8 ms·

I really wish Americans would boycott drugs from Mexican cartels. How bad does an industry have to get before there's enough outrage for a boycott?

ebg13 7y ago
How would they know? Your local "guy" is just some guy. And even if he weren't, what are you going to do, ask? "Excuse me, are you part of a cartel that murders people?" "Uh...no?"
- brlewis 7y ago
  I think the situation is bad enough now that you should boycott your local "guy" even though it's possible that all his drugs come from humane, sustainable sources.
  - VectorLock 7y ago
    Where are people supposed to get their drugs then?
  - weberc2 7y ago
    I agree. I’m sure this will be an unpopular opinion, but it’s bizarre how fashionable it is to advocate vaguely for “social justice” while directly financing gang and cartel violence. Sure, you can blame the government for making it inconvenient to get affordable, conflict-free drugs, but what does that say about your commitment to social justice if you’re willing to bankroll violence because it’s a more convenient way to indulge your leisure activity?
    - cf141q5325 7y ago
      Why are you voting for politicians to save the environment if you arent vegan, keep driving your car and buy stuff packed in plastics? Do you know where the clothes come from you wear? Its not realistic to get enough people voluntarily stop to destroy the planet, it is however feasible to get a government changing its policies to alter the structures that incentivize pollution.
      - weberc2 7y ago
        You're conflating suboptimal decisions about essentials (people need food, clothes, and transport and optimizing for good is a complex problem) with paying for something that you don't need and directly harms the cause you purport to care about.
        ebg13 7y ago
        > people need food People don't need meat. > clothes People don't need leather goods or slave labor or fashion brands. > transport People don't need SUVs or Corvettes. > optimizing for good is a complex problem This is not a complex calculation: in all cases they're more expensive, worse for you, and worse for the world than readily available alternatives. And yet here we are, because, just like drugs, they're fun.
        weberc2 7y ago
        This whole thread is the worst kind of whataboutism. Trying to justify or normalize the consequences of drug use by equating drug users with consumers who don't know how to optimize for their values (and trivializing the work and special knowledge involved in that optimization process). It's shameful. - Balancing your family's diet without meat requires specialist knowledge and effort that "not buying drugs" does not. - Balancing your family's transportation needs with environmental friendliness requires specialist knowledge (chiefly the carbon impact associated with different candidate vehicles) and additional cost (an environmentally friendly vehicle with equivalent capacity is almost always going to cost more) which is also not true for "not buying drugs". - Assessing every candidate clothing item's working conditions requires lots of specialist knowledge and effort that isn't true for "not buying drugs". And this is without comparing the marginal impact of an individual's environmentally inefficient consumer choices to a drug user's significant and direct impact on drug violence. You'd have to place a pretty low price on human life (especially the minority communities that are most impacted by drug violence) to make this equivalency.
godzillabrennus 7y ago
Americans are starting to legalize more and more. When prohibition 2.0 ends in failure maybe some will learn that it doesn’t work.
- lolAtTheSquares 7y ago
  But the biggest laugh is the idea that people using drugs in public is a good idea. Today, I went to get lunch, and these two dudes standing on line in front of me were so fucking stoned that I might have laughed at anything that happened to them. Beaten, robbed, arrested, stabbed, shot, whatever. They were stumbling around, acting like everything belonged to them, not a care in the world, but clearly old enough to know better. Balding, gray hair, maybe fifty years old? They could barely order a sandwich, and they needed to go home and come down off their high in the privacy of their own home. If this is the new normal, some people are going to find out the hard way that it has nothing to do with what’s legal and what’s prohibited. It has to do with whether it’s a good idea to be anything other than completely sober in front of total strangers.
- Ronnie_Dipple 7y ago
  As a non native living in Mexico I'm not surprised by this but on the same hand I would say its actually not as bad as people think here, you see the cartels don't want tourists to stop coming as the locals wouldn't like it and it would effect the cartels bottom line, as long as you stay out their way the cartels will usually leave you alone, just as gangs in Chicago will most of the time. Mexico is a beautiful place of warm people, brave journalists and contradictions.
  - turk73 7y ago
    I don't believe for a single second that violent assholes wouldn't give me a hard time if they felt like it. They don't live by some kind thieves' code. It's not a Dickens novel. They're dangerous as shit and anyone who accidentally crosses paths with them might get killed for the hell of it. You ever read Borderlands Beat? That's real news coming out of Mejico. That country is bullshit and it can't keep its act together and never has. But, oh, my quaint villas and excellent tacos. Yeah, right. Drink the water and get back to me. As far Chicago, that city is a mess, too. I was there just last year. It sucks there for all kinds of reasons. You know what Chicago and Mexico have in common? Failed liberal policies.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
TallGuyShort 7y ago
I insist that my local trap car only vend organic, ethically- and locally-sourced fair trade heroine. And an extra dollar from every purchase goes to the Ronald McDonald House.
