Yet the culture of violence it created will remain.
Which is a good argument for immediate across the board legalization. The recovery is going to be a very long process. Unfortunately I doubt that will happen. Even the idea of marijuana legalization is scoffed at by a city (Washington DC) which is fueled by the very cocaine and pills it purports to abhor.
I would propose creating an open database dedicated to tracking individuals known or believed to be associated with violent drug cartels. Perhaps call it a crowd sourced intelligence network.
Knowing that a government official being anonymously accused of being corrupt recently went on vacation in a foreign country and stayed at a 5 star hotel would go a long way in validating suspicions when combined with other data points, such as their relatives purchasing large quantities of real estate.
Presumably no cartel member or corrupt official operates with complete anonymity. When hundreds of individuals are able to combine their reports together, the "social network" of a criminal organization should be completely visible to all.
While I strongly advocate individual anonymity and privacy rights, anyone who explicitly infringes and impedes the rights of others has no rights.
This is a guerrilla war which can only be won by its own victims.
I'd like to hear more about why you think the culture of violence associated with drugs being illegal will not simply disappear after a generation?
Doesn't most violence associated with these drug cartels take the form of fights over supply/territory? What will they be fighting over if they are no longer the suppliers?
So here is an intersting conundrum, if you look at the distribution of money in the illegal drug business vs the legal drug business, the illegal side provides more jobs for people that the legal drug business won't hire. Ex-felons in general are a case which was recently called out in Richmond California.
Economics aside though, if you use the end of prohibition as an example of what might happen, you might over estimate the speed of commercialization. This is because prior to prohibition there was a thriving liquor business, and that business simply returned (within one generation so people who had run legal liquor stores before where around to run them again). This situation does not exist for drugs, medical pot clubs not withstanding.
True. Luckily it's a much smaller market to begin with since most of the population drinks and only a relatively small fraction is interested in drugs besides marijuana.
I'm not really worried about the employment angle because cartel jobs aren't productive jobs. Essentially you're freeing up labor for the productive part of the economy which makes for a higher standard of living for everyone.
It might take a year or two to have nicely packaged heroin from well known companies available in pretty boxes in liquor stores, but I think you'd be rid of all the cartel violence within 6 months.
I think the point on the violence being reduced is a good one. I personally am in favor of legalizing drugs and allowing market forces to compensate the changes in societal risk; for example for people who are convicted of driving under the influence their insurance goes up and eventually their license gets revoked. Alcohol and cigarette taxes funding outreach and education efforts etc.
Given the various occupy activity, and the quantity of money that drugs influence, it seems like the 1% would figure out how to move all that money to them if they could do so without risking being arrested, extradited, murdered, Etc. Perhaps an unintended side effect, or perhaps not, but until recently I hadn't given a lot of thought to who would benefit most financially from such a change.
Real drug lords are part of the 1%. Most 1%'ers only work in one industry or a few related ones.
US policy is less about who would benefit from legalization (everyone) and more about who would suffer. If prohibition were ended there would be massive cuts in the budget and staff of the ATF, DEA, police, the entire boarder security industry, infantry defense contractors, prisons, courts and law firms.
Many politicians went to law school. No one wants to put their friends out of work.
Heroin was a trademark of Bayer. There are currently several companies manufacturing it for European countries. If it was more widely legal, why wouldn't production ramp up very quickly?
yep. That is the key. The primary beneficiary of the drug prohibition isn't cartels (who by the way risk their own lives), it is the whole government power structure.
That's a bit of an oversimplification. If the drugs they move are suddenly legalized, do you really think they're going to shrug their shoulders and drop everything? It might slow their imports here, but we aren't the only country who uses drugs, and you can bet the country where they're already hanging bloggers from overpasses won't be able to stop them from exerting control.
Mexico is a nexus of the drug trade not because they manufacture lots of drugs, but because they is infective law reinforcement and a porous border with the US. Consider West Virginia's largest crop by cash value is pot, but they have minimal drug related violence because it's highly decentralized and relatively far from major markets.
Pot cultivation went way up after 9/11 due to the increase in border security. It just isnt cost effective to smuggle a kilo of pot versus a kilo of coke. Pot is pretty difficult to move in large amounts so it make sense to grow it north of the border. Wholesale pot might go for 2-3k per key while coke might go for 10-20k per key.
