41 ms·

Just legalize it already. This is stupid.

all2 1y ago
The outcomes are bad for all parties involved.
whatever1 1y ago
Even if they do, the cartels already own huge man & firepower. They will just move on to the next thing, maybe coffee, avocados, oil whatever. When you have accumulated so much power you can demand cash from the world around you.
- stickfigure 1y ago
  Coffee, avocados, and oil aren't illegal. But I'm pretty sure if you banned coffee it would spawn criminal gangs that made 1920s prohibition look tame. There's no substitute for the margins you can get in the illegal drug trade. Take away the primary source of funding and you make it much easier to break the gangs. We've already gone through this. Just legalize it already.
  - whatever1 1y ago
    They could set a 1000% tax on the coffee produced, if they can consolidate control. Latin America is 50% of the world coffee production. What will Starbucks / Nestle do? They will just pay up. They can even go against the families of the execs to make their case about the new price.
    - torbid 1y ago
      They tried this before with fruit. The US companies just sold their interest in production and have plenty of other options for acquisition if they try to tax beyond the relative ease of South America verse anywhere else in the global south. I would agree that letting black market bs continue will eventually lead to groups that could threaten global control on random other commodities but that's no reason kick the can further down this road.
    - arijun 1y ago
      Part of the reason such a large percentage of coffee is grown there is because it's cheap. The cartels can (and do) make profit on legitimate crops, but they can't magically rewrite the rules of capitalism.
      - techjamie 1y ago
        Coffee beans are notoriously picky about their environment. But with modern technology, it wouldn't surprise me if large companies would resort to growing it in artificial greenhouses, or putting more stock in breeding plants that can be grown elsewhere.
    - hiccuphippo 1y ago
      > What will Starbucks / Nestle do? Finance wars. Like with the "Ten Cents War": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Pacific https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Pacific
    - potato3732842 1y ago
      >They could set a 1000% tax on the coffee produced. No they couldn't. That'd just mint another cartel run black market that they don't control and that cartel would tax the black market coffee at substantially less. You can kind of think of the current drugs situation as a "so big the number doesn't matter, it's a non stater" percent tax.
      - whatever1 1y ago
        That new cartel would invite a war against it. These disputes are not resolved through capitalistic means. You cannot just price out the big guys.
        potato3732842 1y ago
        How is that any different than the current situation where the current cartel is fighting with the government?
  - clvx 1y ago
    They already extortion every single producer. Any coffee and avocado coming from South America has an extortion tax somewhere in the supply chain whether it’s to the farmers, shipping companies, distribution center warehouses at port or whatever you imagine. The extortion comes as placing gang members as part of security, real threats or just bribes to unlock to keep moving towards the consumer. Illegal goods have better margins but extortions provide a platform for power and money with less effort.
  - bjourne 1y ago
    Wasn't that same argument used for legalizing cannabis? How did that work out?
- eviks 1y ago
  Not really, the competition with the existing governments will significantly limit the amount of replacement cash they can demand, so they won't be able to sustain the same scale of man/firepower
- preciousoo 1y ago
  They'll probably move onto mass producing weaponry, which, depending on the sophistication and scale, could be big issues for the rest of the world. They already partner with terrorist groups and other unsavory orgs as-is. Any group worth mentioning these days interfaces with the cartels
  - reactordev 1y ago
    I don’t think weapon production is in their wheelhouse. Arms dealing maybe but not manufacturing. Facilities like those are permanent locations. Permanent locations tend to get raided and attacked. I think controlling municipalities like they are is working fine for them. No need to mass produce weapons when you can just buy them.
    - whatever1 1y ago
