7 ms·

Destroying drug cartels, the mathematical way

54 points by jaxonrice 14y ago

dreamdu5t 14y ago
Drug prohibition is immoral and violates the political and ethical sovereignty of the individual. I own my body and I despise anyone who seeks to enslave it. Of course, America's "liberty" is really just a facade for their nationalism.
- paulhauggis 14y ago
  I feel the same way about taxes, but we can't always have what we want..now can we?
  - mikeash 14y ago
    Taxes at least have an upside to them.
  - dreamdu5t 14y ago
    We can or our children can if we keep talking about it and enough people fight for it.
  - mindslight 14y ago
    We can certainly hold those that force these requirements on us in contempt, openly disrespect their system at every chance, mock their idea of progress, and otherwise work to undermine them. The alternative is to tacitly support them and their philosophy by calling taxes a responsibility, scapegoating individual people rather than indicting the process, focusing on the interesting technical details of their force multipliers, repeating half of their talking points to feel part of a televised identity, contributing to red/blue celebrity popularity contest turnout, etc.
  - itistoday2 14y ago
    Taxes and drug prohibition are two very different things, with completely different reasoning behind them. Equating the two is like saying, "Cars should have seat belts, and white people should own black people as slaves." One idea has practical, well thought out reasons behind it that help improve people's lives, the other doesn't. Drug prohibition causes far more damage to society than a society where all drugs are legalized. It's also an affront to what seems like a basic human right: choosing what you put in your body. The concept of prohibition certainly doesn't have a single well thought out reason to support it. Every single argument in favor of it has been shown to be either false, or the worse of two evils, and finally, drug prohibition has been a total failure, a conclusion that's agreed to even by those who support it. It hasn't achieved any of its goals and will not achieve them. I can sense that you probably want specifics, so I'll list just a few, and if you want more... JFGI. - AP: failure to meet any goals http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/05/13/ap-impact-years-trillion-war-drugs-failed-meet-goals/ http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/05/13/ap-impact-years-tril... - History of marijuana laws and reasons that were given for them: http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/History/whiteb1.htm http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/History/whiteb1.htm - Portugal's success with total decriminalization of all drugs (not as good as legalization, but it's a step forward): https://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=portugal-drug-decriminalization https://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=portugal-d... http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/07/05/ten-years-after-decriminalization-drug-abuse-down-by-half-in-portugal/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/07/05/ten-years-af... - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arguments_for_and_against_drug_prohibition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arguments_for_and_against_drug... - Simple observations of hypocrisy (just one example: Marijuana does not fit the definition of a Schedule I substance yet is classified as such, while cigarettes do fit the definition and are legal). The concept of "taxes", or collecting a pool of resources to be used for society at large, does have some well reasoned arguments to support it. It is an idea that does actually help society. Certainly there is a lot of debate about how those funds should be used, and whether they are used inappropriately, but the basic idea of pooling the collective resources of a society for the common good at least has a leg to stand on.
    - mindslight 14y ago
      Heh, both of your juxtapositions are a lot closer than you seem to think. Drug prohibition is actually based on tax laws. The bulk of federal drug deillegalization will not even take an act of congress - they'll just start issuing tax stamps. Seat belt laws are based on the idea that government/society has a financial interest in the productivity of your well functioning body. This analysis essentially treats us all as mild slaves. The conditions are certainly better than the racial slavery of yesteryear (although I'm just repeating the groupthinkline here; I don't have a time machine), but the ideology is not. Pooling money for common purposes and avoiding free riders has a moral leg to stand on. However, the current system has massively outgrown this philosophical justification, using the sheer majority of revenue collected for maladaptive antifeatures.
      - IgorPartola 14y ago
        I have no problem with you driving without a seatbelt on, so long as you sign a waiver that says that if you do not have enough money in the bank and your insurances will not cover you, theother emergencny room staff must turn you down before providing you treatment at my expense. So long as I am effectively buying you implicit insurance I sure as hell want you to be careful. Feel free to buy your way out of that. That is a strawman for decriminalizing drugs. When you don't wear a seatbelt, you risk others' financial harm. We deal with that largely without loss of other people's lives. When you mug people for cash at knife point to buy heroin, peole get physically hurt. You cannot possibly sign a waiver saying that you will not mug, steal, break-in, etc. if you decide to try heroin. Mind you I am not arguing against decriminalization or legalization of drugs. Just saying that your argument is bogus.
