olutions or responsibility.
Drug use is not a serious problem in most of the countries from which drugs are imported to the United States, for the quite straightforward reason that drug abuse is so heavily punished in most of those countries. Drug production and export is not viewed as a serious problem by most countries involved in the drug trade because, for practical purposes, the illegal drug trade brings money into countries which otherwise find it difficult to generate export earnings. In those coun tries where the United States is successful in persuading governments to take action against drug producers and exporters Columbia, Mexico, and Peru, as examples, public support within those countries is typically lukewarm to begin with, and 3
rapidly shifts toward hostility to the effort, the national government, and the United States.
Citizens of foreign countries tend to perceive American efforts to internationalize the American drug problem as a more or less typical American effort to blame others for their own problems. The growing argument in the United States over pro posals to legalize drug use is evidence which, to many people, justifies this contention of an attempt to shift blame.
The United States is continually preaching the benefits of free makrket economics to all countries. There has ne
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