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't do this here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
OnlineCourage 7y ago
Cartels do not only sell drugs, they are systems of diversified private security corporations and paramilitary groups which have emerged out of the previous iterations of violence and loss of governmental order which was a symptom of national narcotrafficking disputes in the previous decade. Basically a large portion of the Mexican Government effectively is infiltrated by cartels which also function with public support, hence the mudering of journalists and politicians...cant have people speak out and show that cartels are bad now can we? If you had a time machine and could boycott drugs in the 1980s then it would have had an impact...now not as much.
- brlewis 7y ago
  You don't think more funding gives them more power?
hanoz 7y ago
Doubtless many of the industry's well-to-do patrons do offset this somewhat by boycotting plastic straws, single use coffee cups and the like.
MarkMc 7y ago
It's very easy for people to convince themselves that they are not contributing to the problem. "It's the government's fault for not liberalizing and regulating the drug trade"
- collyw 7y ago
  Assuming you have a mobile phone did you check where the cobalt was mined from? Are you contributing to that problem? https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/oct/12/phone-misery-children-congo-cobalt-mines-drc https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/oct/12/p...
- AQuantized 7y ago
  Isn't that really where the blame lies? The idea that addicts are going to prioritize an abstract contribution to some far away problem over maintaining their supply, especially when treatment and legal access is very hard to come by, is highly unrealistic.
nullwasamistake 7y ago
I hate to agree with Trump at all, but the drug trade is largely due to ineffective border controls. An impervious border may well restore relative peace to war torn northern Mexico.
- tzs 7y ago
  The vast majority of smuggled drugs come in through border checkpoints, hidden in shipments of ordinary goods that are part of the legitimate US/Mexico trade.
  - nullwasamistake 7y ago
    That kind of supports my point. Crappy border enforcement.
    - CydeWeys 7y ago
      There are millions of tons of goods entering the United States every year. How exactly would you intend to enforce this perfectly? That's like saying that websites shouldn't have copyright violations on them, since every single piece of content uploaded to them can be manually reviewed and approved to prevent violations. Good luck with that.
- pier25 7y ago
  No, it’s due to the existence of high demand. There will always be a way to get it into the country if there is a paying market.
  - nullwasamistake 7y ago
    Prices will increase, lowering demand. It will always get in as long as someone is willing to pay the price. But if the price is steep enough, it will be greatly curtailed. The drug market operates on supply and demand like other commodities
    - 7y ago
dqpb 7y ago
We should also acknowledge Mexican cartel drug trade for what it is - chemical warfare.
- collyw 7y ago
  Some might say supply and demand.
modriano 7y ago
The set people who care deeply enough about this issue to change their drug consumption habits is probably pretty small. And of the ones that are so motivated by this issue, I assume they're infrequent users that account for a small fraction of the cartels' profit.
refurb 7y ago
When you’re purchasing drugs, how exactly would you know Mexican cartels were involved?
- robbick 7y ago
  If you are purchasing illegal drugs (except something someone could grow in their basement i.e. marijuana) - then you are funding some sort of organised crime
rexpop 7y ago
You may want to take a look at No Wall They Can Build for a more vivid picture of the situation. https://crimethinc.com/books/no-wall-they-can-build https://crimethinc.com/books/no-wall-they-can-build
partiallypro 7y ago
Unfortunately the only way to kill the cartels is to legalize drugs and force them into legal industries that we can regulate. That won't stop cartels completely, but it would take away tremendous revenue sources. That being said, I believe I've read that cartels have diversified so much that they now make more money from avocados and other sources than drugs.
smudgymcscmudge 7y ago
I’d like to, but I’ve got a bit of an addiction going, and I’m in no position to be picky.
- chrischen 7y ago
  There are a lot of recreational cocaine users, and they are doing it right under our (or their) noses. They range from billionaires to your local college grad. See The Social Network Movie, Wolf of Wall Street, etc. The drug use was not as dramatized as you might think.
rlt 7y ago
It seems like wishful thinking to expect the majority of consumers of illicit drugs to know or care about the origin of their drugs. Pushing for US government to legalize and regulate these drugs is probably the most effective action.
- JoeSmithson 7y ago
  There's an easy test to know whether your cocaine was produced immorally - it was.
  - collyw 7y ago
    You could probably say that for a whole host of everyday products. Is it cobalt mining that involves lots of child miners in Congo to produce your mobile phone?
    - robbick 7y ago
      I think this is a bit of a false equivalence- at most I might pay $5 for the cobalt in my phone once a year. That is a very harmful $5 but I'd bet most drug users are on 100x that
- brlewis 7y ago
  I fully admit to my comment being wishful thinking.
the_70x 7y ago
real boycott would be stop consuming drugs (most of them flow through México)

ebg13 7y ago

How would they know? Your local "guy" is just some guy. And even if he weren't, what are you going to do, ask? "Excuse me, are you part of a cartel that murders people?" "Uh...no?"