        mindslight 14y ago
        Eh? First, I made no argument connecting seat belts and drugs. Perhaps you're just skipping around my comment, reassembling sentence fragments in an arbitrary order? Second, given that most people have insurance, and that the ones who don't are free riding on emergency care for any injury, but yet you're saying that you would support deillegalization of non-seatbelt wearing if one were to sign a specific waiver (which the cartel of insurance companies would then prohibit you from signing anyway, no doubt), I don't believe your argument to be sincere. I can only infer that your real viewpoint is that universal mandatory seatbelt usage is a good thing, and you're just making yet another specious justification for dictating individuals' behavior. FWIW, I've held up starting to drive for people who weren't putting a seat belt on, and I think it's pretty ridiculous to not wear one. I just don't think the government has any business mandating such behavior.
  - grannyg00se 14y ago
    That doesn't mean you shouldn't fight to right a wrong. When a large number of people decide that they've had enough of it, change happens. I'm no history buff, but I'm pretty sure that rampant taxation is at least part of the reason that the USA exists in the first place.
    - siscia 14y ago
      Sorry it is a little off topic: rampant taxation in the USA ? No are you serious... When you all talk about taxation in the USA you are talking about a joke for the European (Italian in particular 55% of tax) standard...
      - montecarl 14y ago
        He is referring the the revolutionary war against England. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_taxation_without_representation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_taxation_without_representat...
davyjones 14y ago
Please be advised that there is a grisly image in the link.
- mtgx 14y ago
  A man shot in the head and on the ground.
- keithpeter 14y ago
  UK resident personal view: we have this Imperialist thing going where it is ok to show dead foreigners from hot countries but not ok to show dead people in UK. It is a known issue, one commented on a lot in relation to tabloids. I'm surprised to see New Scientist going in for this.
pstuart 14y ago
Or maybe they could just, you know, legalize and regulate it?
- walru 14y ago
  The war will never end because of how profitable it is. Only if the 'fight' comes here to the states will they ever begin to think about legalizing anything.
  - snitko 14y ago
    When people say "it's profitable" I think what they really should say is that it's profitable for one group of individuals, when at the same time very unprofitable for the other group(s) of individuals (namely, consumers and victims). Moreover, unprofitability for the latter greatly exceeds the profitability for the former and it is only by coercing and power is it possible to preserve the status quo.
- siscia 14y ago
  Idk, we can definitely talk about marijuana but cocaine and eroine are very different... Legalize them would be at least very risky. Anyhow we need to move in a different direction than kill/arrest everybody, it simply not gonna work.
  - dllthomas 14y ago
    While not outright legalizing, Portugal's massive decriminalization applied to heroine and cocaine, and their problem seems to have gotten better rather than worse.
    - siscia 14y ago
      In Portugal is illegal have drugs... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal (Interesting wiki to read by the way...) They not only "decriminalized" drugs, they also put a lot of money in prevention with TV ads and more... They educated people first... I will say that it is the best/only way we should follow.
keithpeter 14y ago
"Vortex uses network-analysis algorithms to construct diagrams for court cases that show the interactions between cartel members, governors and law enforcers. These reveal links that are not otherwise visible, what Salcedo-Albaran calls "betweeners" - people who are not well-connected, but serve as a bridge linking two groups." Has anyone done any work on using this kind of network analysis in legal and productive organisations to see who has the most impact on innovation or changes in practice?
- 1337biz 14y ago
  The problem is that "impact on innovation" starts usually already with a big discussion on how to measure innovation. The "easy" way is to take very accessible data points such as the number of patent applications. But you can imagine just by looking at the patent system related discussions around here on hn that this is a very "discussable" subject.
  - keithpeter 14y ago
    I wasn't communicating well, what I'm on about is that knowledge flow in large organisations is not always (or even often) through 'official' channels. I'm thinking of Etienne Wenger's work on situated learning, especially the insurance office example in Lave and Wenger's book. It struck me that datasets from email, and from sharepoint like systems might help people identify the 'betweeners' in their organisation.
    - kvnn 14y ago
      Yes, people do this - it is called Social Network Analysis and has been around a few decades. It is well introduced in http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1449306462 http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1449306462 . There is actually a thorough example of analyzing an organization's "social leaders" and arranging departments to take advantage of them.
- datr 14y ago
  I read an article about using IBM's Watson to do such a thing about a year ago but I can't seem to find it right now. The gist was much like Watson can be used to find how data and information moved in e-discovery, the same principles could be used to determine which employees were driving innovation and had the most influence in the company.
