An ultimately futile thing to do until we change our own drug policies which fuel the economic incentives for such cartels to exist. Unless we change out laws and end prohibition new cartels will continue to spring up out of economic necessity.
It's a fantasy to think that the cartels and their violence would stop existing.
Even if governments legalized all drugs by eliminating all anti-drug laws and agencies, the cartels and the people who run them would quickly find another path to profitability. They would find or create another industry in which applying their violence gives them a competitive advantage.
Let them do that then. It's not as if it would be easy.
Prohibition showed how effective legalization can be (and I don't mean just marijuana). Legalize everything across the board. That means pharma-grade cocaine, heroin being sold without prescription (and taxed) to any adult that wishes to buy them.
Alas, let's not pretend that the 'good guys' (at least the americans) want to solve the drug problem. It results in lucrative profits that can be kept off the books and fed into various "programs", and has also led to the establishment of a massive bureaucracy that will be hard if not impossible to dislodge.
Someone else mentioned the movie Sicario in this thread. It's pretty bad in terms of plot, but one line comes to mind:
One of the characters that plays a CIA agent says: "If only 20% of the population could be pesuaded to stop smoking and snorting that shit..." in order to conveniently shift the blame towards the populace. As if that worked with alcohol, or cigarettes or anything that can short-circuit the pleasure/reward neural pathways.
But I'm digressing here. A bad movie does not a point make. The real CIA knows full well I imagine that legalization is the only real solution to the problem (even if it comes with its own costs) but of course the real CIA also needs endless suitcases full of dollars to fund its operations.
Not all forms of crime are equally lucrative. It's hard to imagine another form of crime that is capable of sustaining even 1/10th of the income of drug smuggling.
That's actually a pretty shitty result given that the target was 100%, and the side effects were extreme: people dying from dodgy moonshine, birth of the Mafia as we know it, etc.
> pharma-grade cocaine, heroin being sold without prescription
what do you honestly think our society would look like if this were the case ? Have you seen what cocaine does to people ? Have you seen how it causes people to lose their impulse control and go crazy ? What about driving ? We have a bad enough problem on our roads right now with alcohol, what do you think the morning commute will be like with people high or nodding off from opiates ?
I'm certainly against our drug "war" just like most people, particularly with its draconian punishments, but be careful what you ask for.
Have you seen what huffing glue does to people? They go completely crazy. Maybe we should ban glue too.
You do realize cocaine and heroin used to be sold at pharmacies in the 1900s? There were a lot of functioning heroin addicts back then who could hold down a job and live a normal life. Nobody talks about that though.
Somehow they didn't trigger the collapse of civilization.
The existing legal frameworks are enough to deal with abuse of those substances, we don't need to ban the substances themselves just because of the potential for abuse.
This is the same idiotic argument that opponents of marijuana legalization present. They assume vast numbers of the population will start fiending on those substances and it's only THE LAW that keeps them in check. This has been proven false time and time again, in Europe and in the US states that legalized, but don't let that stop you making the same fallacious points.
if it bound to the same dopamine receptors it would absolutely be banned, and called a narcotic.
> You do realize cocaine and heroin used to be sold at pharmacies in the 1900s?
what percentage of people drove back then, per mile, per day, and at what speed ? Nodding off in your model-T is quite incomparable to nodding off on the 405 Freeway. Hell, what percentage of people even had access to a store ? Most people lived on farms and went to town once a week. They didn't rely on money as much, they grew their own food and sustained themselves.
This is the same idiotic argument that free-drugs-for-all proponents always present. They assume the same cultural viewpoints from 1900 still apply today. They assume every other variable has been controlled for and still applies, then uses strawmen aguments like "lets ban glue too".
