This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, January 12, 2009. I'm

Caleb Brown. Last year more than 5,300 people in Mexico were killed in

drug cartel warfare with no end of the carnage in sight.

But U.S. policy has always been to exert pressure on Mexican leaders to keep fighting the drug war and maintain Washington's prohibitionist model.

With violence on the rise is that push sustainable?

And is there hope that an Obama administration will change U.S. policy to let other governments deal with drugs in their own way.

Ted Galen Carpenter, the Cato Institute's Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy

Studies comments.

The level of violence is surging and has been on the rise for several years.

For 2008, more than 5,000 people will have died in drug-related violence.

That violence is driven largely by demand for narcotics in the United States and the U.S. government's insistence on pursuing a

prohibitionist policy. Prohibitionism drives up the price of drugs. It creates a

massive black market premium, an enormous potential

profit that attracts the most criminal violence-prone elements. That is what has happened in Mexico. Various drug trafficking

organizations are engaged in turf fights and in fights with the military and

police forces of President Felipe Calderon's government.

And a lot of people are getting caught in the crossfire.

The violence has reached the point now that it really threatens to destabilize Mexico as an

effective state.

How much of what President Calderon in previous administrations in Mexico, their fight against drug cartels how much of that is

being driven by US policy I would say a large part of Mexico cities

policies are a response to pressure from the United States.

...