It blows my mind that there are multiple organizations that are so large and well armed that even the Mexican government won't touch them. Keep in mind that the Mexican military has the 17th most active duty personnel in the world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...) and spent $7 billion last year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Armed_Forces), and still isn't willing to take on drug cartels stomping on their own sovereign territory.
These guys just throw up repeaters and not only do they not try to hide them, they actually mark them to show who is going to be destroying your life if you take them down. Oh, and you have to pay if you want to work on your own legitimate equipment that is rightfully on that tower.
The illegal drug trade exists on a scale unimaginable to most people. Imagine if we could figure out how to legitimize it- we'd save countless lives over stupid stuff like having your life threatened just because you work for a telecom company and need to do your job. If we could tax drug money at just a couple percent we could invest in all sorts of social programs and infrastructure, rather than funding thugs. The crazy part is that a lot of the drug lords don't even spend a good chunk of their fortune, they just store massive amounts of money in houses they'll never even live in.
Edit: To clarify my point a little, the reason the Mexican government isn't willing to do anything is that they couldn't do anything about it even if they tried. The Mexican military has fewer people than the cartels and have a smaller budget. According to this article from 2012 (https://muse.jhu.edu/article/485071) the Mexican cartels employ 450,000 people and make $25 billion annually (these numbers have probably increased in the last eight years). The Mexican military would have to be incredibly skilled to take them on with 177,000 people and a $7 billion budget. And even then, that's just the Mexican cartels, there are more in South America and the rest of the world. Stopping the illegal drug trade would take a unified policy effort from every government in the world, we're past the point of being able to be able to fight the cartels with military power.
There are a few factions - but this is not a drug war - it is in a total civil war. The difference is: the ability to control government. Taking over towns, expelling the police, trying to murder top police cheifs [1], negotiation of prisoners [3] -- all examples of what happens when a society is divided - in civil war. They are not fighting over pot farms.
Killing 24 people in a rehab clinic isn't reported much in the US due to politics [2], but, this country needs international help NOW. The US is purchasing drugs at a massive rate on the I5 corridor and is now a drugged out enabler. I wouldn't expect help from the US. The cash stakes are huge: some cities import drugs in metric tons in the US and avoid prosecution [4].
I heard that rehab clinics in Mexico are often used by the cartels as safe houses for cartel members, and their weapons are taken away during their stay until they actually go out and do their mission to avoid cartel members to go freelancing.
Strictly speaking it isn't officially a civil war, because the cartels prefer to operate as a mafia instead of as a Party To A Conflict. (or am I showing that I grew up last century, by even considering Geneva Conventions?)
(a) That of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;
(b) That of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance;
(c) That of carrying arms openly;
but for whatever reason they feel they have an advantage in not fulfilling:
(d) That of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.
Nota Bene George Washington would return, unopened, letters from the British that were not properly addressed, because he wished to emphasise that his men were regulars.
In more recent news, the sundry poorly regulated US militia may have (a) and (c) but fail on (b), while the "boogaloo" have (b) and (c) but fail on (a), and neither has yet shown any sign of how far they might observe (d).
Most guerillas don't fall under that definition any way. And there can be civil war regardless, Northern Ireland, various parts of Africa, Afghanistan, Syria...
if my maths are correct, we have 4,5/100'000 firearm homicides reported for the US.
This is less than the hot conflicts (including, per TFA, the mexican drug war), and same order of magnitude, but still less than iraq (7/100'000 in 2019).
However, it's an order of magnitude more than ukraine (0,3/100'000 in 2019).
Shootings per day in the US doesn't count. To be a Party To A Conflict, not only does there have be some organisation to the violence, but the organised party has to agree to certain things, including renouncing physical or mental torture, or cruel or degrading treatment, as well as attacks on civilian population as such or civilian persons. Attacks shall be directed solely against military objectives.
(These are probably the reasons the cartels have for not becoming recognised belligerents: they likely see themselves as having unbundled the profitable aspects of violence from the unprofitable parts of governance.)
> Formally, war may be defined as the "reciprocal application of violence by public, armed bodies."
> If it is not reciprocal, it is not war, the killing of persons who do not defend themselves is not war, but slaughter, massacre, or punishment.
> If the bodies involved are not public, their violence is not war. Even our enemies in World War II were relatively careful about this distinction, because they did not know how soon or easily a violation of the rules might be scored against them. To be public, the combatants need not be legal—that is, constitutionally set up; it suffices, according to international usage, for the fighters to have a reasonable minimum of numbers, some kind of identification, and a purpose which is political. If you shoot your neighbor, you will be committing mere murder; but if you gather twenty or thirty friends, together, tie a red handkerchief around the left arm of each man, announce that you are out to overthrow the government of the United States, and then shoot your neighbor as a counterrevolutionary impediment to the new order of things, you can have the satisfaction of having waged war. (In practical terms, this means that you will be put to death for treason and rebellion, not merely for murder.)
> Finally, war must be violent. According to the law of modern states, all the way from Iceland to the Yemen, economic, political, or moral pressure is not war; war is the legalization, in behalf of the state, of things which no individual may lawfully do in time of peace. As a matter of fact, even in time of war you cannot kill the enemy unless you do so on behalf of the state; if you had shot a Japanese creditor of yours privately, or even shot a Japanese soldier when you yourself were out of uniform, you might properly and lawfully have been put to death for murder—either by our courts or by the enemies'. (This is among the charges which recur in the war trials. The Germans and Japanese killed persons whom even war did not entitle them to kill.)
> Attacks shall be directed solely against military objectives.
I don't know much about history but my understanding is this true only exists as long as it is convenient. The union didn't care for this role during the US civil war iirc
That is more an illustration of how broadly "military objectives" alone may be defined in absense of other constraints. While horrible scorched earth itself has a valid tactical purpose. Military objectives alone is a low bar to clear.
That's exactly the problem the U.S. has. As long as they find a single idiot willing to defend the status quo they won't do anything. Fact is, the amount of casualties in the U.S. from shootings would qualify any middle eastern state for some sweet democracy.
The 'democracy in middle east' is a meme. United States is incapable of maintaining occupations primarily due to its own values. this is why after World War II we forced the colonial powers to decolonize (case in point, Suez Canal conflict where we forced UK and France to back off). America just doesn't know how to maintain an occupation, because to maintain an occupation requires you to have extremely brutal power structure on the civilian population, and if our military was trained to do that then they would wreak havoc in our own countries. So we train our military according to our values which renders them incapable of being able to maintain an occupation the way Chinese army or Russian army would be able to do.
You seem to ignore that the US has had, and kept, several overseas territories. There are current movements to recoup the independence of several of such territories, like Hawaii.
> So we train our military according to our values which renders them incapable of being able to maintain an occupation the way Chinese army or Russian army would be able to do.
The US military has been involved in all sorts of atrocities since the end of WWII, they just sometimes failed at achieving their military goals, e.g. Vietnam, and sometimes the government resorted to the use of other aggression tools, e.g. Cuba economic blockade.
Being able to maintain an occupation seems highly determined by the local population will and ability to fight. In the 1980's the Russian army tried to occupy Afghanistan and the Chinese army tried to march into Vietnam. Both had extremely brutal power structure on the civilian population, and both took severe damage then left.
> It blow my mind that there are multiple organizations that are so large and well armed that even the Mexican government won't touch them. Keep in mind that the Mexican military has the 17th most active duty personnel in the world and spent $7 billion last year, and still isn't willing to take on drug cartels stomping on their own sovereign territory.
But if the real problem is your army is corrupt, no quantity of guns and personnel will fix that.
As far as I know, the cartels are closer to an asymmetric military adversary, and have subverted the Mexican state rather than defeating it directly.
Judging from the past examples, they'd be corrupted at lightning speed - who wants to risk their life in some foreign country by playing a saint when all local "government" officials around you are on the take? What would motivate one to resist? The locals have patriotism, caring for their community and making better country, but foreign forces are just paid to do a job - so somebody could pay them 10x to do a different job or just to look the other way. It happened to UN forces many times.
I think what you are missing here - drug cartels are essentially mini factions that govern areas in the society. The cartels are the government and the government is public face for the cartels essentially. How this evolved over time has been interesting, but make no mistake about it. They both protect each other interests domestically. It's not that they can't its that they wont. They attack themselves when they're disputes. Its very fascinating and no secret down there.
