Not op. But that they lured addicted people of other substances and blackmailed them into creating their cartels like they all do. Building loyal "family members to ensure proper chains of command and heavily militarizing to deal with non complicit individuals and police.
Well stated. When I said "you cannot have such a supply chain without demand", I had in mind, the notion that there are society-wide issues in play which are ignored in favor of funding a massive "war on drugs". Maybe misplaced societal priorities? I cannot say; that's way above my pay grade, but it's clear to me that, in the broad vistas of human behaviors, we (the big we) do not seem to have a clear picture of what's really going on.
I think we are all tiptoeing around the issue to be honest. What is the actual problem here and what can be a possible solution?. The problem is obviously that these cartels from MEXICO are taking away high paying jobs away from AMERICAN drug dealers. One of the possible solutions is to intervene so that those jobs come back to America.
Not op but legalizing drugs to purify the supply chain, collect taxes, and give people a safe place to do the things they would otherwise do anyways seems like efficient allocation of resources with the benefit of starving the cartels.
I don't think legalizing fentanyl is a good idea at all. Look at how many people were killed by easy access to Oxycodone.
It's said that one use of heroin will turn someone into an addict, and something like 2% of opioid addicts die per year. Legalizing drugs may make things safer per person, but it will also increase the number of users. Legalizing fentanyl would just flood the streets with something even more potent than heroin and get millions more addicted.
There are steps that can be taken to provide addicts with legal access to their fix in a way that removes cartels from the supply chain and does not equate to "legalizing fentanyl".
Methadone-type programs, but for other substances.
Ie: go to a doctor or similar health worker, get a prescription for the thing you’re dependent on, pick up that prescription, do your thing and go on with life.
Or just you know, legalize fentanyl, because drug laws don't fucking work and have caused vastly more harm than the drugs they "stop"... People's bodies should be their own to use as they please so long as they don't harm others with violence. A simple notion that idiotic puritans just haven't been able to get through their heads for centuries by now and to absolutely no good effect.
When will we learn that not legalizing things is not the same as preventing them from occurring? Usage happens today, but with impurities and a supply chain that causes its own death beyond the end users.
If there were a legal fentanyl clinic down the street from you, would you use it just because it was legal? Doubtful. But someone intent on using it would get it anyways so why not get a pure form in a safe place while starving the cartels of capital?
That’s simply not true because, generally, as cost goes down, demand goes up. It’s like expecting tobacco usage to be the same whether it’s easy or hard to get - if it’s illegal, fewer casually interested people will try it.
You can say no rational person would willingly go start a drug addiction, but people aren't always rational. People already jump through hoops to do drugs. Why do you think nobody extra would try them if was easier? People said the same thing about marijuana and inanely that legalizing it would help fewer people be addicted to smoking. Unsurprisingly though, legalization increased usage by 20%: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/962353
Look at the history of the opioid crisis. It really started becoming a crisis when oxycodone became easy to get a prescription for. Pill mill doctors would give out hundreds of prescriptions a night to be spread through the streets, causing millions more to be addicted. If legalizing opiates helped, Purdue Pharma should have been one of the greatest benefits to public health, no?
To be fair, I personally could not arrive at another interpretation of the GP's unspoken meaning other than the tactics pursued by some governments of disappearing drug users via prison or killing. I'm sure I'm just blanking, though.
Dang, the guy said "You cannot have dominant players in a supply chin if there is no demand". What would you take that to mean? I honestly think he's talking about removing the demand (users). I asked him for clarification, but it sounds pretty macabre to me.
Killing people is really the only way you can imagine of reducing demand? I find that hard to believe.
Drug addiction is a complex phenomenon. Why do people start, why do they get addicted, why do they choose one drug over another, why do they choose to quit, how hard is it to quit, are there resources that can help them?
Obviously there are dozens of possible interventions, short of murder.
The cartels are also extorting avocado farmers for a cut of their profits. It turns out that, if you have a lot of bad people in power, they find ways to do bad things for personal enrichment.
Why? You are punishing the avocado growers more than the cartels.
Corruption is rife. Every single transaction you make in an economy contains a percentage of evil (example: surely you disagree with some of what your government does): how did you decide that avocados are beyond your limit and carrots are not?