People didn't know how addictive heroin was in 1900. It was just another drug in a pharmacy for people with a cough. The mechanisms for how they worked weren't discovered yet. The same stressors from family and society that drive people to seek chemical escape didn't exist back then. Please retry your argument, sans strawmen, and lets see how you do. Here's how ridiculous your strawman sounds: "You know, cars didn't have seatbelts back in 1900, those people were fine. See, we don't need seatbelts or even airbags today, because people in 1900 didn't have them..." Speaking of 1900, they didn't have the FDA in 1900 either, so by your logic, we should abolish that too and regress to the days when the pharmacy sold literally snake oil and marketed as a cure for all types of cancer. I mean, they didn't have double blind trials back in 1900, so why do we need them today?
Have you seen what sleep deprivation does to people? Have you seen how it causes people to lose their impulse control and go crazy ? What about driving ?
It's not hard at all to find these drugs today, despite them being banned. I doubt a slight increase in DUI (which I don't think would be born out) would outweigh pulling the rug from underneath organized crime in all of the Americas. Alcohol is a hard drug, despite being legal, and causes a lot more violent and destructive behavior than pretty much all illegal drugs.
The vast majority of people don't do heroin because it's bad for you, not because it's illegal.
Could organized crime find other markets? Definitely. But no illegal market compares in size to the drug market, particularly the US drug market. Guns are already legal, kidnapping and extortion are much riskier and less repeatable, the explosives market is small and gets the national security establishment on your case.
"finding" them versus legally using them is a pretty large gap in semantics. There is a huge stigma in many social circles against going to "the ghetto" and "cold copping" for dope. Even if you get yours from a suburban dealer, there are many social consequences to be paid (in some circles) such as divorce, losing friends, etc if they find out you're a "pill popper". There is also a clear danger both from being victimized in a crime and being prosecuted by Johnny Law. Personally I think that's what keeps most people from at least trying opiates.
If you could just stop at CVS and pick up a bottle of oxymorphone for $14.99 like you buy advil, that removes (what I claim to be ) a huge barrier of entry to being an opiate addict.
In my earlier post I mentioned driving/crashing, but I left out the most obvious one, dying. Opiates will straight-up kill you if you overindulge. In that regard, it's nowhere near alcohol in being a "hard drug". Yes you can die from acute alcohol poisoning, but I shouldn't have to explain to you why it's harder to chug a bottle of vodka than it is to consume 2-3 pills too many. What kind of society will we live in when it becomes routine that people start disappearing ? Regardless of whether you are ok with that, constituents will demand action , aka prohibition. Or else you must believe that our soceity is somehow capable of safely consuming oxymorphone, codeine, just like they currently do with advil or tylenol, etc without any increased OD-ing once it becomes legalized (please clarify).
> The vast majority of people don't do heroin because it's bad for you, not because it's illegal.
Then why do so many people smoke ? It says right on the label "these will kill you", yet I see people every day smoking ? I thought people didn't do things that were "bad for them" ?
> Let them do that then. It's not as if it would be easy.
Human trafficking, organ harvesting, sex industry, shady sex industry, mercenaries, terrorism for hire ... in a sense you want them to go drugs. The other of their profitable venues are having quite higher human misery built in.
Think through this. How many other high-margin, high-volume products exist that can be moved through Mexico?
Sure, they'll continue existing, probably get into government. But they'll be nothing at all like they are now. It will be a huge net gain for all, even the gangs themselves.
Impossible to make this kind of money with old-fashioned protection rackets (or gambling or prostitution) these days.
The effort for someone used to drug profits is clearly not worth the reward. Will there be a few who turn to that? Sure. But I claim that the effects on society will be miniscule if felt at all.
I would like to share your optimism, but I don't believe that sufficient evidence exists yet to back it. After all, it's not always true that changing black markets into white markets is a net good for society. There are still black markets for slaves, after all, and more slaves today than in the past, even if the proportions have gone down.
If there were other industries in which the application of violence was a competitive advantage, why are there not currently organizations in those industries.
I know most people here mean marijuana legalization when they say drug legalization, but there is absolutely no way meth, cocaine, or heroine will be legalized within the next 15-20 years, which is fairly long-term from a business perspective, by which I mean that they are not worried about their status as a going concern even if marijuana is legalized in the US. Their violence also is a complement to their ability to hold control of the routes / networks to actually move these products in any significant volume. It ensures they get paid whether they control production or not.