      They do have expertise in manufacturing and managing manufacturing facilities and logistics though. Likely the production equipment is not very sophisticated/ hard to reproduce if destroyed. I don’t expect them to produce state of the art F35s anyway.
    - 15155 1y ago
      Where do you think this submersible was manufactured?
      - olyjohn 1y ago
        Building a couple of small boats isn't the same as mass producing weapons. I can build cars in my garage, but I'd need a machine shop full of extremely heavy equipment and tons of metal stock to build guns.
        preciousoo 1y ago
        You severely underestimate the capability that they possess, both intellectually and materially. The skill(and more critically, engineering environment) that went into manufacturing the boat shows a lot
- Jemm 1y ago
  Applies to corporations as well but they do it legally and we consider part of our 'economy'. Heck we even subsidize them and give them the power to lobby and legally be a 'person'. - Problem? What Problem? I don't see no stinkin' Problem!
- potato3732842 1y ago
  Exactly. These cartels are basically competing governments. They're in the drugs industry in the same way that there's state oil industries. The only choose crime because that activity has to exist outside the existing government system.
- m463 1y ago
  high tariffs could make every commodity an opportunity.
l0ng1nu5 1y ago
The only conclusion i can draw from all this insanity is that the powers that be want things to be this way.
- vineyardmike 1y ago
  Of course, "the powers that be" can want things to change, but not want to pay the cost required to truly change it. As hyperbole, you can stop all court cases, assume everyone is guilty if they're arrested, and give everyone capital punishment. That would most likely end cartel issues rather quickly, but it would absolutely mess with society to a dangerous level. El Salvador took a (less hyperbolic) extreme approach, and it dramatically reduced crime, but it's not clear that citizens are actually happy with this outcome as. Of course, it could be possible that leaders are corrupt, but it could simply be that the cost to fixing things is very high.
  - l0ng1nu5 1y ago
    What costs are you talking about? By just about every humanist and economic metric there are only benefits to decriminalisation.
gambiting 1y ago
Cocaine, I could maybe see the argument. But the article also said there was another submarine seized with 4.5BN worth of meth aboard. And I really hope you aren't suggesting legalising meth. I could see the argument that if other amphetamines were legal no one would use meth, but.....I don't think that's necessarily true. All the illegal meth would have to do to keep existing is to be cheaper than legal speed.
- bigmadshoe 1y ago
  The war on drugs has failed. Everyone agrees that no-one should do meth. But the solutions presented so far by prohibition are not just conceptually flawed - they demonstrably don’t work. We literally have 50+ years of data that shows it. We need to a) legalize drugs, b) provide proper treatment to addicts, and c) get unsafe drugs off the streets. I’m speaking as someone who lost a close family member to an overdose. What we’re doing now is not working.
  - crackrook 1y ago
    I know we have data that shows just how harmful the war on drugs has been, but I'm curious if we have data showing that legalization in a modern society, with global supply chains and marketing campaigns, does not result in a bunch of people who previously wouldn't have done drugs - for fear of legal consequences, or just because they're hard to obtain - suddenly doing drugs. I'm genuinely interested to know, this isn't something I've made up my mind about. I finally managed to quit vaping a year ago after starting as a teen. To be honest, if I could get a dime bag at the corner store, I'm not certain that I would be able to resist the temptation to do so for the first time or umpteenth time. Speaking only for myself, I suspect I would be a happier and more productive member of society if it continued to be the case that these chemicals were inaccessible to me. I'm interested to know if there's data suggesting that I'm mistaken or just an outlier. Just given what I know about the issue (which, admittedly, isn't a lot), I feel decriminalizing possession and keeping distribution illegal would be my first choice. I want people to be able to test their drugs for fentanyl without fear of legal consequences, but I'm reluctant to trust corporations or individuals not to push addictive poison into the hands of the vulnerable when there are profit incentives and no legal boundaries.