siscia 14y ago
In my opinion the only way to win this war is to start from the bottom. There are tons of farmer in Colombia who can only survive by growing those drugs, but they would like, in most of the case, to be able to grow crop or bananas or whatever is legal. However they can't because a mere economic reason, they won't get enough money to survive from traditional culture. If we invested the money we are actually using to violently fight against the cartel to develop the infrastructure and the education in those country we all be better off; we would have way less drugs in our world and we would have launch a new economy (more market for American brands like apple, google, IBM)
- mtgx 14y ago
  I don't think I remember the book where I read this, but it was something about a former chief of police of New York, I believe in the 90's, when criminality was very high, and instead of focusing on the "big crimes", he focused on the small ones, like stopping graffiti on the walls, people jumping the gate at the subway, and other small crimes like that. The point was to dramatically reduce this "ecosystem" of criminality. I believe it's kind of like when people see garbage on the ground, it's much easier for them to throw their garbage on the ground, too, because "others are doing it". The same thing must be with small crimes and with the people joining the drug cartels. I believe The District was inspired from this guy's work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_District http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_District
  - ryanwaggoner 14y ago
    You're probably talking about the broken windows theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory#New_York_City http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory#New_York_...
  - iamben 14y ago
    Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point?
    - protomyth 14y ago
      The Freakonomics book has a counter argument to Gladwell's conclusions. They point out that crime went down nationwide and in cities at the same rate as NYC without the NYPD policies. They also point out a connection to the legalization of abortion. // I am reporting on a book not expressing my own opinion
carsongross 14y ago
Destroying drug cartels, the practical way: legalize.
- eagsalazar2 14y ago
  The idea that cracking down harder is going to work is just a complete fantasy. It will just mean that the supply side becomes even more violent, aggressive, and smart.
- hooande 14y ago
  I don't understand the economic argument for legalization. It will turn the price of drugs into price + taxes. The current complex distribution and supply network doesn't have to pay taxes because they are already illegal, so they'll continue to charge the current price. The average addict will want drugs as cheaply as possible and would probably prefer to buy from someone in their neighborhood as opposed to a pharmacy. In the case of mexican cartels specifically, I think there is more to it than just drug sales. They control large areas of mexico, entire towns. They're providing services of security and dispute resolution that the government can't or won't because the areas are too poor. Whenever a large portion of a country is ceded to a criminal group (like sicily used to be) unwinding the problem is more complicated than deincentivizing drug sales.
  - spindritf 14y ago
    > It will turn the price of drugs into price + taxes The price of avoiding authorities, not being able to openly use legitimate financing, or other facilities (transportation, storage, distribution chains), and constricted pool of talented employees is very high and currently included in the price. Also, many potential customers are not being served currently because they're not willing to engage in highly illegal transactions. Even with fairly high taxes, regular corporations would easily be able to deliver product of higher quality and generally better experience not necessarily more expensively. Just like they do with alcohol, tobacco, or chocolate.
  - jseliger 14y ago
    >The current complex distribution and supply network doesn't have to pay taxes because they are already illegal, so they'll continue to charge the current price This is highly unlikely. It's MUCH cheaper to obey the law than not; as I said in another comment, you may notice that, after the U.S. ended alcohol prohibition, almost no one sold alcohol illegally because it wasn't worth it. Daniel Okrent's book Last Call is pretty good on this subject.
Daniel_Newby 14y ago
Evolution will defeat this strategy in short order. Some organizations practice better communications security and will thrive in the vacuum created by the loss of their competitors.
marshallp 14y ago
Legalization is the best way to end it. The network analysis needs to occur about politicians in the rich countries, how to manipulate them into legalizing drugs. It's a lot easier to collect data on them and it's the actual root cause.
- stephengillie 14y ago
  Legalization would stop the flow of money and jobs away from this country and would also remove the main reason these cartels exist. Legalization of marijuana will allow buyers and growers to come together in their communities. It allows buyers to choose local farmers instead of those in foreign countries. Legalization would remove the cash source that causes people to want be part of these cartels.
dllthomas 14y ago