I found this paper by Charles Tilly, a well-known sociologist, to be enlightening and eye-opening.
And I think the flip-side is also true, "organized crime" being little different from "legitimate state", except in scale and sometimes scale.
But even more enlightening to me, building on top of this paper, was the opinion of a chief named Bear in the Vietnamese (iirc) jungle, who had to deal with both the "legitimate" (dominant) government and the "paramilitary" groups, who would both alternate tearing through his village and terrorizing his people.
To Bear, all of this activity was the inevitable result of existence of power itself, just a fact of reality. Power which, inevitablly, one or another would struggle to acquire, with similar results regardless of who it was. This perspective allowed him to maintain and protect his tribe from both organizations, by acknowledging their power, acquiescing to it, and letting the wind bend his stalk but not break it, so to speak.
Bear was a wise man who lived to old age in a place with everyday danger, so his words are worth something, IMO.
---
I learned of Bear and his wisdom from a book written by an anthropologist who lived with his people for several years. I remember one of the stories being about how an unwanted premature baby was allowed to die, and how much this upset the anthropologist at first.
Unfortunately, I do not remember the name of the book anymore. If anyone recognizes it, please comment here.
"Lane, a superbly attentive historian of Venice, allowed specifically for the case of a government that generates protection rents for its merchants by deliberately attacking their competitors."
Correct. It's basically the same relationship large financial interests have with the US government. When financial interests have enough influence, they become too big to fail, meaning any "corruption" by the big players is ignored, and so isn't really corruption anymore so much as a part of government policy.
> Maybe there are lines in Mexico that cannot be crossed, but from an non-American perspective I struggle to see where those lines are.
The main rule is don’t antagonize the Americans too much. The big example is Camarena who was kidnapped, tortured, and killed by the cartels in the 1980s. It brought such a response from the US, that the cartels in general avoid trying to kill US DEA agents.
Anyone know if there have been any resulting probes, north of the border? (I didn't pick up much english just now in a quick news search, and this is not very relevant to my interests.)
From the opening paragraph of the Wikipedia article on Los Zetas:[1]
The origins of Los Zetas date back to the late 1990s, when commandos of the Mexican Army deserted their ranks and began working as the enforcement arm of the Gulf Cartel. In February 2010, Los Zetas broke away and formed their own criminal organization, rivalling the Gulf Cartel.
Needless to say, going after some gang is likely to be different than going after a gang of ex-commando military personnel, and that's before you factor in that there's probably a steady stream of military that still leave to join Los Zetas and that they probably still have active military contacts...
Not only are the Zetas not full of military any more, they are fighting constantly between old school and CDN (when they aren't fighting golfos). The current organization is a shell of what it was.
It was a red queen's race that they lost by attracting too much attention. The original cadre of special warfare operators has been eliminated, and their escalation in violence and sophistication of direct action was emulated by others. Cooperation with the government and subverting the state is more powerful than killing entire towns.
I'll just add that the cartels are so unimaginably brutal, not bound by even the slightest pretense of laws of warfare, that it is impossible that anyone resist to bowing to their demands.
I'm talking "refuse to be bribed and we will skin your teenage son alive in front of you and send the video to his mother".
That is a comforting thought, but the “tough / law and order / war on drugs” response has already been tried extensively under president Calderón, and the result was an explosion in violence and killings, without overall reducing the power of cartels.
The source of the power of the cartels lies north of the border. It's not possible to fight them only in Mexico without tackling their funding sources.
Afaik it is working with marijuana, because we now support domestic production. If we want to cut off the supply chain, we would need to produce domestically the other drugs in the cartel's supply chains.
The US doesn't have the maturity to produce cocaine and distribute internally w/o becoming another cartel. The CIA already did this as a funding source, I could see it being done to destabilize cash flow for cartels. Simply legalizing the possession will allow the focus to be spent elsewhere but will not stem the tide.
>The US doesn't have the maturity to produce cocaine and distribute internally w/o becoming another cartel.
It already does.
Stepan, a chemical company in New Jersey, is the only company in the US licensed to import coca leaf, which primarily comes from a Peruvian state-owned company. The cocaine is extracted and sold to Mallinckrodt for pharmaceutical use (it's used in ENT surgery, as it's both a local anaesthetic and a vasoconstrictor), whilst the remnants are sold to the Coca-Cola Company for use as flavourings.
The process to get cocaine from coca leaf is the same as to extract any alkaloid from a plant.
The problem is the supply is not controlled in the USA, is dependent on the government of Peru and the drug manufacturing cartels have tons and tons of land in Colombia just for growing cocaine. It grows naturally.
Competition is good. The goal of legalising is not to make money, but to suck the profitability out of the industry. Especially the illegal part of the industry.
The cocaine, meth, and opium trade is more than enough to maintain the current situation.
Marijuana confiscation at ports is down 80% over the last decade, but under the current administration (Mexican), violence has exploded to levels triple that of the peak of the previous drug war when CDS/Zetas/CDT/CDG were engaged in multiple wars over lucrative plazas.
One of my junior Marines has family in Mexico. He was almost kidnapped there when he was 17. He also told me a story of his Aunt's friend, who had a restaurant in central Mexico. One day she was complaining about the cartel to a customer, a middle-aged man. The man said "Hey aren't you having a banquet next Saturday? I'll provide the meat. Don't worry, consider it a gift."
The next Saturday a black trashbag was deposited on her doorstep.....with the chopped up body of her son inside it, and a message to "be careful who you speak bad about".
It's terrifying to think of how people try to navigate such savagery just trying to go about their lives.
They are uploading videos of dismembering innocent female family members because the competing factions are trying to outdo each-other in brutality to take the upper hand.
Just to underline the fact that Mexico is a narcostate, when the US announced that they would declare Los Zetas as a terrorist organization, Mexico's president intervened to block that classification.
> Folks know what happens to countries the US deems to contain terrorists.
Obrador's excuse was that he feared that officially recognizing los Zetas as a terrorist organization would tarnish Mexico's reputation. This alleged fear of the US only fits if they feared an outsider intervened to put a stop to the mafia's dominance.
edit: I removed my comment that was here. It was confusing in a way that I didn't intend. It was going to merely generate toxic responses. That was not my intention at all. I'm sorry.
When drugs are illegal, they tend to get more potent and lethal. You can smuggle a lot more doses per kg.
Opium -> Heroin -> fentanyl
So maybe legalize opium?
The other thing is there is a huge difference between by a powder that you don’t know what’s in there versus buying a 100 ug ampoule of pharmaceutical fentanyl.
The horrors of illegal drug economics can easily pale next to the horrors of mass, systematized drug use. There’s no easy solution. Our drug policies are wrong because they’re racist, not because drugs aren’t actually bad for people.
I think a part of what's driven the opiate epidemic was the massive overprescription of opiate painkillers by doctors and the marketing surrounding them.
People tend to trust that their doctor is right. If the doctor gives you oxycodone, you assume that it's safe.
Tied in with that is the increased availability of heroin and fentanyl, and now decreased availability of prescription painkillers, pushing users from taking relatively safe pills to injecting drugs, which is an order of magnitude more damaging.
An oral surgeon gave me an opioid prescription several years ago after a tooth extraction. The pain was minor so I never filled the script, but in retrospect just giving me the prescription seems like malpractice. I can totally see how other patients would end up addicted in that situation.
Scary thought. Legalization is presented as the utopian solve-it-all-policy and everyone points to weeds harmlessness. But hard drugs who lead to physical addiction?
But that's the point. The arguments for the current regulatory environment failed because the gatekeepers still perpetuated a drug epidemic. That is, not only did drug scheduling fail to keep people from obtaining illegal substances, it failed to keep people from getting legal but inappropriate ones too.
Not everyone said weed wasn't dangerous either. Leading up to cannabis deregulation there were any number of experts warning of disaster due to its claimed severe effects.
The point of the deregulatory argument is that you can't really entrust a homogeneous monopoly to act optimally, because there's lack of competing perspectives and alternatives.
The current drug regulation regime has failed in all sorts of ways that go far beyond drugs of abuse, into siphoning off funds surrounding less recreational substances, through rent seeking. Anyone who has tried to get a prescription for something harmless or nearly so that they've taken for years can attest to this. Acyclovir, for example, is an essential medicine per WHO, and articles have been written in which it is acknowledged to be safe for the general public (with empirical data) but still argued should be kept as a prescription to avoid viral resistance (even though there's no evidence of this, and other sources of microbial resistance are routinely ignored).
