Welcome, everyone, to another debate from Intelligence Square, U.S.

I'm John Donovan of ABC News, and once again, it is my honor and pleasure to be serving as moderator as the six debaters you see sharing the stage with me here at the Skurball Center for the Performing Arts at New York University.

Six debaters, three against three, will be debating this motion. America is to blame for Mexico's drug war.

I want to remind everyone, this is not a panel discussion or a seminar. This is a debate. It's a contest. There will be winners and losers.

And you in our audience will be the judges. You will pick the winners. You will have voted twice by the time the debate begins once before and once again after the debate.

And the team that moves the most voters, the changes the most minds, will be declared our winner.

Speaking first for the motion, Fareed Zakaria, he is the host of Fareed Zakaria GPS on CNN and Fareed. I'm certain that has nothing to do with getting directions off the highway. What is the GPS stand for?

Global public square. Global public square. How appropriate for this. Ladies and gentlemen, Fareed Zakaria.

Thank you very much. It's such a pleasure to be here. Look, what I thought I would do is try to convince you as best I can that you should vote for this proposition.

And we are on the 40th anniversary of the drug war. The war on drugs was declared by Richard Nixon. And it began a vast effort by the United States government to transform the issue of drugs into one about criminality and war.

And it began a massive program in the United States that has spread throughout the region.

The results are in 40 years out, I would argue. We have spent about $1 trillion. Now, if you look at any metric, I would argue that would be reasonable to apply.

The metric suggests the drug war has failed. It has done nothing to dampen demand. It has perhaps in many ways increased potency and certainly increased criminality.

It began this process by introducing in Miami and then started moving to the sources because the sources also started fleeing offshore. Then we went into Central America.

You all remember that before we had the heroic wars of liberation in Afghanistan and Iraq, we had the heroic war of liberation in Panama. And so it then shifted to Colombia.

Mexico is only the last in a long line of these drug wars. And so you see the familiar whack-a-mole problem of the drug trade, which is that you push something down and something else pops up.

You push it out of the Caribbean. It goes into Panama. You push it out of Panama. It goes into Colombia. You push it out of Colombia. It goes to Mexico.

And so in that sense, you have to ask yourself, are we not in some way responsible for it? Well, here's the simple reality.

We are the largest consumer of drugs in the world. We have the most demand in the world. And we also have the largest supply of weaponry in the world.

2000 guns cross the American border every day to go into Mexico. Let us not one more time shirk our responsibility and accept that the United States, as the leading consumer of drugs and the leading supplier of weapons, has got to be partly or insubstantially to blame for this.

Mexico is the latest battle.

Your time is up. Thank you.

...