I never said Mexico was a nexus of the drug trade. I said it currently has violent cartels running the show. You cannot point to West Virginia, who has no such history, as an indicator of what would happen in Mexico if drugs were legalized.
The drug lords have invested a bunch of money setting up smuggling networks and equipping mini-armies. Legalize drugs and they'll just switch to smuggling something else.
I agree drugs should be legalized, but it's because I don't like the government telling me what I can do.
This possible, but the profit margins that exist in the illegal drug business would not be replaced. Their smuggling networks & personnel would become a massive financial burden (how long it would take for that financial burden to destroy them is a separate issue.)
If we assume drug lords are in it for the money and/or power they'd cut their losses ASAP.
For any of them that are really in it for the thrills the time would depend on their reserves, but I doubt it'd last longer than a few months for any of them.
Bootleg items are one way to make money, and you can bet that the market for that is already huge for DVDs and clothing knock-offs. I also recommend reading up on human trafficking, which is also a huge problem, too. I don't have any figures, but it's also worth considering how much money can be earned by robbing someone at gun point and holding them for ransom, as well - cartels in South America have done this for quite some time.
That's a useless oversimplification of the problem. Such immediate solutions have enormous pitfalls.
For example, in Europe, cocaine got significantly cheaper and rather easy to find. This led to a a considerable increase of its popularity during the last three years or so. Cocaine is starting to take 'market' from cannabis based drugs which are much less dangerous and carry much softer consequences.
'Legalize drugs' is a too naive statement, the drug situation needs to be carefully analysed and adequate solutions need to be put in practice based on as much factors as possible.
That said, generally, in developed countries I think consumption decriminalization is a positive thing at present time. It makes room for advances in thins like hygiene, medical treatment of addicts, etc. without creating easier access to drugs.
I agree that "legalize all drugs" is problematic, and probably not a good idea. "legalize all drugs less addictive than coffee" is a better option, that allows cannabis and mushrooms. (some people argue "all drugs less addictive than alcohol", but that would include cocaine). However, that still has the problem that customer won't know for sure what they're buying without some sort of FDA control, and small kids getting their hands on the stuff too easily. So as a third revision I propose "Regulate all drugs less addictive than coffee to be legally available to adults". Not very catchy.
Who gets to decide which drugs are addictive? The main claim by anti-legalization politicians is that cannabis is addictive.
Giving any small group of humans the right to decide which properties drugs have and how important/dangerous those properties are is EXTREMELY dangerous. This is not kids stuff. Millions live and die by these decisions. Who do we trust to make such decisions?
Yes, I know that is complex, that's why I sidestepped the issue by saying "less addictive than coffee". That's pretty easy to determine in a controlled double blind and most people agree with it intuitively.
Underlying your arguments is the belief that some people are better at making these sorts of decisions than others. The belief that any group of people (no matter how large) should dictate the consumption patterns of another group of people (no matter how small) is inherently anti-democratic.
You claim that the drug situation should be carefully analysed. Well, it must be analysed by someone, right? Who will do the analysis? Who deserves this power? Who do we trust enough to make unbiased decisions in this domain?
Another underlying assumption that you seem to be making is that drugs are bad. You want to allow room for advances in hygeine, medical treatement, etc. but you don't want people to do more drugs.
I want people to do more drugs. I want there to be more and deeper research into drugs. I want people to trip more. I want cocaine and heroin addicts to have easy access to ibogaine. I want there to be less shame associated with having gone through a period of heavy addiction. I want people to smoke weed and do mushrooms and LSD and 2CE on their days off rather than getting drunk.
"Legalize drugs" is not an over-simplification, it is a purification. It is the only position which is consistent with freedom and mutual human respect. It is the only position which has any hope of allowing humanity to move towards a healthy and mature stance on drug use. Your attempt to cast it as a "simplification" is a subtle (and all-too-common) context-switch from the land of ideals into the land of hubristic utilitarianism/pragmatism.
It looks like the author at RRW didn't read the article well.
Rascatripas was not hung from the infamous overpass. His body was dumped in town at the base of a statue where other bodies have been dumped in the past.
The past tense of "to hang" when referring to a human being (as in "by the neck until dead") is "hanged" - i.e. "Rascatripas was not hanged from the infamous overpass."
No it's not, or more correctly, that is a rather recent development. The Middle English account of a man punished given on Wikipedia uses hung (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanged,_drawn_and_quartered), in fact this punishment was referred to as "hung, drawn, and quartered".
