6 ms·

Perhaps we should end the fifty years long "War on Some Drugs" in the US that funds the cartels.

by jdkee 3y ago

anonym29 3y ago
Let's be honest, it was never a war on drugs, it was a war on drug addicts - a group that already had enough problems on their plate before they had the full force of a police state hunting them down.
- voisin 3y ago
  > war on drug addicts No, ir was a war on political opponents, not necessarily addicts at all. The War on Marijuana and Acid was to go after hippies, and the War on Crack was to go after inner city blacks. The idea being all of these groups would have voted liberal and the Republican base supported punishing these groups. This was all assumed for decades but made explicit as the strategy by one of Nixon’s top lieutenants in recent years.
  - lazide 3y ago
    There was at least a token attempt to crack down on Cocaine though, and that’s about as WASP a drug as is humanly possible.
    - true_religion 3y ago
      Aren’t hippies majority WASPs too?
      - lazide 3y ago
        Usually more like counter culture ‘trying to not be a WASP since Daddy was a WASP and he was a jerk’. So depends on how you define it.
  - nvm0n2 3y ago
    Which would be a great explanation if there weren't drug wars in every other part of the world too, including left wing dictatorships like China.
- jasonm23 3y ago
  Drug addicts was a side effect. It was to target, well it's no secret now... > “You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? > We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. > Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
- pauldenton 3y ago
  If you want to see what a war on drugs looks like, just look at Singapore. Since 1975, after the proposal by then Minister for Home Affairs Chua Sian Chin, the death penalty was mandated as the sole punishment for drug trafficking, should the amount of whichever drugs exceed the capital threshold.[106] As a result of this legal reform, 28-year-old Penang-born Malaysian Teh Sin Tong became the first convicted drug trafficker to be hanged at Changi Prison on 28 April 1978, after the High Court found him guilty on 13 October 1976 The majority of executions in Singapore are for drug offences. Since 2010, 23 prisoners have been executed for drug offences, while only five have been executed for other offences, such as murder. Death penalty supporters, such as blogger Benjamin Chang, claim that Singapore has one of the lowest prevalence of drug abuse worldwide. Chang claims, for instance, that over two decades, the number of drug abusers arrested each year has declined by two-thirds, from over 6,000 in the early 1990s to about 2,000 in 2011.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
PostOnce 3y ago
Why does the war on drugs cause Mexico to fall apart and not Canada? I don't think Mexico's problems would be solved if drugs disappeared tomorrow. For example, the cartels are robbing fuel [depots, refineries, regular gas stations, etc]. They'll keep doing that, it's profitable. So, how can Mexico solve its own problems? I have no idea.
- computerphage 3y ago
  Part of the answer is climate and geography. It's just meaningfully different south of the US than north of the US for drug production. And this is not limited to just mexico, a lot of non-mexican-produced drugs also traffic through mexico.
- lazide 3y ago
  Pretty sure Canada isn’t between South America and the US.
- ipaddr 3y ago
  The war on drugs in the 80s was focused on Colombia and disrupting Pablo Escobar's coke empire. That was successful but caused production to move closer to Mexico. Everything was stable until the national army took over policing enforcement in 2006 and now you have many 1000x more murders. Some of the murders that are reported as cartel murders can be national army murders. It's a different situation that resolves itself when demand drops. Canada was winning best weed strain at shows but was never really supplying the US. The US was supplying Canada with weed/coke from Mexico and premium California bud if Canada was lucky. I'm sure some BC bud flowed south but everything was small operations.
  - PostOnce 3y ago
    That tells me what happened, but not why? (I appreciate the detail, though) Why isn't Canada a major narcotics manufacturing center? Why is Colombia? I think the answer is probably complex and involves poverty (meaning switching from lawful occupation to unlawful occupation is a bigger difference than in, say, Canada) and corruption/lawlessness (which may also be consequently tied to the poverty, if corruption is a way to escape it). It must surely go much deeper than "it's America's fault", and I think it may also be solvable without American intervention or action (though of course, it would be harder)
vorpalhex 3y ago
Do you see a world where Amazon sells fent and.. undercuts the cartel or something? How does ending our prohibition on drugs resolve the a nearly total collapse of law and order in a neighbor?
- fallingknife 3y ago
  You know any legal businesses that also have private armies on the side?
- standardUser 3y ago
  Reducing a major funding source would obviously weaken the cartels dramatically.
  - vorpalhex 3y ago
    But again.. how do you see that happening? Even in a Portugal decriminalization situation, we aren't going to be selling drugs at Walmart. And the cartel isn't going to play fair. Undercutting the cartel means assassination attempts and kidnappings.
    - standardUser 3y ago
      You're jumping all over the place here. Walmart? Portugal? Assassination attempts? I suggest looking into the ways different states and counties in the US manage and regulate the sale of alcohol and marijuana to get a realistic idea of what legalized drug sales could look like. Portugal decriminalized, not legalized, which is a gargantuan difference. Decriminalization is basically the government saying "we'll stop enforcing drug laws, thereby de facto endorsing violent criminal gangs to handle the sale and manufacture as they see fit". As a result, drugs don't get less contaminated and black markets continue to thrive. I think it's a cowardly half-step. And if the US legalized drugs, who are the cartels going to assassinate exactly? US Senators? The President? Then there actually might be a US military intervention and I doubt the cartels want that.
merpnderp 3y ago
Cartels are directly selling their goods in the open in San Fran. You won’t be making their money source, just further streamlining it.
gettodachoppa 3y ago
Can we please stop it with the victim blaming? This is the cartel's fault and no one else. I've never seen people as self-hating as liberal Americans. Only the English come close. I mean, it's great to be introspective and self-aware of what your country is doing, but not to the degree that you put the blame for drug crime on the people trying to eradicate drug usage. The problem with the war on drugs isn't that it exists, it's that it's done limp-wristedly (mainly because of objections by bleeding hearts), instead of being waged ruthlessly. The end result of social libertarianism results in the same thing as for economic libertarianism: misery for the majority.
- karmakurtisaani 3y ago
  > but not to the degree that you put the blame for drug crime on the people trying to eradicate drug usage. But this is exactly where the blame lies. Alcohol production and distribution related crime dropped to essentially zero once the prohibition ended.
- trog 3y ago
  Don't "social libertarians" want drugs to just be legalised so they can be produced by local businesses and thus cut off the flow of cash to criminals? Wanting more Clear and Present Danger-style ruthlessness in the war on drugs (after decades of failures of varying levels of ruthlessness) I guess is an idea if you don't care about body count and collateral damage, but just feels like without legalisation it's going to be a complete waste of time.

