7 ms·

At this point, I doubt it will help. Why? The cartels thrive in countries where you can essentially buy off any official. When you legalize drugs, they aren'

• dsrguru 14y ago
  People who have lived in big cities in the U.S. would strongly disagree with you. There are entire areas that are dangerous to walk in thanks to drug gangs. Legalize the stuff and dealers can't continue forcing out the competition with guns, since that competition will be the local supermarket.
  • vlisivka 14y ago
    Alcohol is already legal, so why gangs are not gone?
    • vlisivka 14y ago
      :-)
      • vlisivka 14y ago
        :-))))
    • blazingice 14y ago
      It looks like you're being downvoted, so I'll provide a reason. Alcohol is legal. The gangs that formed around producing, smuggling, and selling alcohol (e.g. Capone) are gone. The hope is that once other drugs are legal, the same thing happens to their producers.
      • vlisivka 14y ago
        So if everything illegal will be legal, like in America before USA, then all gangs will gone?
        • vlisivka 14y ago
          :-)
      • bmelton 14y ago
        Of note, since I was curious as to the answer myself and just found out, there are still 'gangs' (though less the urban variety we're used to seeing) based around moonshining. That prompted me to ask "why is moonshining illegal", and the best (wrong) answer I could come up with was for production and delivery to dry counties. Turns out, it's just a matter of taxation. Moonshiners are welcome to go legit, but they then have to pay $2.14 for each 750ml bottle they make, which cuts into profitability. As they likely don't have reputations and/or massive marketing budgets, they still and distribute illegally, which turns it into a pure profit + overhead scenario.
        • MattRogish 14y ago
          That's an interesting point that I've never considered (or heard mentioned in the legalize argument). I'm for legalization + taxation of all drugs but will we still see significant folks producing and selling illegally as a tax dodge? May legalization merely get drugs into more hands but still maintain significant illegal production? If so, a lot of the supposed benefits of legalization dry up.
          • Androsynth 14y ago
            The ratio of moonshine to legit alcohol sold is tiny though.
          • base698 14y ago
            It depends on what the markup is. You can't have taxes that equal current costs. If that was the case the market would largely stay the same.
• larrys 14y ago
  "I know the recreational drug users of HN don't really want to hear this" They are of course part of the problem.
• elorant 14y ago
  Legalizing drugs means that the street price will drop by 90% and that will eventually make drug trafficking obsolete. This of course doesn't solve the real problem which is consumption.
  • vlisivka 14y ago
    Meth is very cheap already. Any changes?
    • mrtron 14y ago
      From what I understand meth is produced really poorly by regional producers. I think it would end up more expensive at your local pharmacy if legalized. The benefit would be you know you won't lose your teeth from the odd chemicals the producer is using. (I could be horribly off on the details)
      • refurb 14y ago
        You are horribly off. Methamphetamine is currently available at your local pharmacy. It's a generic drugs and costs less than a $1 per dose. You don't lose your teeth from meth because of chemicals used in it's production, you lose them due to a combination of poor oral hygiene and reduced saliva production. The same thing happens if you abuse the stuff you can get at the pharmacy.
    • elorant 14y ago
      No because Meth can't create huge profits for drug cartels. Street price is too low when compared to heavy drugs. And it's the money that makes cartels invincible.
  • dllthomas 14y ago
    > This of course doesn't solve the real problem which is consumption. I object to your use of the definite article here. We can argue about the degree to which consumption is a problem vs. it leading to problems, moderate use, what particular drugs, etc... but making the police into the enemy of a large swath of our population is itself a real problem, gang violence to control distribution territory is itself a real problem, etc. If people are doing things that hurt themselves that's bad, but it's important we don't cause worse problems (for those people or the rest of us) in trying to stop it, and legalization frees up huge resources that we could put toward educating people about the dangers of various drugs and cleaning up the mess when they don't listen.
• revelation 14y ago
  Corruption is a tradeoff. Is the risk to lose your safe job and possibly land in jail worth the money? So you need money to corrupt officials on a large scale, a lot of money. Obviously that kind of money is no problem if your profit margin is 80%. Legalizing drugs (hence introducing highly industrialized competition) and helping those who are truly addicted tends to quickly kill that margin. I'm not saying legalization is the golden bullet; obviously you will have to do a lot more to reverse the damage done by millions in prison, impoverished, killed, or corrupted in the government apparatus. But its the starting point to stopping the cancer from expanding.