The current system has failed in part because discussions are presented in this black and white fashion where it's things stay as they are or nothing. Pharmacists could be used much more than they are, for example, as could other provider types, not just for drugs but for lots of things.
The pandemic is full of other examples. The CDC demonstrated early on how regulation can fail, and people managed to poison themselves without involving prescribers or their illegal drug dealing counterparts at all.
That possibly desensibilize the user for violence, and give them a reason to need an unbreaking stream of income? That's another reason the black and white them versus us image is misleading. Many of the criminals are victims, and vice versa, moral hard liners tend to criminalize use for the same reason. This also means that it would be a runaway process, and that the elites have to practice abstinence or at least self control.
That's what I'm really unsure about, the physical and psychological addiction potential and an extreme stance which would take it as justification, that the victims are weak of will. The eugenics argument would even encourage this as a way to selection for fitness. IMHO, the physical addiction is countered by the adverse effects of the come-down. I hold some arguments against it, but consider the psychological component much more important. 30% of first time heroin users became addicted in the last German federal report on domestic drug use. I'd say only 30%, in contrast to the myth of the immediate addiction--which is real in a sense, for if addiction-affinity is considered, it's effectively correct. Arguably, understanding the history, these people must be extremely racist, fascist, socialist, liberal, you name it, basicly selfish egoists in any sense you might find offensive.
Simple adversary population dynamics settle at an optimum in the infinite limit (I've watched a video by numberphile or so on the Logistic Function, haha). If the government is a regulator, it should seek to estimate the optimum. The pretense that the optimum is the extinction of drug use and users is ...
In my experience a lot of drug use is self medication for relieving emotional or psychological pain, people who just don't feel good for whatever reason and want to feel better. Making drugs illegal won't really helps these people and if anything can do great damage to their future if they run into legal problems. People should have a right to their own bodies anyway even if they might cause themselves harm
A perfect example is amphetamines. Without them, I don't get stuff done, sure I will get the one thing done that I am interested in, but the dishes will sit in the sink for 2 weeks before I can even remotely begin to think about them, and then it is like pulling teeth to get started. The task just seems insurmountable. When I take my medicine, I do them as a way to take a break from thinking. I agree, I think a lot of people self-medicate mental health issues. I know I like opiates, so I always take them as prescribed when they are given to me. Never had an addiction problem with them, but I was on them for a period of time due to a back injury. I think the risk of amphetamine addiction is overblown, but I certainly see how opiates can be addictive and very quickly. They make you pretty much not give a crap about anything.
I'm sorry but I have to call you out on this. It's complete BS - we simply don't have anything that's remotely comparable to opiates for pain relief.
That being said I'll second that the opiate epidemic in the US is largely the fault of prohibition. Illegality feeds all sorts of negative cycles that wouldn't otherwise exist.
Huh. My apologies for the misunderstanding then. It's definitely not how I read that wording, largely because I'm highly skeptical that a viable alternative exists for any significant number of non-recreational opiate users.
That's a rather baseless and low effort accusation to make.
The linked paper doesn't appear to me to make the claim you did. The combination group (the one from which you could validate the claim you made) is very small - only 486. In fact the paper appears to very carefully outline its own considerable limitations. The authors detail the lack of research in the area and point out a number of conflicting results, including results that directly contradict their own.
That being said, it is a well written, interesting, and thoughtful piece of research. It (and the nearby comment by waheoo) raise quite a few interesting questions for me regarding patient perception and how withdrawal symptoms might interact with marijuana. I also wonder which specific symptoms and underlying conditions might correlate with the various groups. I'm glad you brought this paper to my attention!
Another huge challenge about dealing with the drug trade - people with guns and power probably aren't just going to go away because you've changed the dynamics of their most profitable market:
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2019-11-20/mexico...
They aren't funding armies and bribing governments by skimming off the avocado market. If you take away 90% of their revenue, the cartels' power will shrink quickly.
Not the OP, am on mobile and too lazy to search for links and it’s also about Italy and not Mexico, but there were some studies made a few years ago that showed that the Calabrian organization ‘Ndrangheta was worth about 50-60 billion euros at the time. They had started getting big in the late ‘80s by smuggling Columbian cocaine into Europe but nowadays I think that the drug trade represents a very small percentage of their revenues. For example I live in a reasonably big Eastern-European capital and I’m pretty sure that the biggest waste disposal thing in our city is controlled by ‘Ndrangheta.
Presumably a similar transformation will be carried out by many Mexican cartels when and if the drug trade will dry off.
The difference is that these crimes (extortion, contract abuse, gasoline theft) are actually stoppable. They have real victims who can complain; they have physical pipelines that can be protected. Drugs generally involve a happy buyer and happy seller transacting in private.
Organized crime doesn't go away overnight. It's not like all the gangs immediately disappeared after the end of Prohibition in the US. You just have to keep taking away their revenue sources, eventually they're too poor to fight back.
Not OP but here is one also from HN[1][2] on Mexico. Selected quote from the article:
> “It’s good business,” El Polkas says with a shrug. “It makes a lot of money.” When I ask how gasoline compares to narcotics, in terms of overall revenue to Los Zetas, he rubs his index fingers together. “Fifty-fifty,” he says. “It’s approximately as profitable as drugs.”
The article addresses your point about the drug trade:
"Stories like this are unfolding in industries across Mexico as criminal groups branch out far beyond drugs. Cartels have siphoned millions of dollars’ worth of fuel from Mexican state oil company Petróleos Mexicanos or Pemex in recent years; they steal cargo and pilfer lumber. The tentacles of organized crime extend even into Mexico’s avocado growing regions, where gangs extort farmers and hijack loads of the green fruit."
Just because the military is big, It doesn't mean It's efficient and Its easily controllable centrally. Probably there are many groups within the military and many of the higher ups have their own connections with different local organizations etc.
What you describe is a failed, or at least failing, state. What makes you think these para military groups would stop taking over society if they are made legal?
Look at other mafia run states. Most of them aren't dependent on the drug trade. It's a parasitic part of the economy that won't let the rest of the economy flourish.
One of the most interesting instances of this was the East India Company. Using it’s own army and navy, it eventually colonized Hong Kong and large parts of India.
Yeah, but this is a multi-generational problem - it's important not to give up just because they try to diversify in the moment. Anything that cuts into their margins in the long term makes them weaker, less able to recruit, less competitive for labor. Taking away the black market markups will absolutely hurt these terrible organizations.
> People will always kill and humanity has always had murderers. Embrace this with compassion, not intolerance.
See how that "always been like this" logic doesn't make any sense? I have yet to hear a coherent reason why drugs should be decriminalized or legalized.
Maybe sometimes. But it can also have a heavy impact in families and communities. Parents looking for kids doing drugs. Relationships destroyed. Lying. Siblings lacking attention when all the attention is on the drug user. Partners of drugs users abandoned – or hurt – physically, emotionally and economically. The same with their kids. Stealing to stop the craving. Murder is knocking on the door . . .
When you have invited substances to take over your mind, you can't be sure that it will let you be the captain on the boat without a heavy fight.
Abuse, violence, stealing and so on are already crimes in their own right, regardless of whether drugs are involved or not. They directly involve harm inflicted on other people. The act of doing drugs does not, so why make that a crime, too?
It's a slippery slope argument, it's like saying cutting yourself should be a crime, because people who cut themselves have issues and could harm others.
Just like drug users, they should be helped, not punished.
This type of thinking doesn't help, because jailing addicts doesn't help (or work), either. Addiction robs you of most or all of your agency, it's not so simple as just blaming the addict for their behavior.
The current legal status of most drugs in the US has a profoundly net negative affect on drug use and its ripples, not positive, because anyone wanting to help those addict parents risks just having them simply thrown in prison for who knows how long. Until seeking help isn't a massive risk, addicts will always end up helplessly trapped.
Even if drugs were legalized, children of addicts would still be taken away by CPS and put with relatives or into foster care. It's a crappy situation all around but legalization wouldn't change it
Cigarettes and alcohol harm those near them, but there are stiff regulations in place, there are social stigmas attached, and heavy legal consequences.
The legalization gives the government the funding to actually do something about it in proportion to demand.
We already have seen this during prohibition. It’s either regulate demand, or pretend that it can be banned and let a non government entity rise up and take power.
