No, this is not a tale from the 1800s, although you might find some themes and players in common with the excellent account of Henry Lafayette Dodge’s service. These three stories all broke since early October. First we learned of an Arizona native, from an old family, engaged in massive immigration and adoption fraud. Then we learned of a mass grave near a Mexican coastal town, long regarded by middle class Arizonans as their beach home community, nicknamed “Rocky Point.” Finally, while mulling over these two stories, Arizona and a neighboring Mexican state became national news with the shocking slaughter of nine women and children on a Mexican highway, almost certainly at the hands of an identifiable cartel. All of these stories are tied to the enormous wealth of the American nation, enabling appetites unrestrained by moral sentiments.
Massive Fraud Centered in Arizona’s Valley of the Sun:
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Megan McArdle has an 
Three reactions:
Public policy, like life, is always a matter of trade-offs. The difficulty often arises not so much in determining what is good and what is bad, but in comparing goods’ value to each other, especially when they come into conflict. Further complicating matters, this weighing of risk varies for any given individual depending on his situation: under some circumstances, risks that would be otherwise unthinkable may well be prudent and wise. And the only thing more difficult than anticipating changed circumstances is accurately forecasting people’s reaction to them.
I asked this question on Fred’s post about the problems his family’s had filling his mom’s prescriptions for painkillers — medication she needs to 
Yesterday, Fred Cole 
My father was a cocaine addict who died of an overdose. He began using when I was about eight, and died when I was 24. He tried to quit a couple of times — twice he went into treatment centers — but he was not successful.
In his post “