Furthermore, one industry in which violence will prove to be an asset but hasn't yet had an opportunity (like the guy below me claims) is profit recovery from legal dispensaries inside the US. Dispensaries and their owners have huge targets on their backs.
Mariguana is most of the weight and the volume of cartel operations but Mexican intelligence analysts say it produces only a quarter of the revenue.
That leaves the majority of cartel revenue still viable as long as amphetamines are restricted. Opiates are a rising profit center as DEA policy blocks branded opioid distribution equally to addicts and chronic pain sufferers.
--
Parent describes legal marijuana businesses as targets for cartel violence because they do business in cash. Foreign cartels can't compete against local US gangs if that emerges as a racket. Also, it may become possible for mariguana businesses to use banks if cash starts driving crime. States may have to charter or run state banks eventually if federal officials continue to block the federal banks.
In any case there are no black markets as persistently profitable as the cartels' current drug business.
Fair points, but I didn't say it was because of their cash dealings. I was suggesting it more because of how the cartels operate. Also, claims that local gangs would be able to compete against cartel-aligned gangs (which is already making a huge assumption that they aren't one and the same) strongly disagrees with spikes in violence in Chicago, arguably (obviously) the largest hub for Sinaloa volumes, as well as Baltimore.
My suggestion was merely that I would be balls paranoid about security if I was tied to a dispensary in the US, no matter how legal, not because of cash, but because once one person uses that strategy (violence) they all will, such as how cocaine dealing became significantly more violent permanently once there was a wave of violence in the late 70's / early 80's.
How is profit recovery from dispensaries different from any other business with respect to racketeering? As far as I know racketeering is not a major threat to US businesses in general, what makes legal dispensaries different? Are you implying that the feds won't prosecute rackets against dispensaries, and state agencies are inadequate?
One of the problems with people who are in the violent gangster industry is that they are trapped there. The business which enables them to live is illegal, so its difficult to go to the police when they are forced to do things they don't like. If your competitor is providing a substandard product and undercutting your sales and putting you out of business, then there is no recourse but to shoot him, eh? In the legal world, you can go to a regulator and when he is prosecuted, he will be losing sales. Most drug takers I would say aren't really interested in funding violent gangs..
If drugs were legalised, then you might find it unpalatable that the same people were now providing the drugs legally and their past sins seemingly forgiven, but the incentive to commit violence is now a lot less, and things will change.
I don't know the history exactly, but after prohibition I bet the gangsters didn't immediately become peaceful CEOs of successful corporations.. but then after a few intervening years, the alcohol companies are no longer violent, so obviously something has changed.
I would not bet on the cartels and existing drug dealers to continue to control the trade after it was legal. I would bet on big retail corporations like Amazon, and existing big chemical and agricultural corporations like Archer Daniels, et al
Thats not true. There isn't another product on the planet that has the margins or demand of illegal drugs.
I agree that cartels and violence would continue to exist, but they'd do so in a vastly reduced form. Raketeering is orders of magnitude less profitable and more difficult than selling drugs.
If "applying their violence" in another industry is more profitable than drugs, why aren't they doing that anyway? If it's less profitable than drugs, then forcing them to make that change reduces their power and growth.
This is a very simplistic view of the cartels, and a very US-centric view as well. This doesn't really factor in the local / native view of these groups, which see them much more as semi-heroic for standing up to the imperial Americans and corrupt, oppressive home governments. The cartels recruit heavily and are huge organizations - giving those poor, unemployed guys from backwood areas a mission "greater than themselves" really is a timeless strategy that has worked well for thousands of years, especially when that vision involves power (violence) and wealth.
The suggestion that violent Mexican drug cartels enjoy public support is an extraordinary claim that you should support with evidence. Polling suggests otherwise; cartel violence is one of the top concerns of the Mexican public.
The idea that organized crime syndicates that rape and murder men, women, and children might be seen as a symbol of independence from American oppression strikes me as an argument that might make sense in the airless vacuum of an Internet message board, and in no other place.