Perhaps we should end the fifty years long "War on Some Drugs" in the US that funds the cartels.

by jdkee 3y ago

Perhaps we should end the fifty years long "War on Some Drugs" in the US that funds the cartels.

Let's be honest, it was never a war on drugs, it was a war on drug addicts - a group that already had enough problems on their plate before they had the full force of a police state hunting them down.

voisin 3y ago
> war on drug addicts No, ir was a war on political opponents, not necessarily addicts at all. The War on Marijuana and Acid was to go after hippies, and the War on Crack was to go after inner city blacks. The idea being all of these groups would have voted liberal and the Republican base supported punishing these groups. This was all assumed for decades but made explicit as the strategy by one of Nixon’s top lieutenants in recent years.
- lazide 3y ago
  There was at least a token attempt to crack down on Cocaine though, and that’s about as WASP a drug as is humanly possible.
  - true_religion 3y ago
    Aren’t hippies majority WASPs too?
    - lazide 3y ago
      Usually more like counter culture ‘trying to not be a WASP since Daddy was a WASP and he was a jerk’. So depends on how you define it.
- nvm0n2 3y ago
  Which would be a great explanation if there weren't drug wars in every other part of the world too, including left wing dictatorships like China.
jasonm23 3y ago
Drug addicts was a side effect. It was to target, well it's no secret now... > “You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? > We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. > Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
pauldenton 3y ago
If you want to see what a war on drugs looks like, just look at Singapore. Since 1975, after the proposal by then Minister for Home Affairs Chua Sian Chin, the death penalty was mandated as the sole punishment for drug trafficking, should the amount of whichever drugs exceed the capital threshold.[106] As a result of this legal reform, 28-year-old Penang-born Malaysian Teh Sin Tong became the first convicted drug trafficker to be hanged at Changi Prison on 28 April 1978, after the High Court found him guilty on 13 October 1976 The majority of executions in Singapore are for drug offences. Since 2010, 23 prisoners have been executed for drug offences, while only five have been executed for other offences, such as murder. Death penalty supporters, such as blogger Benjamin Chang, claim that Singapore has one of the lowest prevalence of drug abuse worldwide. Chang claims, for instance, that over two decades, the number of drug abusers arrested each year has declined by two-thirds, from over 6,000 in the early 1990s to about 2,000 in 2011.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