With the price of avocados pushing higher and higher, I think there is too much money in avocado the avocado trade. Farming is basically limited to specific areas. Lowering demand (how ever small) is making a measurable change that I fell like I am contributing to. Voting with my dollars is the only true ways to make a change. As much as this might "hurt" the farmers, it is also hurting the cartel.
isn't MX the country where four dozen activist college students were murdered, many years later a senior, acting Federal attorney was arrested for the covering up the investigation? (edit)
It was 43 and a reporter that recently released updated information about that attorney and a local mayor who was involved was killed hours after publication just last month.
It's also the place where bloggers are routinely killed for blogging about crime. Also, any new law enforcement agent announcing they're going to do something about crime is murdered within 24hrs or so.
And a lot of that violence spills over the border into the US. Bloody cartel murders, extortion, and such are common in the southwest US and beyond. The Mexican government and politicians are all somewhere in between being controlled by the cartels and too scared to do anything about them. That is casus belli, legal grounds for war, by any reasonable understanding of international law.
If the US actually started using its military to hit these guys, what would stop them from sending a thousand guys into a large chemical or nuclear plant and creating a disaster that wiped out a city, or more? I find this sort of jingo rhetoric disturbing because the US has never faced an enemy with thousands of troops inside the US and the funding of a nation state. I can imagine an idiot like Trump actually starting something like this up.
You think that if a thousand cartel guys showed up at a nuke plant with the intention of melting it down that armor and airstrikes would help matters? I think that would just help them actually.
I absolutely do think they could. They operate vast smuggling networks in the US right now with near impunity, as one proof of this capability. Also, US intelligence is pretty bad when it counts. It didn't catch 9-11 or the fall of Afghanistan or the Soviet Union. Why would it detect a raid on a nuke plant?
...Yes. If you kill the people attacking the sensitive site, they will be unable to attack the sensitive site on account of being dead.
A thousand man force is a battalion. The cartels have no real armor and no air support. No heavy weapons. No training.
The US Army fields 31 brigades. A brigade is 5 battalions.
For every cartel member in your theoretical force, there are ~149 trained, armed, active duty service members in deployable condition for combat roles.
That doesn't include artillery, sustainment, the US Airforce or the US Navy. I am also not including guard teams which are another 27 brigades.
Your theoretical cartel force would also have to go through the Texas State Guard (1,700 people) and US Border Patrol.
The Mexican cartels are notably wary of messing with U.S police agents and police/military/border security agencies. There are isolated cases of very foolish sicarios or smaller, more irresponsible organized crime cells playing at threats against U.S border agents or at U.S agents inside Mexico but it's rare and often discouraged brutally by the larger cartels. The simple reason why is they know that with the U.S government, the subversion they regularly practice with pathetically corrupt Mexican authorities works much, much less and goes completely out the window if a U.S police agent dies by their hands. The U.S government strongly underscored this with the cartels by spending decades and God knows how much money diligently pursuing every last person they could find who had any connection to the Kike Camarena murder. The lesson hasn't been forgotten by the bigger cartel bosses, even today.
It's not "jingo rhetoric." Many of the government leaders south of the border are literally in cahoots with the cartels to commit thousands of murders a year, either directly or through peddling fentanyl, in the US. The rest of them have decided to go along with it out of fear. That is an act of war. The US should respond wisely and carefully, but people should remember these are literally ongoing acts of war committed against us. And what you propose the cartels would respond with is unlikely to work and would only elicit the directed ire of the US at the particular groups that ordered it, so would not be a rational move.
We are spending billions of dollars and killing many Russian soldiers and civilians to fight Putin, but Mexico is responsible for more American deaths and mayhem than Putin ever dream of.
And the practicalities of a war would necessitate an effort to stop that, to prevent the spread of enemy combatants behind the front line. Even if you search everybody passing through the border for weapons.. ...it's America. They can get weapons here.
The inevitable result is a massive human rights disaster, that makes the present status quo look like paradise.
It's would actually be really easy to completely close the border if there was the political will for it. The US spends way more money on frivolous things every year than it would take to fully militarily fortify the entire border.
> If the US actually started using its military to hit these guys, what would stop them from sending a thousand guys into a large chemical or nuclear plant and creating a disaster that wiped out a city, or more?
