Legalizing all drugs would kill these cartels almost instantly. People who do drugs do them anyway and find a way to even if they’re illegal. If drugs weren’t illegal all that money wouldnt end up in mexican cartels pockets.
This is absolutely not going to be the case. Assuming both the US and Mexico simultaneous legalized all drugs, what happens to all the illegal jobs the cartels currently have?
Their people, money and weapons don't vanish and what we see when cartels take a hit income is violence increases and the cartels look to other methods of making income using they're existing tools. Protection rackets and kidnappings are already used as supplemental income, these would only increase.
Now a long approach of gradual decriminalization and legalization may work, with the ability to operate legally the need to utilize violence decreases over time as it's generally bad for business.
If their main source of income is cut off they will have to immediately downsize or it would all eat into the boss’s accumulated wealth. Reestablishing the cartel on kidnapping and other violent crime is not as lucrative as selling sniffy gold. If they start kidnapping in America is a different thing all together but doing it in Mexico would not yield enough money to keep the current operations - unless they kidnap every Mexican citizen or something like that... Closest move is to get involved directly into politics
Or they get into the "protection" and kidnapping racket even more than they are currently. Sure their size would probably decrease but the amount of violence would skyrocket. At least for several years. The basically control whole swathes of that. They wouldn't give that up without a fight.
Hard to disentangle effects from other stuff that was going on. Prohibition was repealed in 1933, in the depths of the Depression. It was also the year before FDR signed a comprehensive crime-fighting bill that allowed FBI agents to carry guns and make arrests.
By pure numbers, crime did hit a 20th-century high in 1933, right after prohibition was repealed, and they didn't pass those numbers until the 1970s-early 1990s (and only just barely then). But this was also the economic nadir of the century. And the mechanism for the decline in organized crime was that many crime bosses were killed or imprisoned, so it could've been the crime bill. So yes, it is what happened at the end of prohibition, but it's hard to draw firm conclusions between the two.
It wouldn't be nice for sure, but it would drastically slow down and change the magnitude. The thing is.. crime exists in most countries. What makes a big difference here is the amount of drug money coming into the cartels pockets, that type of money changes everything. We're talking of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, that's no pocket change. If money stops flowing in the cartels would have to switch to other types of operations, sadly still vicious and violent, but nothing like what they currently make.
It definitely would not magically get rid of cartels overnight, but it'd cut off a huge source of money for them. If they start multiplying the number of violence-related revenue streams (kidnapping, protection rackets/extortion, murder-for-hire, arms snuggling), their image among people who were neutral towards them may decline, and maybe they'll start to be seen as much closer to nothing but pure terrorist/paramilitary organizations.
I don't know if that would start the process of gradual downsizing and elimination by security forces or if it'd instead first lead to a huge uptick in violence and perhaps civil war, but I feel like in the long-term it'd be much harder for most of them to hold onto as much money and power as they used to.
I'm absolutely not an expert in this area and could be horribly wrong, but I think this idea should at least be considered more seriously.
I'm curious about one thing: I keep hearing weird stories about small police forces and ultra-militarised police forces in the US for example, like tiny towns having surplus tanks and assault rifles.
Why/how are the cartels not just "put down" immediately with some assistance? Is there something deeper, like people being born into it or politicians much rather having drug money than a living population? I don't understand why there even needs to be any form of civil war, unless the cartels have embedded themselves deep enough to be similar to guerilla warfare-esque with innocent actors.
There are a lot of desperately poor young men in Mexico, and there are billions of dollars being thrown around in the drug industry. It's cheap to hire an army, and if you can get kids young enough you can turn them into psychopaths.
Take a cop in rural Mexico making like $15k/year, and he'd be absolutely insane to flush his and his family's life down the toilet to go up against these guys.
Cop in the US in one of those militarized police forces is making upwards of $70k, and isn't up against organized groups of psychopaths with armored vehicles and automatic weapons. Those cops are going after guys growing pot in the closet, and the occasional small, low-level drug org that isn't too dangerous.