To the many talking about legalization in favor of this kind of approach, I think you're missing the point. I am entirely in favor of legalization, and I think it is a necessary component of fixing things, but things have gotten seriously broken. The drug trade has built massive criminal enterprises which have built themselves infrastructure and organization and connections that can be used toward ends other than just shipping drugs. It keeps pouring money into these enterprises, and making things worse, but if we turn off (or down) that spigot we still have to deal with these organizations. And as someone put it, they're not in drugs because they have a deep interest in agriculture, it's just profitable, and their competitive advantage is that they're willing to do illegal things. Most of them already deal with other things as well, and I'd expect them to try and ramp up income from those to supplement a loss of drug related income. All of this to say, we have a problem we need to deal with. An important part of that is to stop making the problem worse, but then we still need to fix it - something like this could be valuable to that end.
- munin 14y ago
  something perplexes me about talk of "winning the drug war". okay, we're at war with the cartels. let's characterize the enemy. the enemy: - has no land, territory, or people that we can lay siege to. in fact, their civilian population is our civilian population! - has more military funding than we do - as a result, they have an endless supply of soldiers for all levels of their command hierarchy - has less oversight requirements than our military (effectively zero) - has no need for popular support - has no need for large infrastructure, facilities, or anything really. if you take away some building of theirs with soldiers, vehicles and drugs, they will buy 10 more to replace what you took. they can continue to do this because for every dollar that you produce, as the state, to fund your war, they produce 3. so you're fighting an insurgent war against everyone and they have more money / resources than you do. and you expect to win? hey, maybe if we took away their ability to make money and recruit people, then this starts to make sense...
  - dllthomas 14y ago
    Agreed. The only sane approach is to legalize sensibly (funding education and treatment with taxes and money saved) and clean up the mess we've made.
BenderRodriguez 14y ago
The infamous group Anonymous pledged war against The Zeta cartel in 2011 with announcements that they had names, and even personal information about the cartel members. Unfortunately, anonymous decided to back down due to threats of aggravation. Though, in the end the hostage was released the cartel has killed numerous internet bloggers/reporters, and has kidnapped hackers to perform black-hat cyber attacks against targets... It all seems to come down to the amount of resources one has to invest in such an effort. The various law enforcement communities are fighting with the "latest" technology but, the cartels are right there with them if not below or above them... In the United States, the latest defense may be the use of various autonomous robots such as, submarines, boats & drones. http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/mexico-confirms-seeking-us-drone-help-in-drug-war/2011/03/16/ABbSEZg_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/mexico-confirms-seeking-... Unfortunately, similar techniques are being applied by the cartels to thwart the deterrents. It seems only obvious because, its less weight, and less people = cheap. Like Autonomous ultralight UAV. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4415508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4415508 Autonomous ROV/USV Submarines without life support systems must be cheaper. Just mischievous robots in general, https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCUQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cs.unh.edu%2F~it666%2Freading_list%2FPhysical%2Ffinal_ieee_robot_crime_august_2010.pdf&ei=p6aWULf1DO3liwKwmoHwCQ&usg=AFQjCNFNAlhEKuVRCyDEZ-ywqg54NJpl-Q https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&... Think on it.
siscia 14y ago
Sorry guys, I am seeing so many "legalize" that I really need to say that we cannot really legalized everything. If we legalized so powerful/bad drugs like heroin or cocaine we build a business, if we legalize those drugs then we need to legalized newer drugs, if we let corporation to make money out of drugs, well the first scenario that I can think about is a big pharmaceutical corp. who is investing in order to build super addicted drugs, super cheap drugs (free for the new-consumers ???) and commercial like "Try fancy-cool-drug-name you will get smarter, more beautiful and every woman will want you" (and at the very end a little voice will said very very fast "It can give you dependency") I mean, I already hate the commercial of antidepressant (that are about the same stuff) and I am sure you do the same, legalize everything will be too much. There is only one single scenario where it would be possible, when we will Educate (note the capital E) every single person, then no one will use such powerful drugs (heroin, cocaine and acid, i don't know anymore).
- slowpoke 14y ago
  Education shouldn't be about not doing drugs, but about not getting addicted to them. It's perfectly fine to occasionally take drugs (you know, like CH₃CH₂OH or C₈H₁₀N₄O₂, the former of which is a lot worse than a good number of illegal and "dangerous" drugs like THC), it's not fine to be constantly stoned/high/drunk/intoxicated. I don't want even more "drugs are bad, mkay kids" in schools. Drugs are perfectly fine and have been part of human civilization for thousands of years now. It's only been very recently that people got the idiotic idea to crack down on them.
- unfamiliar 14y ago
  >I mean, I already hate the commercial of antidepressant I live in the UK and I have never seen an advert for antidepressant, or for any drug stronger than aspirin. Sounds to me that the problem you describe is not so much legalisation of drugs, but that your country's advertising laws are broken.