• jlmendezbonini 14y ago
  >Drugs are still illegal in the US and we don't really see >the same kind of crime in our country because the police >actually (for the most part) do their job. I strongly disagree with your statement. Police? Mexico is not using your usual police officers to fight drug violence neither Colombia. They are using highly trained military forces. Why? Cartels have very advance military equipment that is, sometimes, even purchased directly from the U.S. government as stated by one of the captured Zetas cartel heads (http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/jul/7/inquiry-of-weapons-smuggling-to-expand/ http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/jul/7/inquiry-of-we...). One of the main reasons the U.S. doesn't have the amount drug related crimes that countries like Mexico do is because it's their primary market (in the case of Mexican cartels) so they, obviously, don't want to create that much problems there and mess up their business. This is not about pointing fingers or saying that the police is useless but as someone who was unlucky enough to witness hitman executed individuals (in front of my house) but lucky enough to _not see anything_ useful for the police I have to tell you that is not about an effective police force. The production, distribution, violence, money laundering, and all the other problems that revolve around drugs are shared between: consumers, criminals, and corrupt individuals (private, government, and public service sectors). My point is that this very complicated problem has only gotten worse since the "War on Drugs" started so legalizing drugs to have some regulation could be an alternative.
  • objclxt 14y ago
    "Police? Mexico is not using your usual police officers to fight drug violence neither Colombia. They are using highly trained military forces. Why? Cartels have very advance military equipment" If you read the article, you'd see the reason Colombia and Mexico use the military is mainly because the cartels own the police. Virtually ever person has been bribed. That's the core problem here.
    • Uhhrrr 14y ago
      ...and if US users can grow their own, legally, in their backyards, then that bribery money goes away.
  • adventureful 14y ago
• mwd_ 14y ago
  Cartels wouldn't have a business selling something like marijuana post-legalization. Just about anybody can grow it almost anywhere so its natural market value is extremely low. I doubt there are a lot of gangs financing their criminal activity off of potato sales or whatever. Extortion and kidnapping must be way less pleasant and much more difficult than dealing drugs. It's very hard to believe that they could scale up to be the same sort of revenue source. As for the US and its supposed success, sure, it's better off than Honduras, but it still spends a fortune on law enforcement and has a massive prison population. I don't want to think of how many lives have been ruined over needless drug-related convictions. US demand and money are also what's fuelling a lot of the violence in Latin America.
  • Osiris 14y ago
    I disagree. I think the cartels or some large agro businesses would set up huge farms just like tobacco farms. I'm fairly certain it's perfectly legal to grow tobacco in your backyard, but no on does because it's so much cheaper and easier to buy it from a farm. So those people with expertise in growing it would continue to do so but out in the open in huge farms and profits would plummet to near at-cost production levels as they compete with similar large farms.
• earl 14y ago
  If you read the article, it points out that the price premium is for all the risk various actors bear in the cocaine supply chain. If you derisk it, you kill most of the profits and suddenly the cartels will have to compete with industrialized agriculture. This will not do wonders for the cartels' profits, and once the profits disappear, the ability to pay enormous bribes follows. Also, without making any judgement about whether people should or should not do certain things, banning private, consensual transactions rarely works well or inexpensively. My politics do not trend libertarian, but this is a well established fact at this point, whether it's prostitution, drug use, etc.
• mrbgty 14y ago
  Why would the largest consumer (US) purchase drugs from the drug cartels if it were legal in the US and could be sold at every 7-11? The drug cartels would lose a lot of the revenue which makes them powerful.
  • vlisivka 14y ago
    Why you are worrying about revenues of cartels? If you think that selling drugs is legal, then their business is equally legal to business of Apple or Microsoft. Why you are not worrying about revenues of Microsoft or Apple?
    • angli 14y ago
      Because Apple and Microsoft aren't using their revenues to kill thousands of people. If cutting off their revenues diminishes their ability to do that, it'd be irresponsible of us not to worry about it, or at least consider it
      • vlisivka 14y ago
        So why worry about revenues when we need to worry about human lives? Legalization of drugs will kills millions but will save thousands. Nice deal?
    • laughinghan 14y ago
      Because Microsoft and Apple's retail employees don't do drive-by shootings of each other's storefronts. No one here is claiming that selling drugs is legal. Some of us think that selling drugs should become legal, in the hopes that businesses that are like Microsoft and Apple, i.e., don't assassinate judges, etc, will outcompete the cartels and decrease the cartel's revenues, hence decreasing their ability and participation in such undesirable activities.
• giardini 14y ago
  "When you legalize drugs, they aren't going to suddenly stop selling it. They will now have a legal business which will continue to fund their criminal empires. We most likely will see an increase in other crimes, like extortion and kidnapping." No. Once a drug is legalized, supply can go up and price plummets. What was once a "criminal empire" now has the cash flow of a 7-11. And because price plummets, addicts no longer need to crawl in your bedroom window to steal money/goods to buy drugs. Crime drops. Drug-related extortion and kidnapping would virtually disappear.