[An error in this article as originally published has been corrected. While the ATF said in February that 90 percent of guns at Mexican crime scenes are from the U.S., it has since clarified that the statistic is only 90 percent of traced firearms. Only 17 percent of the total guns found at Mexican crime scenes are from America.]

Amid gloomy economic news, America’s financial stimulus efforts are succeeding wildly in a couple of areas. One is the funding of violent mafias that are taking over Mexico one town at a time. Another is the subsidy of a criminal underworld in over 200 U.S. cities.

The stimulus money isn’t coming from Washington, but from the pockets of drug users all over the country. About 20 million Americans—8 percent of the population—use illegal drugs, the government estimates. The dollars they pay to maintain their self-destructive habits—what the United Nations believes is $142 billion a year—are funding a world of evil.

Drug users say, My decisions are my business—I’m not hurting anyone else.

It’s a lie. Their decisions are facilitating a massive arms trade, paying for kidnappings and murders, enabling the traffic of human beings, and threatening the Mexican government. Now these evils are spilling back over into the States. Americans are getting kidnapped and killed in violence paid for by these self-indulgent American drug users.

Tragic irony. Our own crimes are coming back to bite us.

Mexican cartels are entrenched in at least 230 American cities, the National Drug Intelligence Center says. For years they have subcontracted the distribution of drugs to local U.S. street gangs. But as the cartels have grown in power thanks to the enormous and increasing cash flow generated by their booming business, they have assumed greater control of the process. By cutting out the middlemen, they now rake in higher profits, which enable them to expand their filthy business even more.

They’re not only infiltrating border cities: They are digging in as far north as Wisconsin and Alaska. And they’re bringing their criminal culture with them.

Phoenix now has the second-highest kidnapping rate of any city in the world—after Mexico City. Last year it averaged one abduction per day, and experts estimate only half are reported. Police there are becoming personally acquainted with the cartels’ signature ruthlessness: smashing the fingers of victims, pistol whipping, arbitrary killing to instill fear. “The tactics are moving north,” says Phoenix Assistant Police Chief Andy Anderson. Last month officials found a body of a man who had been tortured, shot, completely enveloped in duct tape and dumped. Gangs sometimes dress as Phoenix police or an American swat team as they raid homes. This is 185 miles from the Mexican border.

Atlanta, 1,500 miles from the border, has become the cartels’ top drug distribution center for the eastern U.S., according to a USA Today report last week. At the same time, this city is seeing a spike in assaults, abductions and executions. “The violence follows the drugs,” says fbi agent David Cuthbertson.

In Birmingham, Alabama, the bodies of five Mexican men—bound, gagged and electrocuted in what officials think was a drug-related hit—were found. Greenville, Tennessee, has indicted dozens of cartel-tied drug dealers. North Carolina has cartel cells that reach south of the border. Authorities in San Diego and Houston are convinced some murders there were assassinations ordered by drug traffickers from Mexico.

These are the types of projects the cash-rich cartels like to spend their money on. Another favorite project: incredibly sophisticated smuggling operations. The gangsters are building cross-border tunnels nine stories underground. They are purchasing semi-submersible vessels that can evade radar and travel at 20 knots. A recent year-long multi-agency investigation in Arizona exposed one organization bringing a billion dollars’ worth of marijuana into the U.S. via heavy duty camouflaged trucks; drivers wore night vision goggles so they could drive in the dark through the desert without headlights; scouts lived in the mountains for weeks on end radioing directives and warnings to drivers.

The cartels also use these routes to smuggle people. They sell their services to various groups for exorbitant fees, who turn around and extort money from the illegals traveling into the States. At hundreds of drop houses in American cities, immigrants are mistreated, tortured, raped—so criminals can extract ransoms from their families. “This is modern-day slavery of terrible proportions,” says Arizona state Sen. Jonathan Paton. Slavery made possible, again, by dollars from drug users.

Last week I talked about how one of America’s biggest foreign-policy challenges—a near-nuclear-armed Iran—is largely a problem of its own making. The same is painfully true of the spread into American cities of drug-related crime. Mexico’s narcothugs would all be out of business if they didn’t live next door to the world’s most voracious drug-consuming market.

This is a “made in America” problem.

Thus, as we witness the curses of increased and increasingly ruthless violence, of rising gangsterism, of Mexico’s nightmarish drug culture seeping into America’s cities, we should remind ourselves: Our own people are funding it.

That is the real problem. Unless that changes, don’t expect any efforts to correct it to find lasting success.

This isn’t a popular message today, but it’s the truth: These curses are a result of our own sins. And sin always exacts a painful penalty. As the Prophet Isaiah wrote, “Woe to the wicked! It shall be ill with him, for what his hands have done shall be done to him” (Isaiah 3:11, Revised Standard Version). Proverbs 13:21 states the truth even more bluntly: “Evil pursueth sinners.”