Not True

Genaro García Luna, Mexico's Secretary of Public Security, said that the drug violence in Mexico has gotten so much worse because in the past four years, consumption of drugs has doubled. Much of the increase in violence is surely due to gang fighting spurred by the local market rather than cartel warfare driven by American drug use, but García Luna is factually incorrect: according to the most recent National Survey on Addiction (scroll down to the bottom right section of the paper for the relevant info), which measured the increase in the previous six years, shows that the number of users (as distinct from addicts) went from 4.6 percent to 5.5 percent of the population, which is an increase slightly less than 20 percent, and significantly less than the doubling that García Luna suggested. Of course, he was talking about total consumption, so I suppose it's possible that the 0.9 percent of Mexicans who started using accounted for a 100 percent increase in consumption, but that's highly unlikely. Or maybe he was referring to cocaine, which basically doubled in the past six years.

Given the above, perhaps we should take the rest of his statistics with a grain of salt, but this stat shows how Mexican criminal groups have branched out beyond cocaine smuggling: according to García Luna, in 2002 there were 50 complaints of extortion. Last year, there were 50,000.