This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, January 30, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The US-led War on Drugs has cost Mexico dearly,

and there's no end in sight without a change in U.S. policy.

Jorge Castagneta, Mexico's former Foreign Affairs Minister, knows better than most.

He spoke at the Cato Institute's Drug Policy Conference held in November.

What are the costs?

So far we have somewhere around 45,000 deaths, drug war-related deaths since President Calderon took office.

By the time he leaves office, if current trends continue without any increase but without any

decrease it'll be around 55,000 deaths by the time he leaves to give you an idea

for those of you who are very young this is about the same number of

Americans who died in Vietnam in a country of course one-third the population

just so you have roughly an idea. Secondly we will have a human

right situation in Mexico where the number of incidents of torture, extrajudicial executions, and

disappeared forced disappearances will have increased exponentially as

documented by Mexican and international watchdog groups.

And as increasingly acknowledged by the government itself as something which they're trying to fix, which they're working on, which they want to punish,

which they want to limit, but they are increasingly not even denying that this is taking place.

The way this Human Rights Watch report was received by President Calderon and his

cabinet last week shows that the discussion is much more about what to do than whether it's

true or not. This in a country which had had huge human rights problems

over the previous 30, 40, 50 years,

...