The problem in many countries is that the military are themselves involved with drug trafficking. So the fact that they have a relatively large army is not necessarily an advantage, the cartels are most probably infiltrated there.
The other side is also true, the US has the largest army in the world, along with the most sophisticated intelligence apparatus, but it cannot (or doesn't want) to stop the traffic coming from outside its borders.
> it cannot (or doesn't want) to stop the traffic coming from outside its borders
Openly turning that sophisticated intelligence apparatus against the citizenry is simply not politically tenable in the US at present. (Note that I said openly. What Snowden revealed wasn't open.)
Are you aware that there's a bit of an ongoing jackboots-gas-and-rubber-bullets crackdown happening across the United States against unarmed civilians?
The government has no problem turning its tools against the citizenry - well, particular parts of the citizenry.
These aren't hypothetical techie concerns about the NSA seeing your dick pics. This is actual police departments behaving like we live in a police state.
Indeed. In context, something that would presumably continue indefinitely (border traffic and drug consumption) was being discussed. That would require permanent legislation and normalization of extensive government surveillance.
In contrast, the current shenanigans are occurring within a declared state of emergency (pandemic) on top of which widespread protests over an unrelated topic broke out. Even then, what's happening appears to be status quo police brutality that's piecemeal. (As opposed to open, centrally coordinated mass surveillance of everyone's actions - both physical and digital - with the approval of the legislature).
That may be true by number of combatants. But the size of an organization is not measured just by number of people involved. It is well known that the US military spends more money than most other countries COMBINED, and has more bases and operations than any other military in the world. It doesn't even make sense to compare the US military with India's.
It’s not actually in the US’ national interest to have Mexico be a functioning state. How would we be able to get cheap seasonal immigrant labor, or export manufacturing jobs if they were? Perhaps more importantly, if Mexico really was a functioning economy we would then have to compete with them, rather than profiteer off of them. There is very little geopolitical incentive for the US to fix any of Mexico’s endemic problems, in fact it’s probably a far more in the US’ interestes to maintain the status quo making sure that no one faction ever gets too powerful.
Don't think of them as one.
I'm the General in charge and I don't care of what happens, when I'm offered $50 Million for protection. Especially when refusal means death for my entire family. This is repeated in every situation or region. Now I'm in charge and this is my chance to get rich and survive. A lot of these narcos carry multimillion dollars in cash with them, if they get caught they buy their way to freedom. $2 million and let me go. Why would someone not take especially if the one up the chain will probably still free him...?
A state, any state, can take on private armies. They can get all the help needed from USA and EU if they were weak. Even Escobar was beaten, one way or another. Cartels employee a lot of people but the state can make them fight each other and then take on the winner. But then, what does Mexico have to offer to the many millions that wet their beaks in the drug trade? Go work daily on corn fields for $x a day when you can make $xx on opium ones?
Isn't heroin legal in Sweden? I mean, legalize it all. Some people will definitely get hurt and be thrown into a spiral of addiction, but having rehabilitation and counseling programs seems like chump change compared to the drug war boondogle.
I believe you're referring to Switzerland. It isn't legal, but addicts can get free heroin (or methadone) administered by doctors. It cuts the bottom out of the dealer's markets, prevents petty crime by desperate addicts, avoids OD deaths, and makes sure the government has tabs on how bad the problem is. In 20 years Zürich has gone from 'having a heroin problem' to just a few old-timers who occasionally relapse, with almost no new addicts.
"The drug policy of Sweden is based on zero tolerance focusing on prevention, treatment, and control, aiming to reduce both the supply of and demand for illegal drugs."
That's obviously difficult. The actual situation is even more difficult: you have to simultaneously deal with the supply and demand factors.
It's not enough just to legalize everything (which will never happen, 80-90% of the globe will never do such a thing under any circumstances, regardless of what the US does). If you do that, the demand will of course still be there. Someone has to wipe out the cartel production/supply by competing with it.
So the US has to go into the production business for cocaine, heroin, etc. It wouldn't be reliable to leave it to Mexico, it would be too easy for the cartels to hijack and control.
Any country that doesn't legalize globally - which will be most of them - will still remain a target for the cartels to sell into. Latin American cartel networks are effective enough and big enough now that they move product globally.
Legalize it all requires that a very large portion of all countries go in on that. It will never happen.
The US will fully legalize marijuana and it will hardly make a dent in taking down the cartels or reducing cartel violence in Latin America, which demonstrates their considerable staying power. There was widespread opinion that it would make a big difference, in reality it'll have hardly made any difference (Mexico is more violent now than it has ever been in its history).
> It's not enough just to legalize everything (which will never happen, 80-90% of the globe will never do such a thing under any circumstances, regardless of what the US does).
Cutting the US demand (and the prices the US will pay) out of the illegal business will make the cartels far less profitable, even if the rest of the world does nothing.
> So the US has to go into the production business for cocaine, heroin, etc
If it's legal in the US, US business will rush into that domain. Especially if it's not legal to produce in the rest of the world, so they only have domestic competition.
> The US will fully legalize marijuana and it will hardly make a dent in taking down the cartels or reducing cartel violence in Latin America, which demonstrates their considerable staying power. There was widespread opinion that it would make a big difference, in reality it'll have hardly made any difference (Mexico is more violent now than it has ever been in its history).
The US hasn't legalized marijuana at all. (Individual states have, the feds have just paused enforcement of laws on the books, with no guarantee that they won't retroactively resume them within the statutes of limitations. Everyone doing business in the field is in danger of not just garden-variety narcotics offenses but make-enough-money-and-its-life-in-prison kingpin laws. Which effects the willingness for mainstream businesses to get involved and means that the state-legal businesses are often operating at only a remove or two away from traditional organized crime. You can't judge anything about actual legalization effects on legal and illegal business networks from the current state of affairs.)
> So the US has to go into the production business for cocaine, heroin, etc.
Pharmaceutical companies already produce everything you could imagine and more. I can't stress enough how much of a non-issue this concern would be in practice. (Also we already produce an impressively wide range of opiates for medical use.)
> Any country that doesn't legalize globally - which will be most of them - will still remain a target for the cartels to sell into.
So you're saying we shouldn't try to move in the right direction because our actions alone wouldn't immediately and completely solve the problem? This is an incredibly defeatist point of view.
If you legalize and tax production, you'll grow a booming local production market. Smugglers have trouble competing with legal enterprise. The endless argument is mostly one of "how many more addicts would you create and what is that harm" vs "how many people would enjoy better lives if they were not criminalized for taking drugs (and their suppliers were regulated and not criminalized)."
in fact, legalization of class A or B (schedule 1 and 2 in the USA) drugs would generally mean expulsion from the UN of that country for breach of the charter. that's why e.g. the Netherlands have only decriminalised certain drugs. technically they are still illegal. in fact, if Canada was a smaller, non Western/developed country, im sure they would not have legalised cannabis, and even so they definitely won't legalise wholedale trafficking etc. it seems the UN got a bit upset but couldn't do much? [0]
> in fact, legalization of class A or B (schedule 1 and 2 in the USA) drugs would generally mean expulsion from the UN of that country for breach of the charter
No, it wouldn't.
The UN Charter has nothing relevant.
There are various drug conventions, but IIRC, all of them have denunciation provisions, and in any case there is no basis for the claim that either violation or denunciation of those conventions would result in expulsion from the UN. Violation, rather than denunciation, might result in a suit and adverse ruling in the ICJ by another aggrieved nation. Or it might not.
ok, these are all good points, perhaps i could have been clearer. how about this, which i think is a true statement based on my understanding; drugs (mostly cannabis) are usually only decriminalised, rather than legalised, due to treaty obligations within the un system. this makes canada (and uruguay) interesting cases, since both have actually legalised cannabis.
sure, there won't be a un police action against them, and today i learned that denunciation is an option in the relevant treaty, rather than expulsion. but, there is a good reason (treaty obligations) why countries won't just 'legalise all the things' and have traditionally followed softer approaches.
I don't know - both the UN and WHO are pushing for a more tolerant policy. At this point, it is merely focusing on decriminalizing possession and use, in no small part because of good results in some places. It isn't much of a jump to allow full legalisation in their charter.
Very likely will not help except to the extent that it makes selling drugs unprofitable. Any profitable industry--agriculture, tourism, energy, etc.--falls victim to the same.
