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,

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.