There is so much emphasis by policy makers to prevent terrorism and how to handle illegal immigration but when it comes to handling drug trafficing there just isn't the same level of focus out there on the issue.

Regan and Clinton tried to clean up the streets by stricter sentencing and more money toward law enforcement. The amount of people thrown in jail was so high that it eliminated a lot of the middleman drug crime as shown by a huge reduction in murder statistics. The attorney general has now rolled back some of that sentencing for non-aggravating cases (eg. ones that don't also include an aggravated assault or manslaughter charge).

The way to manage an endemic threat that is too big for any one government to tackle is support the bigger players against the smaller ones. The US is essentially doing that in the Middle East by dealing with Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar as regional policeman. The only big player they do not have is Iran and they are working to change that. They want those countries to assume mop up costs for terrorism and to by American technology.

The US is supporting the Mexican government but the problem there is they are trying to fight all of the cartels directly with some regional police and army units corrupted. What they should be doing here is trying to play the cartels off one another like the do with the tribes in the Middle East. Back the bigger cartels against the smaller ones in Mexico to cut the violence and corruption of the Mexican government the give the inside information to the US to interdict local supply lines. Deal with the problem more in chunks than trying to bite it off all at once. Its not as simple as giving the Mexican government Apache helicopters and say go get them boys. The approach has to be more strategic on this.