Thousands showed up to protest the arrest of el Chapo Guzmán last year [0]. The cartels fund schools, parks, businesses and public works in Mexico.
Of course, some communities also organize to fight against cartels with autodefensas. The federal government works to shut them down and leave them vulnerable. That just leaves more communities in the hands of cartels.
Polling is against cartels because most Mexicans live where cartels aren't based.
77% of all Mexicans list cartel violence as the most important problem facing the country.
Crowds of people in Culiacan may consider Guzman a hero, just like crowds of people in Medellin mythologized Pablo Escobar. The Sinaloa cartel kicks back money to the whole state, and Guzman is a hometown hero.
With Guzman at the helm, the Sinaloan cartel was also less violent to civilians than its competitors, particularly the Zetas.
The government of Mexico is among the most corrupt and least trusted in the world, and is itself implicated in the mass slaughter of groups of civilians.
It does not follow that Mexico as a whole, or even the state of Sinaloa as a whole, sees the Sinaloan cartel as a force for good. They are clearly not that.
The comment you responded to cited local support for cartels, not national. Also, the government is rightly considered responsible for cartel violence more than the cartels. Previous governments limited violence by managing cartels without fighting them.
"The government of Mexico is among the most corrupt and least trusted in the world"
That is an extraordinary claim that demands evidence. Mexico is an orderly, prosperous first world democracy with serious gang problems, not some African or Middle Eastern failed state.
Would you like to cite said polls? Any results from Mexico I'd take with a grain of salt, most likely they just polled upper class individuals who obviously will cite cartels as a danger.
That would be refreshing to hear if you didn't know the next conclusion to be drawn would be, "Therefore, we need to double down and increase funding."
I enjoyed the movie cinematography and music, but the plot was simplistic to say the least and the characters completely one-dimensional.
I was extremely surprised however to see a major hollywood movie portray the CIA as top dogs in drug trafficking (even if that connection was obscured by a little whitewashing).
'How DEA Agents Took Down Mexico's Most Vicious Drug Cartel', and how it was replaced with a similar organization within a week. Besides the drug money is keeping a number of western economies afloat.
Try harder seems like it has been done in this area for some time. Can some creativity get into this process? It gets worse the more we invest. The cartels are ever more monstrous.
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadEven if governments legalized all drugs by eliminating all anti-drug laws and agencies, the cartels and the people who run them would quickly find another path to profitability. They would find or create another industry in which applying their violence gives them a competitive advantage.
Alas, let's not pretend that the 'good guys' (at least the americans) want to solve the drug problem. It results in lucrative profits that can be kept off the books and fed into various "programs", and has also led to the establishment of a massive bureaucracy that will be hard if not impossible to dislodge.
Someone else mentioned the movie Sicario in this thread. It's pretty bad in terms of plot, but one line comes to mind: One of the characters that plays a CIA agent says: "If only 20% of the population could be pesuaded to stop smoking and snorting that shit..." in order to conveniently shift the blame towards the populace. As if that worked with alcohol, or cigarettes or anything that can short-circuit the pleasure/reward neural pathways.
But I'm digressing here. A bad movie does not a point make. The real CIA knows full well I imagine that legalization is the only real solution to the problem (even if it comes with its own costs) but of course the real CIA also needs endless suitcases full of dollars to fund its operations.
Do you really mean that? Forget about drugs. (All drugs are already legal in this hypothetical scenario.)
Let your imagination soar. Think of all the other things the cartels could control.
http://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/16/opinion/actually-prohibiti...
These links paint a different picture and make the situation appear less than clearcut:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_Stat...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_Stat...
what do you honestly think our society would look like if this were the case ? Have you seen what cocaine does to people ? Have you seen how it causes people to lose their impulse control and go crazy ? What about driving ? We have a bad enough problem on our roads right now with alcohol, what do you think the morning commute will be like with people high or nodding off from opiates ?
I'm certainly against our drug "war" just like most people, particularly with its draconian punishments, but be careful what you ask for.
