Mexican Businesses ran full page newspaper ads pleading with Mexico President Felipe Calderón to stop the drug violence that has now hit their business capital, Monterrey. That's desperate.

A surge of drug violence in Mexico's business capital and richest city has prompted an outcry from business leaders who on Wednesday took out full-page ads asking President Felipe Calderón to send in more soldiers to stem the violence.

The growing violence in Monterrey, long one of Mexico's most modern and safe cities, is a sign that the country's war against drug gangs is spreading ever further from poorer battlegrounds along the border and into the country's wealthiest enclaves.

Residents opened their newspapers Wednesday morning to find the ads taken out by Mexican business leaders, begging the government to send more military into the city. "Enough already," said the notice that ran in national and local papers, criticizing what it said was a slow response of police against "criminal bands that in every act look to establish a new boundary of terror."

Nearly 23,000 people have died in Mexico as a result of drug violence since 2006. Mexico is as dangerous as Iraq or Afghanistan.

The Wall Street Journal has interactive charts showing the violence and mayhem, along with the rise in power of the Mexican drug cartels, south of the border.

Human trafficking with later kidnap and extortion is big bucks, according to this 2008 Frontline documentary by famed journalist Lowell Bergman:

There is a growing movement, Just Say Now, to legalize marijuana in the United States. The reasons are to help secure the border, stop the drug violence, curtail illegal immigrants acting as drug mules as well as further establishment of Mexican drug cartels in the U.S., stop the absurd amount of money the United States spends fighting this losing battle, control it, tax it and turn it into a very lucrative cash crop.