>I don't think this has anything to do with NAFTA, just the state of
>the Colombian cartels, the proximity of Mexico to the main cocaine market,
>and the level of corruption in Mexico.
NAFTA wasn't the main factor, but it helped:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ryan-grim/nafta-and-the-drug-cartel_b_223705.html
During the first year of his administration, President Bill Clinton made free trade a top priority, pushing for the passage of the controversial North American Free Trade Agreement. It wasn't an easy task. Having helped Democrats take the White House for the first time in twelve years, organized labor was in no mood to see manufacturing jobs shipped to Mexico.
The debate was difficult enough without having to talk about the sprawling Mexican drug trade and its attendant corruption. And how the agreement would also end up benefiting the cartels. So he ordered his people not to talk about it.
"We were prohibited from discussing the effects of NAFTA as it related to narcotics trafficking, yes." Phil Jordan, who had been one of the Drug Enforcement Administration's leading authorities on Mexican drug organizations, told ABC News reporter Brian Ross four years after the deal had gone through. "For the godfathers of the drug trade in Colombia and Mexico, this was a deal made in narco heaven."
The agreement squeaked through Congress in late 1993 and went into effect January 1, 1994, the same day that the Zapatistas rose up in southeast Mexico. With its passage, more than two million trucks began flowing northward across the border annually. Only a small fraction of them were inspected for cocaine, heroin, or meth.
The opening of the border came at an opportune time for Mexican drug runners, who had recently expanded their control of the cocaine trade and made major investments in large-scale meth production. Both were unintended consequences of U.S. policies in the seventies and eighties aimed at crushing meth and cocaine with a militarized, enforcement-heavy approach.
Now NAFTA had presented Mexican cartels with one more unintended opportunity springing from U.S. policy. In a 1999 report, the White House estimated that commercial vehicles brought roughly 100 tons of cocaine into the country across the Mexican border in 1993. With NAFTA in effect, 1994 saw the biggest jump in commercial-vehicle smuggling on record--a 25 percent increase. The number of meth-related emergency-room visits in the United States doubled between 1991 and 1994. In San Diego, America's meth capital, meth seizures climbed from 1,409 pounds in 1991 to 13,366 in 1994.
[...]
The author adds:
[Note: With occasional exceptions, no single policy action is the sole cause of any drug trend. This excerpt on NAFTA only highlights one cause of the rise of meth use in the '90s...]