I mean, yes, they could, but would they? What would be the realistic result of such an action? Would the US then stop and go “Well, I guess we’ll have to stop antagonizing the cartels.”. I would guess that such a thing would instead be a Pearl Harbor moment, and I think the cartels know this, too. The cartels don’t want to act out your personal nightmare scenario; they want to do things to make the US stop bothering the cartels. Instead of mindlessly scare-mongering, figure out what that action would be, and ask yourself if a war with the cartels is worth it. It might or might not be, but be realistic about it.
> I would guess that such a thing would instead be a Pearl Harbor moment, and I think the cartels know this, too.
What else might that war teach us?
There are 10 million Mexican-Americans by birth in America, and 37 million by ancestry. If America went to war with Mexico, I fear there would be efforts to intern Mexican-Americans as Japanese-Americans once were.
Such a war is a horrible idea for everybody. It would create conditions in Mexico and America that are far worse than the present status quo.
Interning 47M people out of 333M, especially when those 47M represent a large portion of younger, working age people, does not seem like it would go well.
No. I am describing what would happen: the American government wrongfully persecuting Mexican-Americans, as it once wrongfully persecuted Japanese-Americans.
This is not a description of what I think should happen, which is this: American and Mexico should not go to war, because it would inevitably lead to a human rights disaster.
Military actions have purposes, which do not include acting out your nightmare scenarios and being as horrible as possible. There’s a reason regular armies don’t do that kind of thing; it does not aid their purpose. And I don’t see how such an action could ever aid the cartels.
War is not a game where each side gradually loses their “restraint”. Instead, each side carefully considers each possible action and its consequences, and then does whatever action seems to lead to the best end result.
Hold on amigo, have you seen how cartels operate? They actually do just do as horrible of a thing as possible, just because the top people want to be monsters and show their enemies they can slaughter them. They hang their gutted enemies off bridges, or decimate a whole neighborhood, or you name it. I think you assume they would play by your rules in a war. They might just decide to erase Houston so they can watch those people die in a gas cloud.
> They actually do just do as horrible of a thing as possible
Yes, the do that when their enemies are individual people, since that tactic works on those. I doubt the same tactics would work on armies or nation states.
> so they can watch those people die in a gas cloud.
You still seem to think that the cartels do things merely for their own cruel amusement. I, on the other hand, believe that cruel amusement is luxury which they allow themselves only as long as it works.
> You still seem to think that the cartels do things merely for their own cruel amusement. I, on the other hand, believe that cruel amusement is luxury which they allow themselves only as long as it works.
I agree with you on this. I also think it would absolutely work, just like it works in Mexico. I also think it would be the first choice of people accustomed to it working.
> I also think it would absolutely work, just like it works in Mexico.
I feel that the U.S. Army would not respond favorably to terrorism.
> I also think it would be the first choice of people accustomed to it working.
Well, that may be true; they might be stupid enough to do that. I couldn’t really say; I’m just a random person on the internet without any special knowledge of their psychology.
> That is casus belli, legal grounds for war, by any reasonable understanding of international law.
Perhaps. But anything the US Military could do about it would only make the problem even worse. It being a legal reason for war is irrelevant because it isn't a rational reason for war.
I don't know. Commando raids on cartel leadership sound good to me. Assassin drones too. Just start taking these people out. Put the fear of God in them.
> Just start taking these people out. Put the fear of God in them.
Cartels have been doing this to cartels the entire time. They inflict violence on each other far more brutal than the American military would dare. They've flayed family members of their rivals alive to "put the fear of God in them". More of the same isn't going to solve anything.
It's not more of the same. It's the cartels vs. the NSA's intelligence gathering apparatus, the US military's precision assassin drones, etc. Cartels don't have those at their disposal.
Common? That's some outrageous hyperbole.
Claims about casus belli against Mexico, America's largest trading partner? Now you've indicted your own intellectual capabilities.
And a lot of that violence spills over the border into the US. Bloody cartel murders, extortion, and such are common in the southwest US and beyond.
One might imagine that but one would do well to actually investigate whether it's true.
I visited El Paso, Texas a few years ago. It has one of the lower murder rates for cities of it's size in the US. It's directly across the border from Cuida Juerez, a city with one of the highest murder rates in the Western Hemisphere.
It's actually quite remarkable how contained the horrible violence in Mexico is.
Are you sure the United states cares enough about drugs? The Sacklers are still free and wealthy. The war on drug keeps the prison industry and slave supply rolling.
as someone who vacations regularly throughout mexico (tijuana, rosarito, mexico city, chihuahua and baja amongst the destinations) i find these sorts of comments silly at best.
