’s worthy of respect. It’s not as if Mexico teems with human capital, and their arrogantly impenitent demographic infiltration of the USA is the most urgent social crisis we currently face. We are entangled in a toxic situation with an insane, primitive, innately brutal nation that has ceased to function and can only impoverish, rather than enrich, us.

We’re fighting the wrong wars. Mexico is a far bigger threat to America’s security and national integrity than anything in the Middle East. Legalize drugs in America and deport all illegal aliens. Mexico’s problems are not ours unless we choose to make them so. Let bloated billionaire Carlos Slim help his countrymen as they proudly bask in their mongrel flatus.

Just as prohibiting alcohol was a loser’s game, the drug war is a bloody exercise in futility. I never understood how naturally occurring plants could possibly be illegal. At least in unrefined botanical form, I think marijuana, coca, and poppies are all far safer than alcohol. We can work out the details of legalization, production, and regulation later—history has proven we’re a far more inventive nation than Mexico could ever dream of being.

It’s time we divorced our tumorous, terminally defective neighbor to the south. Even their weed is awful.