> ... even the Mexican government won't touch them.
The distinction between government and gangs in Mexico is subtle. Just as in the US, many former military become mercenaries. But unlike US mercenaries, Mexican mercenaries operate domestically.
If you try to tax drugs, there will still be a significant black market. Just look at cigarettes - legal, but huge black market because there is money to be made undercutting legitimate vendors with taxed goods.
I don't know, man. Most folks I've met that smoke cigarettes just buy them at the store. Occasionally, when folks travel, they pick them up at a lower tax state (or country). I'm not convinced the black market is really 'significant' since I'm guessing most folks go the legal route. It is just there.
But then again, there is a somewhat thriving black market for detergent and soaps: In the US, Tide is often targeted, as are branded department store body soaps, shampoos, and razor blades. This isn't because soaps and things are taxed.
Also, does tax make up for all of the risk markup? I very highly doubt it. IIRC, prices have gone down in places with legalization, in no small part because the whole process can be done out in the open.
As I understand it, the primary customers of the cigarette black market are corner stores. The people who ultimately end up smoking those cigarettes don't know anything about it.
In New York there's a $4.35 excise tax on a single pack of cigarettes. In Missouri it's $0.17. That huge delta provides a big opportunity for arbitrage.
A large part of the cost of illegal drugs comes from all the effort needed to avoid law enforcement along the supply chain. I'm sure a legitimate operation could save enough money from being able to just have large scale production and delivery in the open without having to hide it to make up for a few % of tax.
I think most of the cost is because of the personal and inventory risk that everyone involved carries. With 100x markup, seizures at borders aren’t as big a deal.
And there are lots of people involved, each one adds markup.
The cigarette tax rate in New York is 2500% higher than the tax rate in Missouri. That's more than a few %, and that's just the state tax; NYC has their own additional tax that increases the difference even more.
A black market will always exist as it does for anything. The problem we're trying to solve is the power of a huge market solely tapped by criminal enterprises. You don't see narcostates formed by black market tobacco or alcohol.
Yes. Though to be even more precise, the benefits of going outside of regular channels have to outweigh the burden of the regulation.
Eg some countries have black markets in currency, because of tight controls. Singapore doesn't really have black markets in currency, despite some (light!) regulation and taxes on money changers.
> These guys just throw up repeaters and not only do they not try to hide them, they actually mark them to show who is going to be destroying your life if you take them down. Oh, and you have to pay if you want to work on your own legitimate equipment that is rightfully on that tower.
As I said, modulo "rightfully" which I won't take away from you just for sake of the argument.
> The illegal drug trade exists on a scale unimaginable to most people
That's why the previous two remarks are necessarily exagerated. If the government governs and the drug trade drug-trades, pretty much by definition--Isn't that a bit myopic (I'm at a loss for words here, as much as you are).
I mean, the tinfoil hat says: if governments wanted to sustain a deadly drugmarket they could not do it in the open. The counter-point, that nobody would want this, is evidently wrong, and that unreasonable cartells did it only for the money is again myopic, if money is really about power.
> Mexican cartels employ 450,000 people and make $25 billion annually (...). The Mexican military would have to be incredibly skilled to take them on with 177,000 people and a $7 billion budget.
Wow, that's incredible--how one could draw such a black and white back of the envelope calculation cobbled together on a quick google search. Not only is the us-versus-them perspective quite difficult, reducing moral to a binary number. It is also conflating a lot of that in the economic measuring stick that is the dollar.
Seen another way, that's 250.000 tons market capitalization of Mexican cocaine and equivalent substances p.a. (at a guessed street price of $100 per pure gram). This would be a gram per day for 1/10,000 of the population, if they compete in a market of ca. 10 billion potential consumers in the market. Realistically though, the street price is grossly inflated after each border. So, if the inflation would be x100, you'd have to have a 1% share of the population in the developed world (more, if my numbers are too high) being highly addicted daily drug users, who can afford to spend between 10 and 100$ a day. This seems like something is off--my numbers, sure, if Mexico is more of an intermediary than a producer.
And it’s not just arms, it’s military training and procedures. The cartel mentioned most often in the article (the Zetas) literally WERE the army - they were special forces and commandos that decided to become the muscle for the Gulf Cartel because it paid more.
Then the Gulf Cartel learned the problems of relying on mercenaries when the Zetas turned on them as well, becoming one of the most dominant cartels in the world.
Anyway, to answer your question: the cartels have tanks, helicopters, ships, submarines, mortars, grenades and missiles.
A bunch of highly trained ex-commandos with billions in budget and hundreds of thousands of “troops” (in aggregate) that doesn’t much care about hurting civilians can do a lot of damage.
> There was a general shifting of position and a group clearing of throats.
> 'What about mercenaries?' said Boggis.
> 'The problem with mercenaries,' said the Patrician, 'is that they need to be paid to start fighting. And, unless you are very lucky, you end up paying them even more to stop -'
I had the impression that cartels, north of the border, prefer mail bombs to bullets. Yet the narco tanks that image search gives me are uniformly flat-bottomed, suggesting that IEDs are not common south of the border.
A few years ago there was a live news broadcast on Mexican TV of a running downtown street battle between the cops/feds/army and one of the cartels. I think it was in Juarez. We watched in real time as the state forces retreated, outmanned and outgunned.
It's so different to the reality that most of us inhabit that it's hard to imagine.
It might have been Sinaloa, where the police captured one of the sons of "El chapo".
There was actually something fishy about that event, and some even think it was a setup of the local government against the federal government.
No doubt there was extreme fishiness involved. One common trait of most corrupt societies is the concentration of power at the top of the pyramid, and how the same few names and families keep popping up all over the landscape.
The current Mexican cartels are offshoots of the military / federal police. A large part of their military / police organization is taking bribes, if not outright working for cartels. It's tragic. They are well armed and more importantly, know how to use them.
> In May 2010 an NPR report collected allegations from dozens of sources, including U.S. and Mexican media, Mexican police officials, politicians, academics, and others, that Sinaloa Cartel had infiltrated and corrupted the Mexican federal government and the Mexican military by bribery and other means. According to a report by the U.S. Army Intelligence section in Leavenworth, over a 6-year period, of the 250,000 soldiers in the Mexican Army, 150,000 deserted and went into the drug industry.
If somehow drug was legalized in the Mexico then I suppose the army would have to product "legal" producers from cartels waging war on them to defend their turf ?
Are cartels lobbying to prevent drug legalization ? I suppose they make more money on illegal drugs than they would if they converted to legalized drugs (if it'd ever come to be)
You could legalise migration, too, that would make a bit dent in trafficking.
I wonder if it would make a bit dent, if Mexico just legalised production and distribution of most drugs? Instead of waiting for the US to get their act together.
I'm sure most of the officials are in their pocket. others just won't mess with their business. if you aren't going to play by their rules they will make an example of you.
It does not help that our current president, AMLO, thinks "Abrazos no balazos" is the solution. Hugs not guns
Then he captures the son of El Chapo, and because they began threatening the government they let him go. It's just a disaster. At this point my only hope Trump is reelected so he puts some pressure on him to actually do something about the problem.
They've tried guns for 4 decades and look where it's got them. I'm not saying hugs are the answer. You still have to punish the existing bad guys. But guns definitively are not the long-term answer. It's time for a different approach - one which prevents new bad guys.
Hmmm I'd say it only began in earnest in the 90s. And then you look at the previous Democrat goverment and its cross border gun trafficking operations which certainly didn't help.
What I can tell you is it's probably never been so brazen. Couple weeks back they shot the chief of Police of Mexico City in broad daylight in one of the nicest (most expensive) neighborhoods in the country. They killed his bodyguards and gravely injured him despite of having an armored SUV. An attempt like that was unheard of so far
The "war on drugs" dates back to the 70s or 80s, starting from either the Nixon or Reagan administrations (depending on which way you look at it). Even if we take the 90s as a starting point, that's an entire generation lost to pointless violence. Entire governments corrupted by the deluge of narco profits.
The "cross border gun trafficking operations" you're referring to involved about 2k guns, of which 1/3 were recovered. Terrible bungling, surely, but a drop in the bucket.[1]
The CIA/Contra cocaine trafficking was probably far more consequential.[2]
The brazenness of the cartels comes from the insane profits they earn. They can buy off anyone, and if they can't they can hire anyone to get rid of them. And their insane profits are due to how scarce and illegal their products are in the US. Take away their economic base and they become far more vulnerable.