54 points by jaxonrice 14y ago

Drug prohibition is immoral and violates the political and ethical sovereignty of the individual. I own my body and I despise anyone who seeks to enslave it. Of course, America's "liberty" is really just a facade for their nationalism.

paulhauggis 14y ago
I feel the same way about taxes, but we can't always have what we want..now can we?
- mikeash 14y ago
  Taxes at least have an upside to them.
- dreamdu5t 14y ago
  We can or our children can if we keep talking about it and enough people fight for it.
- mindslight 14y ago
  We can certainly hold those that force these requirements on us in contempt, openly disrespect their system at every chance, mock their idea of progress, and otherwise work to undermine them. The alternative is to tacitly support them and their philosophy by calling taxes a responsibility, scapegoating individual people rather than indicting the process, focusing on the interesting technical details of their force multipliers, repeating half of their talking points to feel part of a televised identity, contributing to red/blue celebrity popularity contest turnout, etc.
- itistoday2 14y ago
  Taxes and drug prohibition are two very different things, with completely different reasoning behind them. Equating the two is like saying, "Cars should have seat belts, and white people should own black people as slaves." One idea has practical, well thought out reasons behind it that help improve people's lives, the other doesn't. Drug prohibition causes far more damage to society than a society where all drugs are legalized. It's also an affront to what seems like a basic human right: choosing what you put in your body. The concept of prohibition certainly doesn't have a single well thought out reason to support it. Every single argument in favor of it has been shown to be either false, or the worse of two evils, and finally, drug prohibition has been a total failure, a conclusion that's agreed to even by those who support it. It hasn't achieved any of its goals and will not achieve them. I can sense that you probably want specifics, so I'll list just a few, and if you want more... JFGI. - AP: failure to meet any goals http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/05/13/ap-impact-years-trillion-war-drugs-failed-meet-goals/ http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/05/13/ap-impact-years-tril... - History of marijuana laws and reasons that were given for them: http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/History/whiteb1.htm http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/History/whiteb1.htm - Portugal's success with total decriminalization of all drugs (not as good as legalization, but it's a step forward): https://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=portugal-drug-decriminalization https://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=portugal-d... http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/07/05/ten-years-after-decriminalization-drug-abuse-down-by-half-in-portugal/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/07/05/ten-years-af... - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arguments_for_and_against_drug_prohibition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arguments_for_and_against_drug... - Simple observations of hypocrisy (just one example: Marijuana does not fit the definition of a Schedule I substance yet is classified as such, while cigarettes do fit the definition and are legal). The concept of "taxes", or collecting a pool of resources to be used for society at large, does have some well reasoned arguments to support it. It is an idea that does actually help society. Certainly there is a lot of debate about how those funds should be used, and whether they are used inappropriately, but the basic idea of pooling the collective resources of a society for the common good at least has a leg to stand on.
  - mindslight 14y ago
    Heh, both of your juxtapositions are a lot closer than you seem to think. Drug prohibition is actually based on tax laws. The bulk of federal drug deillegalization will not even take an act of congress - they'll just start issuing tax stamps. Seat belt laws are based on the idea that government/society has a financial interest in the productivity of your well functioning body. This analysis essentially treats us all as mild slaves. The conditions are certainly better than the racial slavery of yesteryear (although I'm just repeating the groupthinkline here; I don't have a time machine), but the ideology is not. Pooling money for common purposes and avoiding free riders has a moral leg to stand on. However, the current system has massively outgrown this philosophical justification, using the sheer majority of revenue collected for maladaptive antifeatures.
    - IgorPartola 14y ago
      I have no problem with you driving without a seatbelt on, so long as you sign a waiver that says that if you do not have enough money in the bank and your insurances will not cover you, theother emergencny room staff must turn you down before providing you treatment at my expense. So long as I am effectively buying you implicit insurance I sure as hell want you to be careful. Feel free to buy your way out of that. That is a strawman for decriminalizing drugs. When you don't wear a seatbelt, you risk others' financial harm. We deal with that largely without loss of other people's lives. When you mug people for cash at knife point to buy heroin, peole get physically hurt. You cannot possibly sign a waiver saying that you will not mug, steal, break-in, etc. if you decide to try heroin. Mind you I am not arguing against decriminalization or legalization of drugs. Just saying that your argument is bogus.
      - mindslight 14y ago
        Eh? First, I made no argument connecting seat belts and drugs. Perhaps you're just skipping around my comment, reassembling sentence fragments in an arbitrary order? Second, given that most people have insurance, and that the ones who don't are free riding on emergency care for any injury, but yet you're saying that you would support deillegalization of non-seatbelt wearing if one were to sign a specific waiver (which the cartel of insurance companies would then prohibit you from signing anyway, no doubt), I don't believe your argument to be sincere. I can only infer that your real viewpoint is that universal mandatory seatbelt usage is a good thing, and you're just making yet another specious justification for dictating individuals' behavior. FWIW, I've held up starting to drive for people who weren't putting a seat belt on, and I think it's pretty ridiculous to not wear one. I just don't think the government has any business mandating such behavior.
- grannyg00se 14y ago
  That doesn't mean you shouldn't fight to right a wrong. When a large number of people decide that they've had enough of it, change happens. I'm no history buff, but I'm pretty sure that rampant taxation is at least part of the reason that the USA exists in the first place.
  - siscia 14y ago
    Sorry it is a little off topic: rampant taxation in the USA ? No are you serious... When you all talk about taxation in the USA you are talking about a joke for the European (Italian in particular 55% of tax) standard...
    - montecarl 14y ago
      He is referring the the revolutionary war against England. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_taxation_without_representation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_taxation_without_representat...