Now, if that is the case, how to explain the title of the Wikipedia entry, i.e. the usage of hanged in place of hung. This is the common phenomenon of regularization of irregular verbs, that has been going a loong time in English, eventually almost all of them will be regularized. This article (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-486935/How-irregular...) gives some details and explains that there are about 98 irregular verbs left in the language, compared to 177 in Old English.
You can see this process today in the "driven-drove" dichotomy, different people choose one or the other. Eventually drove will disappear.
It's a little more subtle than that. There are usage differences between the perfect and imperfect tenses in both "hung-hanged" and "driven-drove," between active and passive constructions[1], etc. Unfortunately, most native speakers aren't any more savvy to this than they are to what remains of the English subjunctive.
1. It will always be "I drove to the store" and "I was driven to the store" and "I am a driven person," never "I driven to the store" or "I was drove to the store" or "I am a drove person."
Not only that, but neither "driven" nor "drove" is a regular past-tense form. That would be "drived", a use I haven't heard from anyone over two years of age.
Yes and no. Some people call ablaut verbs irregular, but almost all of them are in fact regular. They only seem irregular because there are relatively few of them left to group together [1]. But I'm not aware of any language with a single pattern of conjugation. Many have 10 or more.
1. Ex.: Drive-drove-driven, write-wrote-written, ride-rode-ridden, etc. While they follow a different conjugation pattern, most ablaut verbs are perfectly regular.
I hate to go off-topic again on such a sensitive subject - but am I the only one that finds a discussion on grammar quite distasteful when we're talking about somebody's death? There's a time and a place for that kind of discussion, and this is neither the time nor the place.
Is there no options but an uncorrupted and highly trained military unit to start marching and cracking down on the cartel? What if the cartel members hide? Or will they fight?
The cartel is largely run by highly trained elite ex-military. One unexplored option is to acknowledge that drugs are a medical and social problem and not something for the police, or God forbid, the military to solve. Legalize drugs and allow them to be distributed through reasonable channels with medical supervision if necessary. It's worked wherever it's been tried.
They'd have the capacity for a moment, but they'd have lost their primary source of income. Human trafficking and extortion don't come anywhere near the risk/reward ratio or volume of drugs.
Some of the cartels would go legit to become drug companies. The ones who wanted to remain criminals would have to downsize their organizations to fit the remaining markets.
Where is this meme originating? It a lame argument that ignores the problem in every way. It pops up so often I want to know where it's being broadcast from.
Yeah, just like the Italian mafia was around long after the US repealed alcohol prohibition. That doesn't mean the repeal was a bad idea, or that it didn't help in combating organized crime.
What I don't get is how come there are no such violence problems with drug cartels in the United States where surely they must be as large if not larger since the drugs get somehow distributed there (I'm assuming there's where most drugs handled by Mexican cartels end up).
The US police/government/courts are less corrupt and have more resources to crack down on the more visible violence.
There is more violence in America than most people realize. It's considered mundane so you don't see it in the news as much.
The US is selling arms to the cartels in Mexico, so their violence is escalated there.
Mexican cartels aren't larger in the US than in Mexico because their supply sources are in Mexico, they lose momentum over distance and face domestic competition as they move across the US.
I didn't mean Mexican cartels in the US, just cartels in the US in general. I don't buy that it just doesn't show up in the news, if people appeared decapitated or hanging from overpasses in the US I think you would see it mentioned in the news. The corruption and incompetence of Mexican police makes the problem more obvious since the government has to put the army and federal police on the streets to keep some control.
I think maybe in the US the cartels have reached some equilibrium that allows them to operate without so much violence and be discrete enough that they don't get bothered so much by the police.
a mom and kids gets caught in the crossfire. this was an accident, and how much news coverage does it get? had you heard about this story before?
the war is outside your house right now and you don't even know, because the casualties are almost universally poor people (okay maybe not outside your house because you might not be in the USA)...
Associated or unassociated with the press, this "blogger" body comes from somewhere. Corruption is simply a fact of life in Mexico.
The most effective conduit of corruption anywhere is complacency, and lack of inherent disgust.
Traveling a few hrs through some neighboring (Mexican) states?
Then carry a few extra fifties so that you can minimize the average time spent pulled over on your trip.
That didn't sound repulsive to my little ears, it was simply how things worked.
I learned that bit of travel advice from listening in on the adult dinner table at about the same time I learned to ride a bicycle in that very same city (Nevo Laredo).