baxtr 1y ago
Which drugs exactly are you proposing to be legalized? All?
- cluckindan 1y ago
  That would be the humane and sensible thing to do, so obviously we are not going to do that. Let’s double down on enforcement so violence, corruption and profits increase. We really did not learn anything from the alcohol prohibition.
  - soraminazuki 1y ago
    It's not a choice between legalization of all drugs or violence and corruption. Sure, the way the US cracked down on drugs did more harm than good. But that doesn't mean there should be no regulation for drugs whatsoever. Take the opioid epidemic for example. It claimed the lives of hundreds of people per day. Do you think "humane and sensible" people were responsible for that?
    - cluckindan 1y ago
      The opioid epidemic is not a great example, as it began by overprescription of legal, regulated medicinal drugs. The problem blew up when authorities started cracking down on those prescriptions, and the newly dependent started seeking drugs from illegal sources. Those sources included clandestinely produced heroin and fentanyl, leading to massive numbers of overdose deaths. In other words, it was the enforcement of prohibition that ultimately caused more societal and health issues than the quasi-legal sales of hard drugs. It definitely wasn’t the doing of ”humane and sensible” policies! So you see, it is actually a choice between legalization of all drugs or violence and corruption. The system can only regulate drugs when they are legal. Illegal drugs combined with enforcement of prohibition pits producers, traffickers, dealers and users against the police and ultimately the army, which are usually the only groups of people who have a state-sanctioned mandate to use violence against other people. How could violence not result, when it is an integral part of the alleged ”solution”? Just add pervasive income inequality, throw in some general lack of future prospects mixed with widely publicized lies about the billionaire class being entirely self-made through hard work, and baby, you got a stew going, and the people getting thrown in the hot water are already boiling over.
numpad0 1y ago
Or fix up the Latin America. Just stop pretending US has no control over internal politics of foreign countries.
- reactordev 1y ago
  The US made this.
- mdhb 1y ago
  That’s a really smart idea, I don’t know why nobody thought of this or tried for multiple decades before.
  - Synaesthesia 1y ago
    The US is a big part of the problems of Latin America. They participate in the drug trade, big time.
- DragonStrength 1y ago
  We don't do that precisely because that's how you end up with this situation. We wonder how history repeats itself, but we can't be bothered to know history from over 40 years ago.
  - clvx 1y ago
    60 years actually but for the recent criminality you need to look to Venezuela’s attempt of revolution in the late 10’s which generated the expansion of the Tren de Aragua which evolved extortion from random events to an enterprise level kind of thing.
anuvrat1 1y ago
Cartels are already diversifying, thanks to bullish gold market they are going full tilt on gold. "In Colombia and Peru gangs are now thought to make more money from gold than from the sale of narcotics."[1] [1]: https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2025/06/26/the-gold-bull-market-has-a-dirty-secret https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2025/06/26/the-gold-b...
billy99k 1y ago
This has been a failed experiment. When you legalize drugs, it comes at increased cost due to taxes and regulations. The black market can easily compete because they can sell a cheaper product without either of these things (and now that it's legal, it makes it easier to bring shipments into the country under the guise of a legal business) and it eventually drives the legitimate companies out of business. This has now been seen in both Colorado and California. Violence still drives the business and it only makes the cartels richer. I'm also tired of all the pot smoke you can smell everyone now in every US city where it's legalized. The people like me, that didn't want drugs legalized, predicted all this would happen a decade or so ago. Update: you know I'm right
- bigyabai 1y ago
  Once upon a time, America attempted to genuinely prohibit alcohol. The rest is calculus and easily-predicted history.
mensetmanusman 1y ago
They make more on human trafficking now, I’m assuming you don’t mean that.