davyjones 14y ago

Please be advised that there is a grisly image in the link.

mtgx 14y ago
A man shot in the head and on the ground.
keithpeter 14y ago
UK resident personal view: we have this Imperialist thing going where it is ok to show dead foreigners from hot countries but not ok to show dead people in UK. It is a known issue, one commented on a lot in relation to tabloids. I'm surprised to see New Scientist going in for this.

pstuart 14y ago

Or maybe they could just, you know, legalize and regulate it?

walru 14y ago
The war will never end because of how profitable it is. Only if the 'fight' comes here to the states will they ever begin to think about legalizing anything.
- snitko 14y ago
  When people say "it's profitable" I think what they really should say is that it's profitable for one group of individuals, when at the same time very unprofitable for the other group(s) of individuals (namely, consumers and victims). Moreover, unprofitability for the latter greatly exceeds the profitability for the former and it is only by coercing and power is it possible to preserve the status quo.
siscia 14y ago
Idk, we can definitely talk about marijuana but cocaine and eroine are very different... Legalize them would be at least very risky. Anyhow we need to move in a different direction than kill/arrest everybody, it simply not gonna work.
- dllthomas 14y ago
  While not outright legalizing, Portugal's massive decriminalization applied to heroine and cocaine, and their problem seems to have gotten better rather than worse.
  - siscia 14y ago
    In Portugal is illegal have drugs... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal (Interesting wiki to read by the way...) They not only "decriminalized" drugs, they also put a lot of money in prevention with TV ads and more... They educated people first... I will say that it is the best/only way we should follow.

keithpeter 14y ago

"Vortex uses network-analysis algorithms to construct diagrams for court cases that show the interactions between cartel members, governors and law enforcers. These reveal links that are not otherwise visible, what Salcedo-Albaran calls "betweeners" - people who are not well-connected, but serve as a bridge linking two groups." Has anyone done any work on using this kind of network analysis in legal and productive organisations to see who has the most impact on innovation or changes in practice?

1337biz 14y ago
The problem is that "impact on innovation" starts usually already with a big discussion on how to measure innovation. The "easy" way is to take very accessible data points such as the number of patent applications. But you can imagine just by looking at the patent system related discussions around here on hn that this is a very "discussable" subject.
- keithpeter 14y ago
  I wasn't communicating well, what I'm on about is that knowledge flow in large organisations is not always (or even often) through 'official' channels. I'm thinking of Etienne Wenger's work on situated learning, especially the insurance office example in Lave and Wenger's book. It struck me that datasets from email, and from sharepoint like systems might help people identify the 'betweeners' in their organisation.
  - kvnn 14y ago
    Yes, people do this - it is called Social Network Analysis and has been around a few decades. It is well introduced in http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1449306462 http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1449306462 . There is actually a thorough example of analyzing an organization's "social leaders" and arranging departments to take advantage of them.
datr 14y ago
I read an article about using IBM's Watson to do such a thing about a year ago but I can't seem to find it right now. The gist was much like Watson can be used to find how data and information moved in e-discovery, the same principles could be used to determine which employees were driving innovation and had the most influence in the company.

