Does a nonviolent drug trafficker need 15 years in prison to learn his lesson? The Washington Post Magazine’s cover story this past Sunday says some politicians are beginning to wonder.

This story follows a New York Times article about a drug massacre that left the town of Villa Ahumada, like many others in Mexico today, with a gutted local police force, terrified citizens, and helpless authorities and investigators. In the last 18 months, over 4,000 people have been killed throughout Mexico in similar attacks and gun battles. In many towns, the local police and officials are on the payroll of drug lords.

So in light of this sort of terrorizing violence just over the border, and with illegal immigration a continuing problem in the U.S., how should the U.S. punish drug traffickers?

Currently, drug offenders get a minimum of 10 years for a first time violation of trafficking or possessing 50 grams of crack. Since the passing of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act in 1986, the federal prison population has grown from 38,000 to more than 200,000—over half of which are drug offenders, cites the Washington Post.

These kinds of figures motivate representatives like Texas’s Sheila Jackson Lee to propose legislation that will cut down, perhaps in half, the sentences of thousands of federal inmates convicted of nonviolent crimes. Such legislation is meant to return nonviolent offenders to society so they can be productive citizens.

Michael Short, for example, was not a violent offender, had no previous criminal history and was a “very minor player” in the trafficking ring, according to the Post Magazine article; yet he spent more time in prison than many murderers.

The idea of long sentences acting as a deterrent doesn’t always hold true either. Short thought he was too small a “peon” to warrant any attention from investigators so he ignored warnings of the penalties.

Some believe that governments’ wars on drugs are doing very little to actually stop the trade. In an article posted the end of April, Slate Magazine said that, what it described as a “boom in smuggling and international crime,” is occurring “despite (and in some cases because of) the ‘wars’—as they have been labeled—that governments everywhere are fighting against international traffickers.” Unlike Civil wars and international wars, “smuggling is not bound by time or space, and it is now growing faster than ever.”

At the same time, drug use in one’s youth has become almost normal adolescent behavior. The DailyKos chides mainstream new sources for trying to make a big deal of Barak Obama’s dabbling in drugs while in college, saying his “experience appears to mirror the majority of adolescents who engaged in casual drug use.”