Cartels have killed hundreds of Mexican government figures, including presidential candidates. I'm not sure the police chief of cdmx is a much higher profile target.
A decade ago, Chapo was burning tractor trailers on all the major highways in plazas to box his enemies in, fighting them for hours in broad daylight.
With that said, the homicides in Mexico have absolutely exploded under the current US and Mexican administrations, CJNG shot a helicopter down, etc. It's sad this escalation doesn't get more attention.
Trump had enough time and leverage to put pressure on him, so if that's your hope, well I don't think anything will come from it.
OTOH, I may not really think highly about how AMLO has done things, but I do applaud him for following a strategy to act against the structural causes. We have enough history on how the Militar strategy doesn't work, and actually a couple of examples where the "tough on drugs" guy is actually colluding with the drug dealers.
What are the structural causes? Unless you mean the economics of it, I don't think people will be dissuaded from going for cartel jobs. Lots of educated people end up working for them. It is just that the profits are that big. Would Chapo having a better primary school have made any difference?
Yes, I do mean economics. And as I mentioned, I don't think highly about how he's doing, as the economic indicators are not so great, but the proposed strategy was since the debates, to put pressure on the economic side of cartel, and offer relief on poverty.
If you'd bothered to read past the catchphrase you'd realize how stupid this sounds. It would also help if you gained some perspective on Mexican history - it's never been an issue of lack of funding for police.
This seems unlikely. It would vary a lot by the society in which “Defund the Police” became policy. The last time the US decided to radically reduce law enforcement and severity of punishment for law breaking in the 1960-1970 period it didn’t lead to parastatal organizations with their own militaries. Eventually the public grows sick of the disorder and laws and constitutional barriers that militate against harsh punishment and enforcement get worked around. Before the political reaction you had a broader social reaction in the flight from cities and suburbanization.
I think most of us would agree that all drugs (drug use) should be decriminalized. But even if you go as far as to imagine the Mexican cartels being (eventually) legitimate businesses, the strong competition between them would not subside, so they would still fight each other and keep their grip on the government and the population. (Then there's also the ties they have to the governments of the target markets, and their policy making.)
I think to solve this situation, you'd have to diminish the demand for their product in the target markets, which is next to impossible due to the addictive nature of the product. One way to do this would be to legalize and promote therapeutic use of drugs which are known (among many other positives) to break drug addiction (in just a few sessions), like psilocybin mushrooms or Ayahuasca.
> if you go as far as to imagine the Mexican cartels being (eventually) legitimate businesses, the strong competition between them would not subside, so they would still fight each other
Exactly. Just look at the much larger market contested by the Apple/Google blood feud for an example!
This doesn't actually happen. The expense of running a private army makes a firm catastrophically non-competetive vs. the new flood of now-legal competitors selling at a much lower price.
I don’t listen to Joe Rogen much, his two interviews with Ed Calderon (former Mexican federal police in cartel areas) is incredible and highly recommended.
He talks about the corruption, the hearts-and-minds efforts of the cartels, the cartel cell networks, how they build roads, etc. absolutely fascinating.
What if the US had a system wherein drug addicts would register, and get their drugs for free (or at very low prices, administered by professionals)? Just take away the middlemen, and provide the drugs in safe, controlled, monitored sites. No questions asked: as long as you are over 21 and can prove a need, you can get a card. Just walk in, get your fix, and either walk out (or lay down right there).
Once you have people in this system, then you can work on them to get them off the drugs.
Not the exact same, but Vancouver is piloting something like this. You get evaluated by a doctor and if you're addicted and have fentanyl in your system (at high risk of OD), they will prescribe you hydromorphone (which is a very cherished street drug). There is a "vending machine" where you can put in your credentials and out pops your dose. You can do it as often as you want, but there is a minimum time between doses.[1]
In European countries doing this the biggest opponents are families of addicts. This is basically a death sentence. It's society finally turning its back on them. I believe it's the right approach in the long run, but in the short run you get emotional appeals and weak politicians.
Could you point me to some reading material on this?
Because we have these schemes in the Netherlands. Opiod addicts can get their fix from municipality health centres, alcoholic homeless people can clean up parks in exchange for beer, it seems to work very well.
If you take away 'the game' of acquiring your next fix and give people structure it seems to set them up better to drop the dependancy all together.
It doesn't have to be society turning its back, because you can provide other health care (mental health, skin integrity, sexual health, etc) to people in those settings, alongside social work.
> The contractor had disrupted a small link in a vast criminal network that spans much of Mexico. In addition to high-end encrypted cell phones and popular messaging apps, traffickers still rely heavily on two-way radios like the ones police and firefighters use to coordinate their teams on the ground, six law enforcement experts on both sides of the border told Reuters.
How will Mexico ever have peace while it lives next to the largest drug consuming country in the world? While it’s illegal here, the money will go to these cartels.
It boggles my mind how people use drugs and not realise that for the drugs they bought, a poor mexican person will have their face cut off while still alive.
Buy drugs, fund the cartels. Have mexican people killed.
It makes me wonder why life is so bad for so many that they need to use 'the hard stuff'.
It boggles my mind that a poor Mexican person will have their face cut off because someone decided it should be illegal to grow a plant and consume it.
The poor Mexican person isn't getting their face cut off because of some person doing drugs. They're getting their face cut off because of the government's failure to accept that it can't win the war on drugs, and it's too proud to sue for peace in the form of legalization.
Can't both be true at the same time? Just because there are ill-advised legislations in effect doesn't mean that your responsibility as a consumer goes out the window.
That individual consumer stopping won't actually fix the problem though, it'll just remove from them any moral obligation to do anything to actually fix things under your framework.
You mean the same way that vegans never act against animal cruelty?
If you want to work against drug trafficking empires (by decriminalizing or otherwise) I'd say it makes perfect sense to also not give them your money.
Hmm, I think there's some confusion about my comment here. I'll use your reference to veganism as an example. Individual vegans can choose a diet which, for themselves, minimizes the harm caused by their choices. But at a larger-than-individual scale there are those who recognize that reducing meat consumption means addressing the reasons people eat meat, and that in turn means things like (but not limited to) developing meat alternative products that satiate people's cravings for meat. So, while veganism may be a good enough choice for yourself, it's unrealistic to not recognize the reasons why people don't choose it and to not keep those reasons in consideration when coming up with a strategy.
Most drugs are coming from South America, so Canada isn't really in the way. My guess is amongst other things, there's better conditions for growing them there.
Apparently there is some drug trafficking through Canada [1] mostly coming from Asia, which makes sense, since it'd follow international shipping routes. I'd imagine the volume is much less because it sounds much more expensive, which would make it a much less profitable and contested industry.
> While it’s illegal here, the money will go to these cartels.
Unfortunately legalizing doesn't end this, not when the legalized variants are so much more expensive. There will always be a lucrative black market to serve unless retail is both accessible and cost competitive for all consumers.
What I've seen so far with legalized recreational weed in the states is it's incredibly expensive, heavily taxed, and there are tons of illegal marijuana grow operations - more than before because demand has increased thanks to legalizing.
> not when the legalized variants are so much more expensive
That's highly dependent on the particular product and regulation. There's not much of an alcohol or tobacco black market in the US as far as I can tell because the regulation seems to consist almost exclusively of a sin tax applied to product sold for human consumption.
Compare this to marijuana in WA, where there's some sort of convoluted and expensive licensing system for cultivating it. Then there's a set of byzantine regulations surrounding the cultivation and distribution itself followed up by a sin tax at point of sale.
If drug legalization were simply that existing pharmacies could sell existing stock to people who didn't have a prescription subject to a tax (less than 50%) the drug cartels would quite literally lose their entire revenue stream overnight. The controlled substances act then becomes a list of taxed behind-the-counter substances instead of a list of illegal substances.
(Bonus: The jobs of academic researches who use such substances immediately becomes _much_ easier. Not for human consumption? No tax issues, just order it from your usual supplier like any other chemical. No more complicated permits and limited availability.)
(Extra bonus: No more meth labs in residential neighborhoods illegally disposing of highly toxic compounds, presenting a serious fire hazard, and otherwise endangering the health and safety of everyone nearby. Industrial chemistry belongs in industrial areas, where it can be subject to OSHA and the EPA.)