siscia 14y ago

In my opinion the only way to win this war is to start from the bottom. There are tons of farmer in Colombia who can only survive by growing those drugs, but they would like, in most of the case, to be able to grow crop or bananas or whatever is legal. However they can't because a mere economic reason, they won't get enough money to survive from traditional culture. If we invested the money we are actually using to violently fight against the cartel to develop the infrastructure and the education in those country we all be better off; we would have way less drugs in our world and we would have launch a new economy (more market for American brands like apple, google, IBM)

mtgx 14y ago
I don't think I remember the book where I read this, but it was something about a former chief of police of New York, I believe in the 90's, when criminality was very high, and instead of focusing on the "big crimes", he focused on the small ones, like stopping graffiti on the walls, people jumping the gate at the subway, and other small crimes like that. The point was to dramatically reduce this "ecosystem" of criminality. I believe it's kind of like when people see garbage on the ground, it's much easier for them to throw their garbage on the ground, too, because "others are doing it". The same thing must be with small crimes and with the people joining the drug cartels. I believe The District was inspired from this guy's work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_District http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_District
- ryanwaggoner 14y ago
  You're probably talking about the broken windows theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory#New_York_City http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory#New_York_...
- iamben 14y ago
  Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point?
  - protomyth 14y ago
    The Freakonomics book has a counter argument to Gladwell's conclusions. They point out that crime went down nationwide and in cities at the same rate as NYC without the NYPD policies. They also point out a connection to the legalization of abortion. // I am reporting on a book not expressing my own opinion

carsongross 14y ago

Destroying drug cartels, the practical way: legalize.

eagsalazar2 14y ago
The idea that cracking down harder is going to work is just a complete fantasy. It will just mean that the supply side becomes even more violent, aggressive, and smart.
hooande 14y ago
I don't understand the economic argument for legalization. It will turn the price of drugs into price + taxes. The current complex distribution and supply network doesn't have to pay taxes because they are already illegal, so they'll continue to charge the current price. The average addict will want drugs as cheaply as possible and would probably prefer to buy from someone in their neighborhood as opposed to a pharmacy. In the case of mexican cartels specifically, I think there is more to it than just drug sales. They control large areas of mexico, entire towns. They're providing services of security and dispute resolution that the government can't or won't because the areas are too poor. Whenever a large portion of a country is ceded to a criminal group (like sicily used to be) unwinding the problem is more complicated than deincentivizing drug sales.
- spindritf 14y ago
  > It will turn the price of drugs into price + taxes The price of avoiding authorities, not being able to openly use legitimate financing, or other facilities (transportation, storage, distribution chains), and constricted pool of talented employees is very high and currently included in the price. Also, many potential customers are not being served currently because they're not willing to engage in highly illegal transactions. Even with fairly high taxes, regular corporations would easily be able to deliver product of higher quality and generally better experience not necessarily more expensively. Just like they do with alcohol, tobacco, or chocolate.
- jseliger 14y ago
  >The current complex distribution and supply network doesn't have to pay taxes because they are already illegal, so they'll continue to charge the current price This is highly unlikely. It's MUCH cheaper to obey the law than not; as I said in another comment, you may notice that, after the U.S. ended alcohol prohibition, almost no one sold alcohol illegally because it wasn't worth it. Daniel Okrent's book Last Call is pretty good on this subject.

Daniel_Newby 14y ago

Evolution will defeat this strategy in short order. Some organizations practice better communications security and will thrive in the vacuum created by the loss of their competitors.

marshallp 14y ago

Legalization is the best way to end it. The network analysis needs to occur about politicians in the rich countries, how to manipulate them into legalizing drugs. It's a lot easier to collect data on them and it's the actual root cause.

stephengillie 14y ago
Legalization would stop the flow of money and jobs away from this country and would also remove the main reason these cartels exist. Legalization of marijuana will allow buyers and growers to come together in their communities. It allows buyers to choose local farmers instead of those in foreign countries. Legalization would remove the cash source that causes people to want be part of these cartels.

dllthomas 14y ago

To the many talking about legalization in favor of this kind of approach, I think you're missing the point. I am entirely in favor of legalization, and I think it is a necessary component of fixing things, but things have gotten seriously broken. The drug trade has built massive criminal enterprises which have built themselves infrastructure and organization and connections that can be used toward ends other than just shipping drugs. It keeps pouring money into these enterprises, and making things worse, but if we turn off (or down) that spigot we still have to deal with these organizations. And as someone put it, they're not in drugs because they have a deep interest in agriculture, it's just profitable, and their competitive advantage is that they're willing to do illegal things. Most of them already deal with other things as well, and I'd expect them to try and ramp up income from those to supplement a loss of drug related income. All of this to say, we have a problem we need to deal with. An important part of that is to stop making the problem worse, but then we still need to fix it - something like this could be valuable to that end.

