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I think you're partly right. The risk is much higher with the SEC, and I agree that SEC regulatory capture is a virtual certainty at this point. But with drugs

by api 13y ago

I think you're partly right. The risk is much higher with the SEC, and I agree that SEC regulatory capture is a virtual certainty at this point. But with drugs I don't think it's the dealers we have to worry about. The dealers are the little fish. It's the financiers, the money launderers, the ones who profit. They -- if they are smart -- never touch the stuff. They invest in it like they'd invest in any other venture. My suspicion is that a captured DEA would behave not as an actual facilitator of drug trafficking but as a selective turf war tool to take politically unconnected competitors' drugs off the street. All you need there is enough influence to ensure that the DEA targets the other guys, not your bread and butter. That also helps to support the price of drugs, increasing your margins. Actually it could be even simpler than that. If you have enough spies in the DEA you could be one ahead of them, have intel about how they conduct searches, etc. Then the DEA would act for you like a passive turf enforcement army. With your advantage you could fly under the radar, allowing the DEA to mop up your competition and prop up your margins by creating scarcity. Spying on an organization is orders of magnitude easier than influencing it, and requires the compromise of lower-level personnel. There's far more field agents and mid-level paper pushers than there are higher-up agenda setters and they make less money, making them easier targets to flip. This is why the drug war is so bad for democracy and why prohibition encourages corruption. Put simply it creates a massive financial incentive for every kind of political corruption imaginable, and in so doing begets a "corruption infrastructure" that can be used for other kinds of crimes.

graedus 13y ago
Interesting, that would be a different type of capture - partial capture, you could call it - and both potentially more insidious and far more difficult to prove. One: to the public the DEA still appears to be doing its job (and in a sense, it is), whereas the SEC often appears totally ineffectual in the face of massive and obvious fraud. Two: it would be far more difficult to trace any murky connections between the financiers of drug operations (who are presumably carefully laundering their money) and DEA officials, whereas the SEC regularly openly hires wall street execs and lawyers and vice versa, so the potential for conflicts of interest is obvious. I wouldn't be too surprised if this was happening at some level in the DEA, but is there any information pointing to it or is it pure conjecture?
- api 13y ago
  Mostly conjecture. There are people who talk about it, but they're independents who are usually tarred as "conspiracy nuts." Example: http://www.madcowprod.com/ http://www.madcowprod.com/ It's not the way the media portrays them that causes me to be skeptical, but the fact that they're so small and independent. Investigation is hard, and good investigative journalism with proper vetting of all sources costs a lot of money. It is very easy to be misled by misinformation or by kooks with an agenda. On the flip side, a good way to keep something quiet from investigative journalists is to spread a lot of phony BS, wait, and then point out that it's phony in order to discredit them. For example, Daniel Hopsicker of the above link believed and perpetuated the "Mohammed Atta's American Girlfriend" story. I strongly suspect this story was BS and that he was misled by a stripper with psychological issues. But he does have some good and verifiable information on the intersection between drugs and high-level corruption, and he did uncover some links to the 9/11 highjackers that point to similar corruption. His work on drug planes and their ownership is very interesting, and those kinds of things are easier for an independent to vet.

by api 13y ago

graedus 13y ago

Interesting, that would be a different type of capture - partial capture, you could call it - and both potentially more insidious and far more difficult to prove. One: to the public the DEA still appears to be doing its job (and in a sense, it is), whereas the SEC often appears totally ineffectual in the face of massive and obvious fraud. Two: it would be far more difficult to trace any murky connections between the financiers of drug operations (who are presumably carefully laundering their money) and DEA officials, whereas the SEC regularly openly hires wall street execs and lawyers and vice versa, so the potential for conflicts of interest is obvious. I wouldn't be too surprised if this was happening at some level in the DEA, but is there any information pointing to it or is it pure conjecture?

api 13y ago
Mostly conjecture. There are people who talk about it, but they're independents who are usually tarred as "conspiracy nuts." Example: http://www.madcowprod.com/ http://www.madcowprod.com/ It's not the way the media portrays them that causes me to be skeptical, but the fact that they're so small and independent. Investigation is hard, and good investigative journalism with proper vetting of all sources costs a lot of money. It is very easy to be misled by misinformation or by kooks with an agenda. On the flip side, a good way to keep something quiet from investigative journalists is to spread a lot of phony BS, wait, and then point out that it's phony in order to discredit them. For example, Daniel Hopsicker of the above link believed and perpetuated the "Mohammed Atta's American Girlfriend" story. I strongly suspect this story was BS and that he was misled by a stripper with psychological issues. But he does have some good and verifiable information on the intersection between drugs and high-level corruption, and he did uncover some links to the 9/11 highjackers that point to similar corruption. His work on drug planes and their ownership is very interesting, and those kinds of things are easier for an independent to vet.