all2 1y ago

The outcomes are bad for all parties involved.

Even if they do, the cartels already own huge man & firepower. They will just move on to the next thing, maybe coffee, avocados, oil whatever. When you have accumulated so much power you can demand cash from the world around you.

stickfigure 1y ago
Coffee, avocados, and oil aren't illegal. But I'm pretty sure if you banned coffee it would spawn criminal gangs that made 1920s prohibition look tame. There's no substitute for the margins you can get in the illegal drug trade. Take away the primary source of funding and you make it much easier to break the gangs. We've already gone through this. Just legalize it already.
- whatever1 1y ago
  They could set a 1000% tax on the coffee produced, if they can consolidate control. Latin America is 50% of the world coffee production. What will Starbucks / Nestle do? They will just pay up. They can even go against the families of the execs to make their case about the new price.
  - torbid 1y ago
    They tried this before with fruit. The US companies just sold their interest in production and have plenty of other options for acquisition if they try to tax beyond the relative ease of South America verse anywhere else in the global south. I would agree that letting black market bs continue will eventually lead to groups that could threaten global control on random other commodities but that's no reason kick the can further down this road.
  - arijun 1y ago
    Part of the reason such a large percentage of coffee is grown there is because it's cheap. The cartels can (and do) make profit on legitimate crops, but they can't magically rewrite the rules of capitalism.
    - techjamie 1y ago
      Coffee beans are notoriously picky about their environment. But with modern technology, it wouldn't surprise me if large companies would resort to growing it in artificial greenhouses, or putting more stock in breeding plants that can be grown elsewhere.
  - hiccuphippo 1y ago
    > What will Starbucks / Nestle do? Finance wars. Like with the "Ten Cents War": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Pacific https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Pacific
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    >They could set a 1000% tax on the coffee produced. No they couldn't. That'd just mint another cartel run black market that they don't control and that cartel would tax the black market coffee at substantially less. You can kind of think of the current drugs situation as a "so big the number doesn't matter, it's a non stater" percent tax.
    - whatever1 1y ago
      That new cartel would invite a war against it. These disputes are not resolved through capitalistic means. You cannot just price out the big guys.
      - potato3732842 1y ago
        How is that any different than the current situation where the current cartel is fighting with the government?
- clvx 1y ago
  They already extortion every single producer. Any coffee and avocado coming from South America has an extortion tax somewhere in the supply chain whether it’s to the farmers, shipping companies, distribution center warehouses at port or whatever you imagine. The extortion comes as placing gang members as part of security, real threats or just bribes to unlock to keep moving towards the consumer. Illegal goods have better margins but extortions provide a platform for power and money with less effort.
- bjourne 1y ago
  Wasn't that same argument used for legalizing cannabis? How did that work out?
eviks 1y ago
Not really, the competition with the existing governments will significantly limit the amount of replacement cash they can demand, so they won't be able to sustain the same scale of man/firepower
preciousoo 1y ago
They'll probably move onto mass producing weaponry, which, depending on the sophistication and scale, could be big issues for the rest of the world. They already partner with terrorist groups and other unsavory orgs as-is. Any group worth mentioning these days interfaces with the cartels
- reactordev 1y ago
  I don’t think weapon production is in their wheelhouse. Arms dealing maybe but not manufacturing. Facilities like those are permanent locations. Permanent locations tend to get raided and attacked. I think controlling municipalities like they are is working fine for them. No need to mass produce weapons when you can just buy them.
  - whatever1 1y ago
    They do have expertise in manufacturing and managing manufacturing facilities and logistics though. Likely the production equipment is not very sophisticated/ hard to reproduce if destroyed. I don’t expect them to produce state of the art F35s anyway.
  - 15155 1y ago
    Where do you think this submersible was manufactured?
    - olyjohn 1y ago
      Building a couple of small boats isn't the same as mass producing weapons. I can build cars in my garage, but I'd need a machine shop full of extremely heavy equipment and tons of metal stock to build guns.
      - preciousoo 1y ago
        You severely underestimate the capability that they possess, both intellectually and materially. The skill(and more critically, engineering environment) that went into manufacturing the boat shows a lot
Jemm 1y ago
Applies to corporations as well but they do it legally and we consider part of our 'economy'. Heck we even subsidize them and give them the power to lobby and legally be a 'person'. - Problem? What Problem? I don't see no stinkin' Problem!
potato3732842 1y ago
Exactly. These cartels are basically competing governments. They're in the drugs industry in the same way that there's state oil industries. The only choose crime because that activity has to exist outside the existing government system.
m463 1y ago
high tariffs could make every commodity an opportunity.

l0ng1nu5 1y ago

The only conclusion i can draw from all this insanity is that the powers that be want things to be this way.

vineyardmike 1y ago
Of course, "the powers that be" can want things to change, but not want to pay the cost required to truly change it. As hyperbole, you can stop all court cases, assume everyone is guilty if they're arrested, and give everyone capital punishment. That would most likely end cartel issues rather quickly, but it would absolutely mess with society to a dangerous level. El Salvador took a (less hyperbolic) extreme approach, and it dramatically reduced crime, but it's not clear that citizens are actually happy with this outcome as. Of course, it could be possible that leaders are corrupt, but it could simply be that the cost to fixing things is very high.
- l0ng1nu5 1y ago
  What costs are you talking about? By just about every humanist and economic metric there are only benefits to decriminalisation.

gambiting 1y ago

Cocaine, I could maybe see the argument. But the article also said there was another submarine seized with 4.5BN worth of meth aboard. And I really hope you aren't suggesting legalising meth. I could see the argument that if other amphetamines were legal no one would use meth, but.....I don't think that's necessarily true. All the illegal meth would have to do to keep existing is to be cheaper than legal speed.