brlewis 7y ago
I think the situation is bad enough now that you should boycott your local "guy" even though it's possible that all his drugs come from humane, sustainable sources.
- VectorLock 7y ago
  Where are people supposed to get their drugs then?
- weberc2 7y ago
  I agree. I’m sure this will be an unpopular opinion, but it’s bizarre how fashionable it is to advocate vaguely for “social justice” while directly financing gang and cartel violence. Sure, you can blame the government for making it inconvenient to get affordable, conflict-free drugs, but what does that say about your commitment to social justice if you’re willing to bankroll violence because it’s a more convenient way to indulge your leisure activity?
  - cf141q5325 7y ago
    Why are you voting for politicians to save the environment if you arent vegan, keep driving your car and buy stuff packed in plastics? Do you know where the clothes come from you wear? Its not realistic to get enough people voluntarily stop to destroy the planet, it is however feasible to get a government changing its policies to alter the structures that incentivize pollution.
    - weberc2 7y ago
      You're conflating suboptimal decisions about essentials (people need food, clothes, and transport and optimizing for good is a complex problem) with paying for something that you don't need and directly harms the cause you purport to care about.
      - ebg13 7y ago
        > people need food People don't need meat. > clothes People don't need leather goods or slave labor or fashion brands. > transport People don't need SUVs or Corvettes. > optimizing for good is a complex problem This is not a complex calculation: in all cases they're more expensive, worse for you, and worse for the world than readily available alternatives. And yet here we are, because, just like drugs, they're fun.
        weberc2 7y ago
        This whole thread is the worst kind of whataboutism. Trying to justify or normalize the consequences of drug use by equating drug users with consumers who don't know how to optimize for their values (and trivializing the work and special knowledge involved in that optimization process). It's shameful. - Balancing your family's diet without meat requires specialist knowledge and effort that "not buying drugs" does not. - Balancing your family's transportation needs with environmental friendliness requires specialist knowledge (chiefly the carbon impact associated with different candidate vehicles) and additional cost (an environmentally friendly vehicle with equivalent capacity is almost always going to cost more) which is also not true for "not buying drugs". - Assessing every candidate clothing item's working conditions requires lots of specialist knowledge and effort that isn't true for "not buying drugs". And this is without comparing the marginal impact of an individual's environmentally inefficient consumer choices to a drug user's significant and direct impact on drug violence. You'd have to place a pretty low price on human life (especially the minority communities that are most impacted by drug violence) to make this equivalency.

godzillabrennus 7y ago

Americans are starting to legalize more and more. When prohibition 2.0 ends in failure maybe some will learn that it doesn’t work.

lolAtTheSquares 7y ago
But the biggest laugh is the idea that people using drugs in public is a good idea. Today, I went to get lunch, and these two dudes standing on line in front of me were so fucking stoned that I might have laughed at anything that happened to them. Beaten, robbed, arrested, stabbed, shot, whatever. They were stumbling around, acting like everything belonged to them, not a care in the world, but clearly old enough to know better. Balding, gray hair, maybe fifty years old? They could barely order a sandwich, and they needed to go home and come down off their high in the privacy of their own home. If this is the new normal, some people are going to find out the hard way that it has nothing to do with what’s legal and what’s prohibited. It has to do with whether it’s a good idea to be anything other than completely sober in front of total strangers.
Ronnie_Dipple 7y ago
As a non native living in Mexico I'm not surprised by this but on the same hand I would say its actually not as bad as people think here, you see the cartels don't want tourists to stop coming as the locals wouldn't like it and it would effect the cartels bottom line, as long as you stay out their way the cartels will usually leave you alone, just as gangs in Chicago will most of the time. Mexico is a beautiful place of warm people, brave journalists and contradictions.
- turk73 7y ago
  I don't believe for a single second that violent assholes wouldn't give me a hard time if they felt like it. They don't live by some kind thieves' code. It's not a Dickens novel. They're dangerous as shit and anyone who accidentally crosses paths with them might get killed for the hell of it. You ever read Borderlands Beat? That's real news coming out of Mejico. That country is bullshit and it can't keep its act together and never has. But, oh, my quaint villas and excellent tacos. Yeah, right. Drink the water and get back to me. As far Chicago, that city is a mess, too. I was there just last year. It sucks there for all kinds of reasons. You know what Chicago and Mexico have in common? Failed liberal policies.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

TallGuyShort 7y ago

I insist that my local trap car only vend organic, ethically- and locally-sourced fair trade heroine. And an extra dollar from every purchase goes to the Ronald McDonald House.