> 227,413 civilians had been killed between March 2011 and June 2022.
That's about 20k a year (assuming an even distribution across the entire conflict, which is probably a bad assumption.)
From your first link, there were 33k organized crime related murders in Mexico in 2021.
Probably both of these should be adjusted per capita (Mexico has ~6x the population of Syria), but in absolute numbers they seem to be in the same ballpark.
The first line in your link says: It is often not clear what deaths are part of the Mexican drug war versus general criminal homicides, and different sources give different estimates. Which should be a clue that the actual casualties are very plausibly higher than those officially attributed to organized crime.
The total Mexican murder rate listed Wikipedia is 36,579/year. Given Mexico once had a fairly low murder rate, attributing much of this to organized crime seems plausible. Not 60k/year but the violence has gone up and down. Moreover, the "rate of disappearance" is substantial and I believe disappearances aren't counted as official murders of any sort.
And my point would be that all this is unknown. Given the cartels have corrupted and subverted local authorities and that their murders are kept as secret as they can manage, glib certainty about the extent of cartel murders seems unwarranted.
Gave you an upvote as your sources mostly confirm that Mexico is the worst war zone in the world. I may have the figures off, but, in 2016, at the height of the Syrian war, Mexico was second place to Syria[0]. Problem is, Mexico aren't counting missing people, and there A TON of missing persons, hundreds of thousands of them.
As someone who lives in Mexico since over a decade ago, and well outside the tourist bubbles, I'd say that your personal view of the situation is ridiculously rose-tinted. The violence isn't plainly visible as it's been in Syria, for example, but it's very real and vastly destructive. Not to mention the amount of homicide that goes unreported and the disappearances that likewise don't get reported. Furthermore, your own sources actually do more to back up the argument you're rejecting than to prove your own claim.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 145 ms ] threadNow they’re stuck growing KALE for LllllliBERALS just to afford steak for their children’s breakfast.
> The cartels “don’t just fill a void, they create a market,” Mr. Dhillon said.
It's said that one use of heroin will turn someone into an addict, and something like 2% of opioid addicts die per year. Legalizing drugs may make things safer per person, but it will also increase the number of users. Legalizing fentanyl would just flood the streets with something even more potent than heroin and get millions more addicted.
Ie: go to a doctor or similar health worker, get a prescription for the thing you’re dependent on, pick up that prescription, do your thing and go on with life.
Is this “giving drugs to drug addicts”? Yes.
If there were a legal fentanyl clinic down the street from you, would you use it just because it was legal? Doubtful. But someone intent on using it would get it anyways so why not get a pure form in a safe place while starving the cartels of capital?
Look at the history of the opioid crisis. It really started becoming a crisis when oxycodone became easy to get a prescription for. Pill mill doctors would give out hundreds of prescriptions a night to be spread through the streets, causing millions more to be addicted. If legalizing opiates helped, Purdue Pharma should have been one of the greatest benefits to public health, no?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Drug addiction is a complex phenomenon. Why do people start, why do they get addicted, why do they choose one drug over another, why do they choose to quit, how hard is it to quit, are there resources that can help them?
Obviously there are dozens of possible interventions, short of murder.
Corruption is rife. Every single transaction you make in an economy contains a percentage of evil (example: surely you disagree with some of what your government does): how did you decide that avocados are beyond your limit and carrots are not?
With the price of avocados pushing higher and higher, I think there is too much money in avocado the avocado trade. Farming is basically limited to specific areas. Lowering demand (how ever small) is making a measurable change that I fell like I am contributing to. Voting with my dollars is the only true ways to make a change. As much as this might "hurt" the farmers, it is also hurting the cartel.
https://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/military/mexic...
"Editor's note: Because of concerns over their ongoing safety in Mexico, the name of the reporter who wrote this story is not listed." https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/11/29/mexica...
Occasionally the cartel and Texas guard do exchange fire.
This isn’t something the government hopes doesn’t happen: it’s something they actively work hard at everyday to ensure doesn’t happen.
A thousand man force is a battalion. The cartels have no real armor and no air support. No heavy weapons. No training.
The US Army fields 31 brigades. A brigade is 5 battalions.
