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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

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.

armitron 11y ago
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.
- HillaryBriss 11y ago
  "Let them do that then" 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.
  - stickfigure 11y ago
    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.
    - venomsnake 11y ago
      How many people with means in the US need organ transplant? From involuntarily donor. Just asking for market research.
      - zouhair 11y ago
        Harveting organs from such donors is as easy as harveting poppy seeds.
- petra 11y ago
  Actually prohibition was quite effective, it reduced alcohol usage by 30-50% , according to an history professor[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/16/opinion/actually-prohibition-was-a-success.html http://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/16/opinion/actually-prohibiti...
  - jpatokal 11y ago
    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.
  - armitron 11y ago
    This is an opinion piece with 0 citations. Point us to something better than useless drivel. These links paint a different picture and make the situation appear less than clearcut: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_States#Rates_of_consumption_during_Prohibition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_Stat... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_States#Organized_crime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_Stat...
    - petra 11y ago
      It isn't drivel, but it may be that more recent historical research paints a different picture.
- digler999 11y ago
  > 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.
  - armitron 11y ago
    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.
    - digler999 11y ago
      > Maybe we should ban glue too. 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?
- venomsnake 11y ago
  > 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.
DanielBMarkham 11y ago
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.
- Natsu 11y ago
  They don't need a 'product' at all, just a way to get money. They can go to old-fashioned 'protection' rackets and such.
  - armitron 11y ago
    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.
    - Natsu 11y ago
      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.
- HillaryBriss 11y ago
  Please. They're already in Mexico's government.
GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
If there were other industries in which the application of violence was a competitive advantage, why are there not currently organizations in those industries.
- pault 11y ago
  Human trafficking?
- HillaryBriss 11y ago
  Look at the kidnapping industry in Mexico, for example. They could also expand into controlling the building trades, the railroads and highways, the flow of oil, etc.
HiLo 11y ago
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.
- WildUtah 11y ago
  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.
  - HiLo 11y ago
    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.
clort 11y ago
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.
- HillaryBriss 11y ago
  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
awakeasleep 11y ago
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.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
dllthomas 11y ago
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.

armitron 11y ago

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.

HillaryBriss 11y ago
"Let them do that then" 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.
- stickfigure 11y ago
  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.
  - venomsnake 11y ago
    How many people with means in the US need organ transplant? From involuntarily donor. Just asking for market research.
    - zouhair 11y ago
      Harveting organs from such donors is as easy as harveting poppy seeds.
petra 11y ago
Actually prohibition was quite effective, it reduced alcohol usage by 30-50% , according to an history professor[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/16/opinion/actually-prohibition-was-a-success.html http://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/16/opinion/actually-prohibiti...
- jpatokal 11y ago
  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.
- armitron 11y ago
  This is an opinion piece with 0 citations. Point us to something better than useless drivel. These links paint a different picture and make the situation appear less than clearcut: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_States#Rates_of_consumption_during_Prohibition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_Stat... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_States#Organized_crime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_Stat...
  - petra 11y ago
    It isn't drivel, but it may be that more recent historical research paints a different picture.
digler999 11y ago
> 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.
- armitron 11y ago
  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.
  - digler999 11y ago
    > Maybe we should ban glue too. 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?
venomsnake 11y ago
> 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.

DanielBMarkham 11y ago

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.

Natsu 11y ago
They don't need a 'product' at all, just a way to get money. They can go to old-fashioned 'protection' rackets and such.
- armitron 11y ago
  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.
  - Natsu 11y ago
    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.
HillaryBriss 11y ago
Please. They're already in Mexico's government.

GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago

If there were other industries in which the application of violence was a competitive advantage, why are there not currently organizations in those industries.

pault 11y ago
Human trafficking?
HillaryBriss 11y ago
Look at the kidnapping industry in Mexico, for example. They could also expand into controlling the building trades, the railroads and highways, the flow of oil, etc.

HiLo 11y ago

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.

WildUtah 11y ago
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.
- HiLo 11y ago
  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.

clort 11y ago

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.

HillaryBriss 11y ago
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

awakeasleep 11y ago

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.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

dllthomas 11y ago

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.