Commentary
This week, as my husband and I were driving home along the backroads of Texas, I received a text from a high school friend. Another person we knew had died. I am 47 years old now, and I went to a very small school with only about 265 students in the entire school and fewer than 40 in my graduating class. Yet I cannot count on both hands the number of classmates who have died, many of them from drug overdoses.
When I moved to Los Angeles, the circle of loss only grew wider. Friends, co-workers, and acquaintances—far too many—have died the same way.
As we drove, my husband asked me, “How many people in your life have died of a drug overdose?”
I tried to count them, to name them, but the list blurred. “Too many,” I told him.
He thought for a moment, then said, “That is so strange. I only know one person who died from drugs. A man who was high, fell asleep, and died of smoke inhalation in a fire. And that just happened recently.”
This contrast startled me. Why had I known dozens of overdose victims while he could name just one?
The next morning, I looked up the statistics. In 2024, the overdose death rate in Mexico was 0.53 per 100,000 people. In the United States, it was 31 per 100,000. That means the U.S. rate is nearly 5,800 percent higher. Slightly higher rates are found in Mexican cities, but in rural areas like the one my husband grew up in, overdoses remain almost nonexistent.
That got me thinking. Does more government actually make us healthier?
In Oaxaca alone, between 400 and 500 municipalities are governed by “usos y costumbres,” or community law. These towns make their own rules about drugs, alcohol, and conduct. They run their own community patrols. They even have their own jails, where sentences are swift and sanctions are social, not bureaucratic.
Of course, such systems are not perfect. When my husband returned to visit his mother last year, he brought Coronas from the larger city to share at a family gathering. But his mother’s town had received money from another alcohol company, which meant Corona was not authorized for sale in the community. Drinking it was fine, but selling it was prohibited. Someone reported that his nearly 70-year-old mother was selling Coronas. She was arrested. The community rose up, demanded her release, and the council corrected course the next day.
When my husband was a child, and still to this day, there is no police force in his town. Order is maintained by men in the community under the guidance of a council of elders. Everyone contributes to public works until they grow too old to serve. Young men who refuse are fined or barred from living there. Those who have land but live abroad, like my husband, contribute financially in place of service.
Revenue is not raised through taxation but through shared enterprises. In the past, the village made lime from limestone. Today it runs a tortilla press and a masa grinder. Families can bring their corn to be ground into masa or pressed into tortillas. These simple ventures sustain the community and keep costs low. My mother-in-law’s monthly electricity bill is still less than the cost of a Coca-Cola.
In my husband’s village, if you are indigenous, you can claim land by clearing it, fencing it, and registering it with the local council. You do not buy the land; you must maintain it and pay for water access. After 10 years, you can sell it. The elders believe the land belongs to the people. When my brother-in-law once visited me in California, he asked, “Is all this land already claimed?” He was shocked when I told him yes.
The village did not even have a road to the outside world until 1991. For generations, life was self-contained, governed not by distant politicians but by neighbors, elders, and shared responsibility. This kind of governance is a remnant of what once was all of our collective systems, reaching back to biblical times. Governments grow big and collapse, but family and community remain the foundation of life.
But my husband worries. He sees methamphetamines creeping into his hometown. He hears stories of old friends becoming addicted, hallucinating, or thrown into violence. He knows people who have been killed over the drug trade, their places quickly filled by others. He tells me, “The people here don’t realize how quickly social order can deteriorate if they don’t maintain it.” The elders are aging, and young people are distracted, unprepared to defend the system that protected them.
It is not only indigenous villages that show this contrast. I recently spoke with a girlfriend who is Mexican but not indigenous. She grew up in a city with more wealth than my husband’s town, went to college, and so did all her friends. She told me she does not know anyone who has ever overdosed. Some of her siblings had gone to rehab, but the family stepped in immediately and carried them through it. The instinct was not to let things spiral out of control, but to surround loved ones and push them toward healing.
For now, the overdose rate in Mexico remains low. But my husband fears that as small villages abandon their sovereign traditions of “usos y costumbres,” the numbers will rise.
So my question is not, “Do we want to be Mexico?” We do not. But is there something to learn from a smaller, sovereign form of government? Have we in the United States built such a massive system that it no longer serves us? We pour billions into subsidies, programs, and treatment, yet overdose deaths only climb higher.
Meanwhile, in places like my husband’s hometown, order has long been maintained by neighbors, elders, and shared responsibility. That model is fraying, but it offers a glimpse of another possibility, a society where community bonds and accountability have more power than distant bureaucracies.
Here in Texas, Narcan, the overdose reversal drug, is available almost everywhere. It is strange to live in a society where we are constantly on alert, expecting that someone around us might overdose, and being told we should carry Narcan just in case. That reality would be almost unthinkable in the town where my husband grew up.
Perhaps the question we need to ask is this: Does small government, known in Mexico as “usos y costumbres,” have a more powerful effect on the health of our youth than the massive reach of big government?
I do not have all the answers. But living at the intersection of American and Mexican culture, I cannot help but see the contrast. In one country, overdoses are so common I cannot keep track of the dead. In the other, my husband can count them on one hand.
That difference should make us pause.