>Now a long approach of gradual decriminalization and legalization may work, with the ability to operate legally the need to utilize violence decreases over time as it's generally bad for business.
For the record I'm pro-legalization, but just flipping the status quo overnight isn't going to fly here.
Saying "just legalize all drugs" doesn't solve the problem, someone still has to make the drugs, can we just give all traffickers amnesty for past crimes and make their operations legal? Maybe? But it's not something to hand-wave away.
I don't have the answer but flippant comments about how easy it is to dismantle cartels, is offensive to anyone who has fought to do such and likely a disservice to the intelligence of people running them.
No, it's not easy to dismantle cartels and that is because of how much money and power they amassed under the current status quo. But making drugs legal would definitely cut the cartels funding and they would eventually dwindle into obscurity and small time crime. The current power of the cartels is only due to the big money that are in the game, hundreds of billions of dollars a year!!
That's actually a myth. During past government in Mexico drug cartels started kidnapping and stealing oil to the point that oil income was higher than drugs. There's an active case from Pemex against BASF and other Houston based company to buy oil from drug cartels at cheaper price.
Indeed. In the US the focus is typically on the drugs that come north, but it’s not just dollars that flow back south, it’s also weapons, which further destabilize the drug producing/transit countries.
This is the most naive comment I have seen. You do not understand the cartels integration in all parts of life. They control the government. They control business.
Source for what?
Currently US dollars are entering the cartels pockets, big dollars and there’s no secret. And naturally they scaled up the operations because the demand is high. If drugs became legal demand would go down and it would cut into their operations “biggly”.
Citation please? The profit that Colorado and other states are reporting makes it hard to believe the black market is even a shadow of its former self in those states.
In California, the black market is estimated as twice the size of the legal market (1). This is the natural result when you make it excruciatingly difficult to open legal businesses, and impose in some municipalities (including Los Angeles) north of 30% taxes on product with no break given for medical patients who might rely on this for their disease. There is also a lack of enforcement of illegal dispensaries, which contributes to there being at least 2835 illegal dispensaries compared to 873 licensed dispensaries state wide (2).
If they hadn't made it so expensive artificially then the illegal guys couldn't make enough profit to make it worth their time to sell illegally. The California canibus market is a terrible example of what a market should be.
Yes, just as they still smuggle tobacco products into areas where they are perceived to be excessively taxed. The problem is overtaxation, not the nature of the product.
The fear of punishments probably keeps many kids / young adults off drugs. The fear of incarceration and a criminal record probably does more to keep people off drugs than actual incarceration.
I find the argument for legalizing drugs as some sort of a benevolent all-in-one solution a complete idiotic solution.
Drugs like Heroin, Meth, Cocaine, etc should absolutely be banned and IMV the scope and scale of punishments increased.
Humans are notoriously incompetent or weak-willed to make rational choices in many aspects. They are emotional, impulsive and irrational.
Imagine being able to obtain drugs at market prices and being able to sell to children in schools, illegally of course. Can you not see what is happening with alcohol?
Drugs are a social evil and must be dealt with. Legalization is not the solution. It will increase drug use exponentially.
The fear of punishment can be replaced with the fear of becoming a junkie and education can prevent that. Sure, some will become junkies and so be it, it's their life and that choice belongs to them. When I say legalizing drugs I don't mean encouraging them. Drugs like Heroin, Meth, Coke (and the list doesn't end here) are indeed dangerous and disgusting, but people still do them and the reason is because their lives are messed up or they themselves are messed up. If drugs were legal accessible junkies wouldn't need to turn into criminals.
With illegal drugs there is a great incentive by drug dealers to hook more and more people up and make them do whatever it takes to get their next dose. If the next dose is very easy to get and cheap I bet you'd either not see junkies come to light or a lot of them would be semi-functional and be on drugs throughout their lives without many of us not even be aware of it. The fear will come from seeing irresponsible people ruin their lives and not wanting to be one of them. Alcohol too has a high potential of abuse and yet not a large number of people abuse it as it was thought during the prohibition.