munin 14y ago
something perplexes me about talk of "winning the drug war". okay, we're at war with the cartels. let's characterize the enemy. the enemy: - has no land, territory, or people that we can lay siege to. in fact, their civilian population is our civilian population! - has more military funding than we do - as a result, they have an endless supply of soldiers for all levels of their command hierarchy - has less oversight requirements than our military (effectively zero) - has no need for popular support - has no need for large infrastructure, facilities, or anything really. if you take away some building of theirs with soldiers, vehicles and drugs, they will buy 10 more to replace what you took. they can continue to do this because for every dollar that you produce, as the state, to fund your war, they produce 3. so you're fighting an insurgent war against everyone and they have more money / resources than you do. and you expect to win? hey, maybe if we took away their ability to make money and recruit people, then this starts to make sense...
- dllthomas 14y ago
  Agreed. The only sane approach is to legalize sensibly (funding education and treatment with taxes and money saved) and clean up the mess we've made.

BenderRodriguez 14y ago

The infamous group Anonymous pledged war against The Zeta cartel in 2011 with announcements that they had names, and even personal information about the cartel members. Unfortunately, anonymous decided to back down due to threats of aggravation. Though, in the end the hostage was released the cartel has killed numerous internet bloggers/reporters, and has kidnapped hackers to perform black-hat cyber attacks against targets... It all seems to come down to the amount of resources one has to invest in such an effort. The various law enforcement communities are fighting with the "latest" technology but, the cartels are right there with them if not below or above them... In the United States, the latest defense may be the use of various autonomous robots such as, submarines, boats & drones. http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/mexico-confirms-seeking-us-drone-help-in-drug-war/2011/03/16/ABbSEZg_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/mexico-confirms-seeking-... Unfortunately, similar techniques are being applied by the cartels to thwart the deterrents. It seems only obvious because, its less weight, and less people = cheap. Like Autonomous ultralight UAV. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4415508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4415508 Autonomous ROV/USV Submarines without life support systems must be cheaper. Just mischievous robots in general, https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCUQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cs.unh.edu%2F~it666%2Freading_list%2FPhysical%2Ffinal_ieee_robot_crime_august_2010.pdf&ei=p6aWULf1DO3liwKwmoHwCQ&usg=AFQjCNFNAlhEKuVRCyDEZ-ywqg54NJpl-Q https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&... Think on it.

siscia 14y ago

Sorry guys, I am seeing so many "legalize" that I really need to say that we cannot really legalized everything. If we legalized so powerful/bad drugs like heroin or cocaine we build a business, if we legalize those drugs then we need to legalized newer drugs, if we let corporation to make money out of drugs, well the first scenario that I can think about is a big pharmaceutical corp. who is investing in order to build super addicted drugs, super cheap drugs (free for the new-consumers ???) and commercial like "Try fancy-cool-drug-name you will get smarter, more beautiful and every woman will want you" (and at the very end a little voice will said very very fast "It can give you dependency") I mean, I already hate the commercial of antidepressant (that are about the same stuff) and I am sure you do the same, legalize everything will be too much. There is only one single scenario where it would be possible, when we will Educate (note the capital E) every single person, then no one will use such powerful drugs (heroin, cocaine and acid, i don't know anymore).

slowpoke 14y ago
Education shouldn't be about not doing drugs, but about not getting addicted to them. It's perfectly fine to occasionally take drugs (you know, like CH₃CH₂OH or C₈H₁₀N₄O₂, the former of which is a lot worse than a good number of illegal and "dangerous" drugs like THC), it's not fine to be constantly stoned/high/drunk/intoxicated. I don't want even more "drugs are bad, mkay kids" in schools. Drugs are perfectly fine and have been part of human civilization for thousands of years now. It's only been very recently that people got the idiotic idea to crack down on them.
unfamiliar 14y ago
>I mean, I already hate the commercial of antidepressant I live in the UK and I have never seen an advert for antidepressant, or for any drug stronger than aspirin. Sounds to me that the problem you describe is not so much legalisation of drugs, but that your country's advertising laws are broken.