PostOnce 3y ago

Why does the war on drugs cause Mexico to fall apart and not Canada? I don't think Mexico's problems would be solved if drugs disappeared tomorrow. For example, the cartels are robbing fuel [depots, refineries, regular gas stations, etc]. They'll keep doing that, it's profitable. So, how can Mexico solve its own problems? I have no idea.

computerphage 3y ago
Part of the answer is climate and geography. It's just meaningfully different south of the US than north of the US for drug production. And this is not limited to just mexico, a lot of non-mexican-produced drugs also traffic through mexico.
lazide 3y ago
Pretty sure Canada isn’t between South America and the US.
ipaddr 3y ago
The war on drugs in the 80s was focused on Colombia and disrupting Pablo Escobar's coke empire. That was successful but caused production to move closer to Mexico. Everything was stable until the national army took over policing enforcement in 2006 and now you have many 1000x more murders. Some of the murders that are reported as cartel murders can be national army murders. It's a different situation that resolves itself when demand drops. Canada was winning best weed strain at shows but was never really supplying the US. The US was supplying Canada with weed/coke from Mexico and premium California bud if Canada was lucky. I'm sure some BC bud flowed south but everything was small operations.
- PostOnce 3y ago
  That tells me what happened, but not why? (I appreciate the detail, though) Why isn't Canada a major narcotics manufacturing center? Why is Colombia? I think the answer is probably complex and involves poverty (meaning switching from lawful occupation to unlawful occupation is a bigger difference than in, say, Canada) and corruption/lawlessness (which may also be consequently tied to the poverty, if corruption is a way to escape it). It must surely go much deeper than "it's America's fault", and I think it may also be solvable without American intervention or action (though of course, it would be harder)

vorpalhex 3y ago

Do you see a world where Amazon sells fent and.. undercuts the cartel or something? How does ending our prohibition on drugs resolve the a nearly total collapse of law and order in a neighbor?

fallingknife 3y ago
You know any legal businesses that also have private armies on the side?
standardUser 3y ago
Reducing a major funding source would obviously weaken the cartels dramatically.
- vorpalhex 3y ago
  But again.. how do you see that happening? Even in a Portugal decriminalization situation, we aren't going to be selling drugs at Walmart. And the cartel isn't going to play fair. Undercutting the cartel means assassination attempts and kidnappings.
  - standardUser 3y ago
    You're jumping all over the place here. Walmart? Portugal? Assassination attempts? I suggest looking into the ways different states and counties in the US manage and regulate the sale of alcohol and marijuana to get a realistic idea of what legalized drug sales could look like. Portugal decriminalized, not legalized, which is a gargantuan difference. Decriminalization is basically the government saying "we'll stop enforcing drug laws, thereby de facto endorsing violent criminal gangs to handle the sale and manufacture as they see fit". As a result, drugs don't get less contaminated and black markets continue to thrive. I think it's a cowardly half-step. And if the US legalized drugs, who are the cartels going to assassinate exactly? US Senators? The President? Then there actually might be a US military intervention and I doubt the cartels want that.

merpnderp 3y ago

Cartels are directly selling their goods in the open in San Fran. You won’t be making their money source, just further streamlining it.

gettodachoppa 3y ago

Can we please stop it with the victim blaming? This is the cartel's fault and no one else. I've never seen people as self-hating as liberal Americans. Only the English come close. I mean, it's great to be introspective and self-aware of what your country is doing, but not to the degree that you put the blame for drug crime on the people trying to eradicate drug usage. The problem with the war on drugs isn't that it exists, it's that it's done limp-wristedly (mainly because of objections by bleeding hearts), instead of being waged ruthlessly. The end result of social libertarianism results in the same thing as for economic libertarianism: misery for the majority.

karmakurtisaani 3y ago
> but not to the degree that you put the blame for drug crime on the people trying to eradicate drug usage. But this is exactly where the blame lies. Alcohol production and distribution related crime dropped to essentially zero once the prohibition ended.
trog 3y ago
Don't "social libertarians" want drugs to just be legalised so they can be produced by local businesses and thus cut off the flow of cash to criminals? Wanting more Clear and Present Danger-style ruthlessness in the war on drugs (after decades of failures of varying levels of ruthlessness) I guess is an idea if you don't care about body count and collateral damage, but just feels like without legalisation it's going to be a complete waste of time.