This does not jive with my observations living in a state with legal recreational marijuana. There are some significant taxes, but even so I can buy some decent weed for the same price as before legalization. There are definitely "high end" products in the stores that are ridiculously overpriced but the crappy stuff is cheaper than it's ever been.
I used to manufacture "shatter" in my basement lab which I extracted from "shake" I bought off of friends that ran grow-ops. Since legalization I had to wind that entire operation down because in addition to noticing a precipitous drop in my own sales figures no one I know is growing anymore! Now I can buy bulk flower from the store for less than I used to pay for trimmings.
Mexico’s only real chance is to raise a middle finger to the USA and legalize drugs in their own country. How can you enforce law and order when a foreign country is funding criminals in your country with more money than exists in your own budget?
But when your neighbour has an economy 100x the size of yours, and hands your cartels several billion dollars a year, you really have not realistic chance at all.
There is nothing wrong with adults doing drugs. The USA has a law and morality problem. We, the USA, choose to continue this model despite decades of evidence that it does not work and will not ever work.
Possibly. When I worked in radio there was no shortage of engineers willing to violate all of the safety rules and do tower maintenance without shutting down the transmitter for a little extra money. They often had the RF scars to prove it.
It's possible they kill the power before mounting their equipment. They don't seem like they'd have any qualms with cutting a lock or disrupting someone else's service.
Here in Mexico we have to copy the American narco model.
Drugs crossing the border don’t just appear automatically in the consumer’s hands, right?
So how do American narcos transport their drugs inside the US?
How do they transport the money?
Does the American law enforcement chooses to close their eyes to the mountains of drugs crossing the border every day and being transported everywhere in the US? Are they part of the mafia?
Let’s not forget there’s A LOT of money involved and a lot of consumers are millionaires and powerful people.
Exactly, it's a pretend war on drugs, while the people at the top make millions. Moving the war on drugs overseas only serves to distract from the US home grown drug industry. And there's no problem in injecting these narco-dollars back into the economy.
A shocking video surfaced onto social media Friday, showing a convoy of armored vehicles with dozens of combat-uniformed gunmen who expressed their support for Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes ("El Menccho"), the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel:
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/mexican-cartel-displa...
Like a cornered animal, if someone is acting jumpy you don't know what they might do. If it helps, imagine you are a police officer and you stop someone for speeding on the highway... You are just trying to give them a fine, but they are acting really weird.
You might start thinking: does this guy have a gun? Why isn't he doing what I expected? etc.
I guess I could see that- this context is about the cartels interacting with maintenance men and soliciting protection payments, not law enforcement thinking maintenance men are doing shady things.
We could significantly diminish the cartels' powers if we legalized all drugs. It could be done with the stroke of a pen but there's no political willingness to do so.
The citizenry has been brainwashed into thinking that the war on drugs is designed to protect people; in fact it's the exact opposite.
While we commonly think of drugs as a sort of abstracted aggregate, in reality most of the drug trafficking in Latin America comes down to just two drugs: marijuana and cocaine.
Marijuana is a problem that we are already addressing. A majority of Americans and Westerners in general have supported marijuana legalization for years now, raising hopes that the problem will be solved in some way. Our knowledge about the drug and experience with legal marijuana problems suggests that the downsides of legalization are not very large.
Cocaine is a little bit different. It puts severe stress on the heart because it inhibits action potentials in peripheral neurons directly via action on voltage-gated sodium channels and increases metabolic rate via CNS activity. The downsides of cocaine prohibition are massive, but in this case the downsides of legalization have a large uncertainty.
However, the severe death toll associated with a $30bn market puts the onus of responsibility on any conscientious American to want to put a stop to it.
Unlike powder cocaine, coca leaf has a long history of relatively safe use in the northern Andes. Widespread coca tea use is not considered a public health crisis of any particular concern in Peru and southern Colombia:
The decriminalization of coca tea in Western countries may lead to less gang activity as illegal cocaine manufacture economics shift from large-scale to small-scale extraction. The same situation occurs presently with DMT, albeit on a much smaller scale. Optimistically, addicts may substitute with oral formulations which are generally less addictive due to the relationship between reward delay and the intensity of operant conditioning. Cocaine also substitutes for methamphetamine, which may lower the street price of the latter.
However, there is also the possibility of increased crime associated with cocaine extraction, which poses another quandary. It is highly unconventional to enact a policy that will clearly empower certain types of criminals.
Nonetheless, I think we need to be open to ideas like these if we are to be ready to take responsibility for the role of US drug policy in destabilizing equatorial Latin America. The situation as it stands is not acceptable. It must be strenuously opposed.
WTF. This isn't 1989. The two drugs are meth and fentanyl. This is so inaccurate I don't even know where to start. You can buy Marijuana in a store on the west coast as easy as a beer - the cartels have moved on. There is zero money in Marijuana. Cocaine was taken over by the Dominican Republic ten years ago. Cocaine takes actual agriculture - the cartels are no longer interested in mass slow farming competing with 3rd world producers.
>Cocaine of Colombian origin supplies most of the U.S. market, and most of that supply is trafficked through Mexico,
>In 2017, Mexico seized 421 metric tons of marijuana and eradicated more than 4,230 hectares of marijuana, according to the State Department’s 2019 INCSR. However, some analysts foresee a decline in U.S. demand for Mexican marijuana because drugs “other than marijuana” will likely become dominant in the future. This projection relates to more marijuana being grown legally in several states in the United States and Canada, which have either legalized cannabis or made it legal for medical purposes, thus decreasing its value as part of Mexican trafficking organizations’ profit portfolio.
However, the same report indicates I underestimated the relevance of heroin coming via Mexico. In this case, poppy production in Mexico has increased in recent years, so apparently "actual agriculture" is still not too much work for the cartels.
Unfortunately, opioid use is a much more difficult question, due to the "laser-like" effect of opioids: the capacity for non-drug pleasure is slowly degraded[1] and users may not notice until it's too late, similar to the way that the visual cortex will try to correct for laser damage until the retina is irredeemable. Decriminalizing any opioids comes with significant risk, since they are easily the deadliest sort of drugs.
Instead, approaches similar to that currently applied in the Netherlands may be more fruitful. A bright spot is that medical cannabis seems to decrease the likelihood of opioid prescriptions, which narrows the medicine-to-streets pipeline.
i think you are not mentioning meth and heroin, despite them being on the RAND report from 2012 (one may suspect that order/rank may have morphed significantly since then), because the conversation around legalization around them would be an immensely unpopular sell in the US.
i don't see why cartels wouldn't switch overnight to meth or heroin (or both) the moment that cocaine and marijuana become legalized. what then? we know that the illegality creates the massive black market/financial incentives for these regional drug powers to exist, so it seems important to get all cards out on the table, lest we "fix" two problematic drugs only to have at least two left over.
> i think you are not mentioning meth and heroin, despite them being on the RAND report from 2012 (one may suspect that order/rank may have morphed significantly since then), because the conversation around legalization around them would be an immensely unpopular sell in the US.
Heroin, mostly, comes from Asia, so I did segment a little there. In particular, a lot of heroin comes from Afghanistan, specifically, and American interventions there may have contributed to the opioid crisis. See e.g.:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47861444
Really the post was just too long and I was tired of writing. Opioids will indeed be another problem we have to deal with.
In the case of methamphetamine, there is some hope of substitution with less dangerous drugs like amphetamine, methylphenidate, et cetera. One of the biggest reasons people start using meth is that it's cheaper than other drugs; it's by far the easiest for chemists to make. It's heavily ingrained in various "party" subcultures for this reason, and also features in stories of rural poverty. But that also means that even a strikingly different (hopefully safer) drug could potentially take its place, if it were stimulating and pro-social. In that case we have no appeal to tradition; we have to confront the question of whether "party drugs" can have a place in legal society, which is another matter entirely.
Luckily, the market for methamphetamine is significantly smaller than that for marijuana or cocaine according to the RAND report, and I think this is because demand for meth, which we might call the "ramen noodles" of drugs, is more price-sensitive than other drugs. If the power of cartels is reduced by decriminalization efforts targeting the marijuana and cocaine markets, the price of meth may not be able to rise so easily without impacting demand.
The cartels aren’t drug evangelists, they’re businesses. Take away drugs and they’ll violently monopolize other profitable export industries. In fact, they’ve already done this with avocados.
