Bunch of dopes

Some say smoking dope is harmless.

Tell that to the family of Mateo Bejar. The police commander and three of his men were murdered Wednesday in broad daylight on a highway in the Pacific resort town of Zihuatanejo. Mexican drug cartel members wielding AK-47 and AR-15 assault rifles tossed grenades and fired more than 200 rounds into their vehicle, setting it on fire. The bodies of Bejar and his men were found burned inside.

Or tell that to the family of José Luis Ortiz. Mexican drug traffickers killed the 3-year-old boy in January after mistaking his green-painted home in a Tijuana slum for one of the same color on the same street belonging to a police officer they were seeking. They shot José as well as his father Mainol and his mother Eugenia Velasquez while they slept in the bed they shared.

Once they recognized their mistake, the cartel members found the home of the police officer. They killed him, his wife and 11-year-old daughter, too.

Or tell that to the families of the soldiers whose headless bodies were scattered on a thoroughfare in the Mexican state capital of Chilpancingo in December. The drug traffickers who killed them left a sign near the bodies that read: "For every one of mine that you kill, I will kill 10."

More than 500 police and 5,500 drug traffickers were murdered in Mexico in 2008. Their killings as killings go have been extraordinary. Dozens have been decapitated. Some have had their tongues cut out. Others have been found blindfolded and gagged and shot in the head or bound and burned and shot in the head.

In its National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimated 55,000 South Dakotans smoked marijuana in 2006. Eighteen thousand used cocaine or other illegal drugs.

Minnehaha County Sheriff Mike Milstead is on the board of a group of law enforcement officials from six states working to stop drug trafficking in the Midwest. He says most of the marijuana smoked, most of the cocaine snorted and most of the methamphetamine injected in South Dakota can be traced to Mexican drug cartels.

"It's almost a civil war," Milstead says of the violence between the cartels – and between the cartels and Mexican law enforcement.

Drug users like to claim theirs is a victimless offense.

Tell that to the families of the five Ciudad Juarez police officers who were gunned down a week ago by Mexican drug traffickers threatening to kill one officer every 48 hours unless the police chief of this city across the Texas border from El Paso resigned. He did.

Or tell that to the family of the Tijuana police officer who was murdered recently after Mexican drug cartel members hijacked a police radio frequency and said in reference to him: "You're next, bastard. ... We're going to get you." Two hours later he and another police officer were found bound and shot in the head.

Or tell that to the family of Mauro Enrique Tello Quinones. The retired army general was kidnapped this month after being asked by the mayor of Cancun to root out the drug cartels in that Caribbean city. He had been on the job a week. Before they shot him in the head, cartel members broke both of his arms and legs.

Or tell that to the family – what is left of it – of Carlos Reyes López. Hooded gunmen killed him and his wife and his mother and his children and his nephews – 11 family members in all – 14 days ago inside their home in the ranching community of Monte Largo in retaliation for drug arrests that Lopez and his elite state police unit had made in recent weeks. Some of the children were killed as they hid under their beds.

Drug violence has claimed another 1,000 lives in Mexico so far this year. To date the drug cartels have confined most of their murdering to Mexico although the five men found dead in an apartment in Birmingham, Ala., in August had some of the earmarks of a cartel killing: slit throats, gags and blindfolds.

Elsewhere, kidnappings and home invasions thought to be tied to Mexican drug cartels are occurring almost daily in Arizona while on Tuesday Texas Gov. Rick Perry asked Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano for 1,000 more troops to keep cartel-sponsored violence at bay.

At the root of this ruthlessness, of course, is money.

Mexican and Colombian drug cartels, according to the U.S. Justice Department, collect at least $18 billion and possibly as much as $39 billion each year from the sale of illegal drugs. In comparison, the gross domestic product of South Dakota was $33.9 billion in 2007. At the top end of the Justice Department estimate, illegal drugs in Mexico are bigger business than all the business in South Dakota combined.

In a sense, the seven drug cartels in Mexico are competing for market share. But they take an approach Main Street businesses do not: They kill.

Might the cartels – or the street and motorcycle gangs in the United States through which they distribute much of their drugs – someday resort to carnage to carve up this country like they are doing their own?

Lt. Steve Haney of the Sioux Falls Area Drug Task Force doesn't rule out the possibility. "There is so much money to be made," says the commander of the task force, which a week ago seized almost $300,000 of marijuana and methamphetamine from one Guatemalan and six Mexican drug traffickers in a major bust. "It all comes down to greed."

And to people who think the only person their drug habit is hurting is them.