As I write this, there's only 3 days left according to the BBC i-player website in order to catch the last of the recent run of 'Toughest Place to Be a....' This episode follows a senior nurse from the A&E department of Royal Preston Hospital as she spends time working in a public hospital in Ciudad Juarez, close to the Mexican US border.
Apart from having to adjust to working in a casualty department devoid of all the modern equipment common throughout the NHS, nurse Maria Connolly has to come to terms with the relentless flow of human misery that the War on Drugs delivers to the hospital daily. The President of Mexico declared war on the drug cartels in 2006 and as a result in this one city alone, 10,000 people have been killed since 2008.
In heart-rending detail, what this programme makes clear is not only the utter futility of this on-going war, but it's inexorable escalation whereby armed guards not only have to escort ambulances, but also have to be stationed in the hospital itself. Civil society is clearly breaking down in this once pleasant and thriving city with ordinary law-abiding citizens being forced to abandon their lives and move out.
This story on the BBC website today about a boy turning up at his Mexican school with a loaded gun points to yet another deeply worrying aspect of the War on Drugs, namely that of widespread police corruption. With so much money to be made from the illegal drugs trade, not surprisingly law enforcement officers cannot be trusted. I cannot fail to notice that when police raided the boy's house, his mother was arrested 'but a man had managed to escape'.
There simply has to be another, more intelligent way of dealing with the drug issue or the pernicious tentacles of the international drug gangs will simply become ever more widespread, and particularly in a time of economic uncertainty.
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