If you want to stop the violence and corruption of the cartels, you’ll have to either change the culture that makes their existence possible, or defeat/imprison/kill them all. I’m not sure which of those would be more difficult.
There are no other criminal enterprises that offer a comparable revenue source. Not one. It's utter nonsense to think that organized crime is just going to switch to avocado extortion and keep bribing their way out of jail.
The Sicilian Mafia has gone mostly “legit,” in the sense that they operate in legal industries, e.g. olive oil. They just use criminal means to extract hugely excessive rents from those industries.
They aren't competitive internationally, though. And can't be unless they're also going to go down to Morocco, fight the Army, invade Tunisia and Algeria, and then force the extraction of high rents.
Human trafficking and gun running are the cartel’s other significant sources of revenue. Then there are extortion and protection rackets. You could legalize absolutely everything and you would still have cartels. In Africa they are run by warlords and drug smuggling isn’t a big thing there — anywhere you have poor people and a weak government, you’ll have some form of “cartel.” The product is irrelevant.
If they could violently monopolize some other industry, why aren't they already doing so?
I would assume they are already trying to expand as much as possible. Legalising drugs doesn't look like it would make that expansion easier. If anything, it would become harder, because funding dries up, so investments are harder to make.
If true then what is a workable solution? Does Mexico need UN peacekeepers to reinforce the government's efforts to retake control from cartels and corrupt militaries?
How sustainable is any change if people believe criminals will just regain power once help leaves?
While I agree that the common populace of the US has mostly reached an understanding that marijuana prohibition has far higher costs compared to gains (and was initiated for extremely unjust reasons) - we aren't there yet. National legalization is unlikely to happen regardless of who takes the Senate+House+Presidency in the coming term with a possibility of it happening if a lot of pressure is applied on the Democrat side (and assuming they hold significant political power).
The fight isn't over. While the populace has coalesced the political will is still lagging behind.
>> Unlike powder cocaine, coca leaf has a long history of relatively safe use in the northern Andes. Widespread coca tea use is not considered a public health crisis of any particular concern in Peru and southern Colombia:
> The decriminalization of coca tea in Western countries may lead to less gang activity as illegal cocaine manufacture economics shift from large-scale to small-scale extraction.
Who would substitute coca tea for cocaine? Decriminalized marijuana has same sought-after effects of criminalized marijuana, so can reduce the crime associated with it. I don't think you'd get the same reduction in cocaine trafficking crime unless you decriminalized refined cocaine.
Few people would, that's not the point. It seems you are not understanding this part: "shift from large-scale to small-scale extraction". The claim is that cocaine would partly shift to "at home" and local production, which GP correctly points out is currently very common with DMT. The comparison is made because DMT currently has a similar legal situation to what GP suggests for cocaine: legal plant material, but the purified/extracted substance is illegal.
> It seems you are not understanding this part: "shift from large-scale to small-scale extraction". The claim is that cocaine would be fabricated "at home" and locally, which GP correctly points out is currently very common with DMT.
Couldn't you say the same thing about meth, especially in the past when pseudoephedrine medicines were easier to get? It sounds simple enough that regular people can make it from a receipe, but the cartels still traffic it: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bvgazz/sinaloa-cartel-dru....
I believe cocaine is a bit easier than meth, though I'm no chemist. In any case, you're certainly right that it wouldn't kill the black market, but it would still weaken it (I edited my post on this point, sorry for the confusion).
If you can get an ephedrine compound a synthesis for meth is possible where you just throw everything in a pot and come back to it. Small scale production used to be fairly prolific based on total consumption. That said its total production volume in that manner was low.
There are really two things to respond to here: first, all powder cocaine starts as the leaf, so the powder cocaine market would move downstream to extraction from widely-available coca leaf. This is the biggest reason we haven't tried this already. However, I hope that the economics will not favor transporting large amounts of still-illegal cocaine across long distances, so that instead it will mostly be produced near the point of consumption, with lower profit margins and less violence.
Second, addicts are more likely than you think to recognize their own usage as a problem, yet rely on the drug to do things that most people expect to be able to do. Someone who uses cocaine so they can focus on work or participate in social activities would probably be willing to substitute at least some of their usage with tea, if it were cheaper than powder and legal. Drug abuse isn't usually a problem of simple uncontained hedonism. It's not a perfect analogy, but the availability of beer probably likewise moderates the demand for spirits.
Coca tea is far, far too weak to even get a similar effect to cocaine. For example, It takes ~1 lb of coca leaves to get 1 g of cocaine using chemical extraction, so the tea doesn't even come close.
Most coke addicts will switch to amphetamines and booze, which gives similar dopaminergic effects.
>A cup of coca tea prepared from one gram of coca leaves (the typical contents of a tea bag) contains approximately 4.2 mg of organic coca alkaloid.[1] (In comparison, a typical dose (a "line") of cocaine contains between 20 and 30 milligrams.[2])
It's fair to point out that there is still a discrepancy and many habitual cocaine users have some tolerance to the drug, but it's not impossible to drink five cups of tea. Also, it looks like you'd need more like half a pound.
A typical ingested dose is close to 200mg or so which is still a fifth of a kg of raw leaves. (A 200mg dose lasts longer than insufflation, about 4-6 hours, and during that duration is about as strong as insufflation.)
A "typical dose" is 40-60 mg, lasts 45 minutes, and leaves you wanting more. A coke addict will need at least a gram no matter what they're doing, hence why a gram is a benchmark for coke use.
Nobody is going to drink 10 cups of coca tea every 45 minutes. They're going to pop adderall and hit the bottle.
A 1920s alcohol prohibition that banned only hard liquor while allowing beer and wine might well have lasted until the present day. I think there really is a willingness to substitute legal "soft" versions of drugs (or other contraband) for "hard" ones.
It would have to be some damn strong mate de coca. I've drank it on several occasions, and from what I could tell, it was less of a stimulant than coffee.
I doubt this is for the profit in that industry itself. It's probably more to do with the negotiation power they can get if they control an important export to the USA, maybe partly using avocado distribution chains for drugs, and maybe money laundering.
Violent criminal activity is not attractive from a business perspective. Security is expensive, paying bribes is expensive, mistakes are expensive. Without the huge money influx of drug trafficking (which is an insane source of profit) to maintain an army, it'd be more cost-effective to simply not have one.
Don't get me wrong, these aren't good people and right off the bat would probably still be involved in lots of corruption, blackmailing and even murder. But I doubt they'd be able to afford a paramilitary branch and maintain violent conflicts without the profits from drugs.
>Cartels have kidnapped technicians doing maintenance on cellular towers to make them fix their networks, people working in the sector said. The technicians usually are released after a few days, if not sooner. Still, those who spoke with Reuters said they live in fear of being forced by traffickers to do such work, lest they be killed for knowing too much, or become targets of authorities or rival criminal groups for being complicit. Whenever possible, they said, they downplay their expertise.
Isn't what President Duterte is correct, now? There are lot of failings I agree but Philippines would have turned out to be another Mexico if it was left unchecked.
If the borders of the US close then the smuggling will start to go to other countries too I guess.
These guys just throw up repeaters and not only do they not try to hide them, they actually mark them to show who is going to be destroying your life if you take them down. Oh, and you have to pay if you want to work on your own legitimate equipment that is rightfully on that tower.
The illegal drug trade exists on a scale unimaginable to most people. Imagine if we could figure out how to legitimize it- we'd save countless lives over stupid stuff like having your life threatened just because you work for a telecom company and need to do your job. If we could tax drug money at just a couple percent we could invest in all sorts of social programs and infrastructure, rather than funding thugs. The crazy part is that a lot of the drug lords don't even spend a good chunk of their fortune, they just store massive amounts of money in houses they'll never even live in.
Edit: To clarify my point a little, the reason the Mexican government isn't willing to do anything is that they couldn't do anything about it even if they tried. The Mexican military has fewer people than the cartels and have a smaller budget. According to this article from 2012 (https://muse.jhu.edu/article/485071) the Mexican cartels employ 450,000 people and make $25 billion annually (these numbers have probably increased in the last eight years). The Mexican military would have to be incredibly skilled to take them on with 177,000 people and a $7 billion budget. And even then, that's just the Mexican cartels, there are more in South America and the rest of the world. Stopping the illegal drug trade would take a unified policy effort from every government in the world, we're past the point of being able to be able to fight the cartels with military power.