bigmadshoe 1y ago
The war on drugs has failed. Everyone agrees that no-one should do meth. But the solutions presented so far by prohibition are not just conceptually flawed - they demonstrably don’t work. We literally have 50+ years of data that shows it. We need to a) legalize drugs, b) provide proper treatment to addicts, and c) get unsafe drugs off the streets. I’m speaking as someone who lost a close family member to an overdose. What we’re doing now is not working.
- crackrook 1y ago
  I know we have data that shows just how harmful the war on drugs has been, but I'm curious if we have data showing that legalization in a modern society, with global supply chains and marketing campaigns, does not result in a bunch of people who previously wouldn't have done drugs - for fear of legal consequences, or just because they're hard to obtain - suddenly doing drugs. I'm genuinely interested to know, this isn't something I've made up my mind about. I finally managed to quit vaping a year ago after starting as a teen. To be honest, if I could get a dime bag at the corner store, I'm not certain that I would be able to resist the temptation to do so for the first time or umpteenth time. Speaking only for myself, I suspect I would be a happier and more productive member of society if it continued to be the case that these chemicals were inaccessible to me. I'm interested to know if there's data suggesting that I'm mistaken or just an outlier. Just given what I know about the issue (which, admittedly, isn't a lot), I feel decriminalizing possession and keeping distribution illegal would be my first choice. I want people to be able to test their drugs for fentanyl without fear of legal consequences, but I'm reluctant to trust corporations or individuals not to push addictive poison into the hands of the vulnerable when there are profit incentives and no legal boundaries.

baxtr 1y ago

Which drugs exactly are you proposing to be legalized? All?

cluckindan 1y ago
That would be the humane and sensible thing to do, so obviously we are not going to do that. Let’s double down on enforcement so violence, corruption and profits increase. We really did not learn anything from the alcohol prohibition.
- soraminazuki 1y ago
  It's not a choice between legalization of all drugs or violence and corruption. Sure, the way the US cracked down on drugs did more harm than good. But that doesn't mean there should be no regulation for drugs whatsoever. Take the opioid epidemic for example. It claimed the lives of hundreds of people per day. Do you think "humane and sensible" people were responsible for that?
  - cluckindan 1y ago
    The opioid epidemic is not a great example, as it began by overprescription of legal, regulated medicinal drugs. The problem blew up when authorities started cracking down on those prescriptions, and the newly dependent started seeking drugs from illegal sources. Those sources included clandestinely produced heroin and fentanyl, leading to massive numbers of overdose deaths. In other words, it was the enforcement of prohibition that ultimately caused more societal and health issues than the quasi-legal sales of hard drugs. It definitely wasn’t the doing of ”humane and sensible” policies! So you see, it is actually a choice between legalization of all drugs or violence and corruption. The system can only regulate drugs when they are legal. Illegal drugs combined with enforcement of prohibition pits producers, traffickers, dealers and users against the police and ultimately the army, which are usually the only groups of people who have a state-sanctioned mandate to use violence against other people. How could violence not result, when it is an integral part of the alleged ”solution”? Just add pervasive income inequality, throw in some general lack of future prospects mixed with widely publicized lies about the billionaire class being entirely self-made through hard work, and baby, you got a stew going, and the people getting thrown in the hot water are already boiling over.

numpad0 1y ago

Or fix up the Latin America. Just stop pretending US has no control over internal politics of foreign countries.

reactordev 1y ago
The US made this.
mdhb 1y ago
That’s a really smart idea, I don’t know why nobody thought of this or tried for multiple decades before.
- Synaesthesia 1y ago
  The US is a big part of the problems of Latin America. They participate in the drug trade, big time.
DragonStrength 1y ago
We don't do that precisely because that's how you end up with this situation. We wonder how history repeats itself, but we can't be bothered to know history from over 40 years ago.
- clvx 1y ago
  60 years actually but for the recent criminality you need to look to Venezuela’s attempt of revolution in the late 10’s which generated the expansion of the Tren de Aragua which evolved extortion from random events to an enterprise level kind of thing.

anuvrat1 1y ago

Cartels are already diversifying, thanks to bullish gold market they are going full tilt on gold. "In Colombia and Peru gangs are now thought to make more money from gold than from the sale of narcotics."[1] [1]: https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2025/06/26/the-gold-bull-market-has-a-dirty-secret https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2025/06/26/the-gold-b...

billy99k 1y ago

This has been a failed experiment. When you legalize drugs, it comes at increased cost due to taxes and regulations. The black market can easily compete because they can sell a cheaper product without either of these things (and now that it's legal, it makes it easier to bring shipments into the country under the guise of a legal business) and it eventually drives the legitimate companies out of business. This has now been seen in both Colorado and California. Violence still drives the business and it only makes the cartels richer. I'm also tired of all the pot smoke you can smell everyone now in every US city where it's legalized. The people like me, that didn't want drugs legalized, predicted all this would happen a decade or so ago. Update: you know I'm right

bigyabai 1y ago
Once upon a time, America attempted to genuinely prohibit alcohol. The rest is calculus and easily-predicted history.

mensetmanusman 1y ago

They make more on human trafficking now, I’m assuming you don’t mean that.