dang 7y ago
Please don't do this here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

OnlineCourage 7y ago

Cartels do not only sell drugs, they are systems of diversified private security corporations and paramilitary groups which have emerged out of the previous iterations of violence and loss of governmental order which was a symptom of national narcotrafficking disputes in the previous decade. Basically a large portion of the Mexican Government effectively is infiltrated by cartels which also function with public support, hence the mudering of journalists and politicians...cant have people speak out and show that cartels are bad now can we? If you had a time machine and could boycott drugs in the 1980s then it would have had an impact...now not as much.

brlewis 7y ago
You don't think more funding gives them more power?

hanoz 7y ago

Doubtless many of the industry's well-to-do patrons do offset this somewhat by boycotting plastic straws, single use coffee cups and the like.

MarkMc 7y ago

It's very easy for people to convince themselves that they are not contributing to the problem. "It's the government's fault for not liberalizing and regulating the drug trade"

collyw 7y ago
Assuming you have a mobile phone did you check where the cobalt was mined from? Are you contributing to that problem? https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/oct/12/phone-misery-children-congo-cobalt-mines-drc https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/oct/12/p...
AQuantized 7y ago
Isn't that really where the blame lies? The idea that addicts are going to prioritize an abstract contribution to some far away problem over maintaining their supply, especially when treatment and legal access is very hard to come by, is highly unrealistic.

nullwasamistake 7y ago

I hate to agree with Trump at all, but the drug trade is largely due to ineffective border controls. An impervious border may well restore relative peace to war torn northern Mexico.

tzs 7y ago
The vast majority of smuggled drugs come in through border checkpoints, hidden in shipments of ordinary goods that are part of the legitimate US/Mexico trade.
- nullwasamistake 7y ago
  That kind of supports my point. Crappy border enforcement.
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    There are millions of tons of goods entering the United States every year. How exactly would you intend to enforce this perfectly? That's like saying that websites shouldn't have copyright violations on them, since every single piece of content uploaded to them can be manually reviewed and approved to prevent violations. Good luck with that.
pier25 7y ago
No, it’s due to the existence of high demand. There will always be a way to get it into the country if there is a paying market.
- nullwasamistake 7y ago
  Prices will increase, lowering demand. It will always get in as long as someone is willing to pay the price. But if the price is steep enough, it will be greatly curtailed. The drug market operates on supply and demand like other commodities
  - 7y ago

dqpb 7y ago

We should also acknowledge Mexican cartel drug trade for what it is - chemical warfare.

collyw 7y ago
Some might say supply and demand.

modriano 7y ago

The set people who care deeply enough about this issue to change their drug consumption habits is probably pretty small. And of the ones that are so motivated by this issue, I assume they're infrequent users that account for a small fraction of the cartels' profit.

refurb 7y ago

When you’re purchasing drugs, how exactly would you know Mexican cartels were involved?

robbick 7y ago
If you are purchasing illegal drugs (except something someone could grow in their basement i.e. marijuana) - then you are funding some sort of organised crime

rexpop 7y ago

You may want to take a look at No Wall They Can Build for a more vivid picture of the situation. https://crimethinc.com/books/no-wall-they-can-build https://crimethinc.com/books/no-wall-they-can-build

partiallypro 7y ago

Unfortunately the only way to kill the cartels is to legalize drugs and force them into legal industries that we can regulate. That won't stop cartels completely, but it would take away tremendous revenue sources. That being said, I believe I've read that cartels have diversified so much that they now make more money from avocados and other sources than drugs.

smudgymcscmudge 7y ago

I’d like to, but I’ve got a bit of an addiction going, and I’m in no position to be picky.

chrischen 7y ago
There are a lot of recreational cocaine users, and they are doing it right under our (or their) noses. They range from billionaires to your local college grad. See The Social Network Movie, Wolf of Wall Street, etc. The drug use was not as dramatized as you might think.

rlt 7y ago

It seems like wishful thinking to expect the majority of consumers of illicit drugs to know or care about the origin of their drugs. Pushing for US government to legalize and regulate these drugs is probably the most effective action.

JoeSmithson 7y ago
There's an easy test to know whether your cocaine was produced immorally - it was.
- collyw 7y ago
  You could probably say that for a whole host of everyday products. Is it cobalt mining that involves lots of child miners in Congo to produce your mobile phone?
  - robbick 7y ago
    I think this is a bit of a false equivalence- at most I might pay $5 for the cobalt in my phone once a year. That is a very harmful $5 but I'd bet most drug users are on 100x that
brlewis 7y ago
I fully admit to my comment being wishful thinking.

the_70x 7y ago

real boycott would be stop consuming drugs (most of them flow through México)