Why arresting cartel bosses will do little to end the drug war.

Mexico’s War on Drugs started back in 2006, when, just a few days after taking office, President Felipe Calderón dispatched army troops to take on the drug cartels in his home state of Michoacán.

Multiple kingpins have been captured since then, including “El Vicentillo,” eldest son of the Sinaloa cartel boss “El Mayo” Zambada, extradited to the United States in 2010; Alfredo Beltrán Leyva, one of the founders of the Beltrán Leyva cartel, extradited in 2014; and his lieutenant “La Barbie,” extradited in 2015. Sinaloa’s other top dog, “El Chapo” Guzmán, was extradited in 2017. His son Ovidio followed him into U.S. custody last year.

Over this period, the Mexican government’s strategy has evolved, from shooting traffickers to “hugging them” (addressing the “root causes” of crime through education, jobs and other programs in the hope that Mexico’s youth will reject the narco life).

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Meanwhile, organized crime has reorganized, reshaped by violence as well as by profound economic forces. All four Beltrán Leyva brothers have been arrested or killed, and their cartel has splintered. The Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación, which the Drug Enforcement Administration highlights as one of the two main threats to the United States alongside Sinaloa, didn’t even exist in 2006. Nor did fentanyl.

What has remained pretty much constant, impervious to all this instability, is America’s robust demand for illicit drugs underpinning a big, lucrative consumer market.

In 2022, 17.4 percent of 19-to-30-year-olds admitted to using a drug other than marijuana in the preceding 12 months, according to the Monitoring the Future survey from the University of Michigan. This is exactly the same share as in 2006. Among 35-to-50-year-olds the share rose to 11.9 percent from 11.7 percent in 2008, the first year the project surveyed this cohort.

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Despite all the firepower directed against the supply side, this demand is being met. In 2021, the wholesale price of cocaine in the United States was 15 percent less than it was in 2006 after accounting for inflation, according to the United Nations. The wholesale heroin price fell by one-third between 2006 and 2018. This is not what one would expect of a commodity that is becoming harder to procure or distribute.

And the incalculable violence inflicted on the Mexican people rages unabated. There were more than 22,000 homicides in Mexico in 2012, up from more than 12,000 when Calderón started his war on drugs in 2006. By 2018, the end of the administration of President........

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