You do realize cocaine and heroin used to be sold at pharmacies in the 1900s? There were a lot of functioning heroin addicts back then who could hold down a job and live a normal life. Nobody talks about that though.
Somehow they didn't trigger the collapse of civilization. The existing legal frameworks are enough to deal with abuse of those substances, we don't need to ban the substances themselves just because of the potential for abuse.
This is the same idiotic argument that opponents of marijuana legalization present. They assume vast numbers of the population will start fiending on those substances and it's only THE LAW that keeps them in check. This has been proven false time and time again, in Europe and in the US states that legalized, but don't let that stop you making the same fallacious points.
if it bound to the same dopamine receptors it would absolutely be banned, and called a narcotic.
> You do realize cocaine and heroin used to be sold at pharmacies in the 1900s?
what percentage of people drove back then, per mile, per day, and at what speed ? Nodding off in your model-T is quite incomparable to nodding off on the 405 Freeway. Hell, what percentage of people even had access to a store ? Most people lived on farms and went to town once a week. They didn't rely on money as much, they grew their own food and sustained themselves.
This is the same idiotic argument that free-drugs-for-all proponents always present. They assume the same cultural viewpoints from 1900 still apply today. They assume every other variable has been controlled for and still applies, then uses strawmen aguments like "lets ban glue too".
People didn't know how addictive heroin was in 1900. It was just another drug in a pharmacy for people with a cough. The mechanisms for how they worked weren't discovered yet. The same stressors from family and society that drive people to seek chemical escape didn't exist back then. Please retry your argument, sans strawmen, and lets see how you do. Here's how ridiculous your strawman sounds: "You know, cars didn't have seatbelts back in 1900, those people were fine. See, we don't need seatbelts or even airbags today, because people in 1900 didn't have them..." Speaking of 1900, they didn't have the FDA in 1900 either, so by your logic, we should abolish that too and regress to the days when the pharmacy sold literally snake oil and marketed as a cure for all types of cancer. I mean, they didn't have double blind trials back in 1900, so why do we need them today?
The vast majority of people don't do heroin because it's bad for you, not because it's illegal.
Could organized crime find other markets? Definitely. But no illegal market compares in size to the drug market, particularly the US drug market. Guns are already legal, kidnapping and extortion are much riskier and less repeatable, the explosives market is small and gets the national security establishment on your case.
"finding" them versus legally using them is a pretty large gap in semantics. There is a huge stigma in many social circles against going to "the ghetto" and "cold copping" for dope. Even if you get yours from a suburban dealer, there are many social consequences to be paid (in some circles) such as divorce, losing friends, etc if they find out you're a "pill popper". There is also a clear danger both from being victimized in a crime and being prosecuted by Johnny Law. Personally I think that's what keeps most people from at least trying opiates.
If you could just stop at CVS and pick up a bottle of oxymorphone for $14.99 like you buy advil, that removes (what I claim to be ) a huge barrier of entry to being an opiate addict.
In my earlier post I mentioned driving/crashing, but I left out the most obvious one, dying. Opiates will straight-up kill you if you overindulge. In that regard, it's nowhere near alcohol in being a "hard drug". Yes you can die from acute alcohol poisoning, but I shouldn't have to explain to you why it's harder to chug a bottle of vodka than it is to consume 2-3 pills too many. What kind of society will we live in when it becomes routine that people start disappearing ? Regardless of whether you are ok with that, constituents will demand action , aka prohibition. Or else you must believe that our soceity is somehow capable of safely consuming oxymorphone, codeine, just like they currently do with advil or tylenol, etc without any increased OD-ing once it becomes legalized (please clarify).
> The vast majority of people don't do heroin because it's bad for you, not because it's illegal.
Then why do so many people smoke ? It says right on the label "these will kill you", yet I see people every day smoking ? I thought people didn't do things that were "bad for them" ?
Human trafficking, organ harvesting, sex industry, shady sex industry, mercenaries, terrorism for hire ... in a sense you want them to go drugs. The other of their profitable venues are having quite higher human misery built in.