For every cartel member in your theoretical force, there are ~149 trained, armed, active duty service members in deployable condition for combat roles.
That doesn't include artillery, sustainment, the US Airforce or the US Navy. I am also not including guard teams which are another 27 brigades.
Your theoretical cartel force would also have to go through the Texas State Guard (1,700 people) and US Border Patrol.
We are spending billions of dollars and killing many Russian soldiers and civilians to fight Putin, but Mexico is responsible for more American deaths and mayhem than Putin ever dream of.
The inevitable result is a massive human rights disaster, that makes the present status quo look like paradise.
I mean, yes, they could, but would they? What would be the realistic result of such an action? Would the US then stop and go “Well, I guess we’ll have to stop antagonizing the cartels.”. I would guess that such a thing would instead be a Pearl Harbor moment, and I think the cartels know this, too. The cartels don’t want to act out your personal nightmare scenario; they want to do things to make the US stop bothering the cartels. Instead of mindlessly scare-mongering, figure out what that action would be, and ask yourself if a war with the cartels is worth it. It might or might not be, but be realistic about it.
What else might that war teach us?
There are 10 million Mexican-Americans by birth in America, and 37 million by ancestry. If America went to war with Mexico, I fear there would be efforts to intern Mexican-Americans as Japanese-Americans once were.
Such a war is a horrible idea for everybody. It would create conditions in Mexico and America that are far worse than the present status quo.
This is not a description of what I think should happen, which is this: American and Mexico should not go to war, because it would inevitably lead to a human rights disaster.
War is not a game where each side gradually loses their “restraint”. Instead, each side carefully considers each possible action and its consequences, and then does whatever action seems to lead to the best end result.
Yes, the do that when their enemies are individual people, since that tactic works on those. I doubt the same tactics would work on armies or nation states.
> so they can watch those people die in a gas cloud.
You still seem to think that the cartels do things merely for their own cruel amusement. I, on the other hand, believe that cruel amusement is luxury which they allow themselves only as long as it works.
I agree with you on this. I also think it would absolutely work, just like it works in Mexico. I also think it would be the first choice of people accustomed to it working.
I feel that the U.S. Army would not respond favorably to terrorism.
> I also think it would be the first choice of people accustomed to it working.
Well, that may be true; they might be stupid enough to do that. I couldn’t really say; I’m just a random person on the internet without any special knowledge of their psychology.
Perhaps. But anything the US Military could do about it would only make the problem even worse. It being a legal reason for war is irrelevant because it isn't a rational reason for war.
Cartels have been doing this to cartels the entire time. They inflict violence on each other far more brutal than the American military would dare. They've flayed family members of their rivals alive to "put the fear of God in them". More of the same isn't going to solve anything.
One might imagine that but one would do well to actually investigate whether it's true.
I visited El Paso, Texas a few years ago. It has one of the lower murder rates for cities of it's size in the US. It's directly across the border from Cuida Juerez, a city with one of the highest murder rates in the Western Hemisphere.
It's actually quite remarkable how contained the horrible violence in Mexico is.
12th lowest here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_drug_traffi...
there is no "mexican civil war" there was the Cristero, the reform, and the revolutionary war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Civil_War
while organized criminal homicides are rising, it is nowhere near sixty-thousand. it has never been close.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_drug_war#Casualties
the civilian casualties of the Syrian civil war numbered nearly 230,000 which is nearly quadruple your assessment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Syrian_civil...
> 227,413 civilians had been killed between March 2011 and June 2022.
That's about 20k a year (assuming an even distribution across the entire conflict, which is probably a bad assumption.)
From your first link, there were 33k organized crime related murders in Mexico in 2021.
Probably both of these should be adjusted per capita (Mexico has ~6x the population of Syria), but in absolute numbers they seem to be in the same ballpark.
The total Mexican murder rate listed Wikipedia is 36,579/year. Given Mexico once had a fairly low murder rate, attributing much of this to organized crime seems plausible. Not 60k/year but the violence has gone up and down. Moreover, the "rate of disappearance" is substantial and I believe disappearances aren't counted as official murders of any sort.
And my point would be that all this is unknown. Given the cartels have corrupted and subverted local authorities and that their murders are kept as secret as they can manage, glib certainty about the extent of cartel murders seems unwarranted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/11/mexico-deadly-...
[0]https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/18/americas/mexican-defense-secr...