At a House subcommittee hearing last week, Rep. John Tierney, D-Ma., figured that $15 to $25 billion in annual profits from drug sales in the United States bankroll Mexican cartels' purchases of guns from America. "The profits and guns -- and drug precursors in some cases -- then find their way back across the border to Mexico and fuel the increasing violence."

Sterling said of the violence in Mexico, it "is not senseless. It's very deliberate. The reason the violence becomes more gruesome is because it's murder as message. It's an attempt to intimidate the government to make the government the way it used to be."

Sidney Weintraub of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told the Chronicle that 40 percent of Mexico's drug sales are marijuana. "What we have to do is change our policy and decriminalize marijuana."

Think the L-word, instead, to put more kingpins out of business. Except that to question the drug war is to risk losing tax money. When the El Paso City Council passed a resolution calling for "open, honest, national dialogue on ending the prohibition of narcotics," state and national politicians threatened to withhold government funds. The Associated Press reported on a letter by five Democratic state representatives that warned that the resolution "does not bring the right attention to El Paso. It says, 'We give up and we don't care.'" The El Paso mayor vetoed the measure and it died.

I'd say that to not ask if prohibition actually works is to give up and not care. Now here's a moral question: How many Mexican police have to die because American parents believe that U.S. drug laws will keep their teenagers from doing something their kids may or may not do whether it is or isn't legal?

Follow-up question: Will parents feel safer if the drug cartel violence moves north?