Sure, they'll continue existing, probably get into government. But they'll be nothing at all like they are now. It will be a huge net gain for all, even the gangs themselves.
The effort for someone used to drug profits is clearly not worth the reward. Will there be a few who turn to that? Sure. But I claim that the effects on society will be miniscule if felt at all.
They could also expand into controlling the building trades, the railroads and highways, the flow of oil, etc.
Furthermore, one industry in which violence will prove to be an asset but hasn't yet had an opportunity (like the guy below me claims) is profit recovery from legal dispensaries inside the US. Dispensaries and their owners have huge targets on their backs.
That leaves the majority of cartel revenue still viable as long as amphetamines are restricted. Opiates are a rising profit center as DEA policy blocks branded opioid distribution equally to addicts and chronic pain sufferers.
--
Parent describes legal marijuana businesses as targets for cartel violence because they do business in cash. Foreign cartels can't compete against local US gangs if that emerges as a racket. Also, it may become possible for mariguana businesses to use banks if cash starts driving crime. States may have to charter or run state banks eventually if federal officials continue to block the federal banks.
In any case there are no black markets as persistently profitable as the cartels' current drug business.
My suggestion was merely that I would be balls paranoid about security if I was tied to a dispensary in the US, no matter how legal, not because of cash, but because once one person uses that strategy (violence) they all will, such as how cocaine dealing became significantly more violent permanently once there was a wave of violence in the late 70's / early 80's.
If drugs were legalised, then you might find it unpalatable that the same people were now providing the drugs legally and their past sins seemingly forgiven, but the incentive to commit violence is now a lot less, and things will change.
I don't know the history exactly, but after prohibition I bet the gangsters didn't immediately become peaceful CEOs of successful corporations.. but then after a few intervening years, the alcohol companies are no longer violent, so obviously something has changed.
I agree that cartels and violence would continue to exist, but they'd do so in a vastly reduced form. Raketeering is orders of magnitude less profitable and more difficult than selling drugs.
The idea that organized crime syndicates that rape and murder men, women, and children might be seen as a symbol of independence from American oppression strikes me as an argument that might make sense in the airless vacuum of an Internet message board, and in no other place.
Of course, some communities also organize to fight against cartels with autodefensas. The federal government works to shut them down and leave them vulnerable. That just leaves more communities in the hands of cartels.
Polling is against cartels because most Mexicans live where cartels aren't based.
[0] http://m.eleconomista.mx/sociedad/2014/03/01/narco-ya-prepar...
Crowds of people in Culiacan may consider Guzman a hero, just like crowds of people in Medellin mythologized Pablo Escobar. The Sinaloa cartel kicks back money to the whole state, and Guzman is a hometown hero.
With Guzman at the helm, the Sinaloan cartel was also less violent to civilians than its competitors, particularly the Zetas.
The government of Mexico is among the most corrupt and least trusted in the world, and is itself implicated in the mass slaughter of groups of civilians.
It does not follow that Mexico as a whole, or even the state of Sinaloa as a whole, sees the Sinaloan cartel as a force for good. They are clearly not that.
"The government of Mexico is among the most corrupt and least trusted in the world"
That is an extraordinary claim that demands evidence. Mexico is an orderly, prosperous first world democracy with serious gang problems, not some African or Middle Eastern failed state.
Sure GP's comment reads a tad hyperbolic. However, Mexico is certainly perceived to be fairly corrupt.
It appears in the bottom half of the 2014 Corruptions Perception Index (CPI), ranked at Rank 103 out of 174 countries.
https://www.transparency.org/cpi2014/results
Would you like to cite said polls? Any results from Mexico I'd take with a grain of salt, most likely they just polled upper class individuals who obviously will cite cartels as a danger.
Team America, World Police.
Pretty good is underselling it. I think it's better than Game of Thrones :)
I was extremely surprised however to see a major hollywood movie portray the CIA as top dogs in drug trafficking (even if that connection was obscured by a little whitewashing).
Maybe things are changing after all.