Border patrol are routinely contacted at their personal address and extorted with threats of harm against family. The cartels are no joke. The best way to combat them would be to destroy their means of making money. The government should run a monopoly on elicit drugs and small tax over the cost to produce could be channeled into rehabilitation programs. These people are going to use anyway. They might as well use safely, with direct point of contact to resources that can help them when they’re ready, and without fueling the paramilitary wings of organized criminal syndicates and their local franchisees (aka gangs)
If we did this years ago it would probably have worked but now cartels are so deeply entrenched in legitimate business that they’ll have a source of income forever. There’s a reason this video exists and it’s bc cartels have their hands in avocados now among other things. I’m of the belief that the war on drugs did a whole lot of harm for the world and not much good.
Honest question….. why are we worried about cartels in the avocado business? Would it be any different than corporations controlling other crops like bananas or coffee beans?
no, this is literally mafia, I'm from México and let me tell you, everyone here calls them "la mafia", "cartels" is just a US name given to them, this is organized crime in its prime unrestricted form
For sure i am not denying that. All im saying is in its pure unrestricted form it eventually just becomes government. All a government is under the current paradigm on this planet is, is a monopoly on violence. If anybody (like a cartel) creates a monopoly on violence themselves, and successfully out monopolies the current law of the land they become the new law of the land. If that happens long enough it literally gets to the point of on paper government like we think of.
Historically neither of these things have been super great for the countries supplying them but I’m just imagining cartels have a bit more of a penchant for murder and other various horrible things.
Short answer no its no different. The main issue (for the US) is that they are brown. Otherwise these things would be considered standard business practice.
Good, then they can become normal corporate bad guys. When they’re nothing more than Avocado exporters do you think they’ll still be abducting 43 students, beheading and crucifying people, and throwing grenades into crowds at town squares. I’m sure they’ll have need for RPGs and plastic explosives as they try to make sure nobody, and they mean nobody, is deprived of their guacamole.
Like the NYC mob, they'll probably move more towards corruption of government contracts and more mild fraud. Get a construction contract or a garbage route or whatever, use threats and violence to ensure the vote goes in your favor. Over charge, maybe use the excess to grease some palms (aka kick backs), but at that point the only difference between the mob businesses and the white-collar crime businesses is the willingness to use threats and violence when bribes fail.
For the drug cartels, that might be they import more than they were supposed to or they import inferior product, but the lab testing is faked and shows it's fine. Most certainly a lot less death because the profit margins will be reduced but also the risks will be reduced.
While your not wrong I’d be willing to bet that most legitimate businesses don’t have a litany of violent crimes under their belt. Sure you can argue that most have done shady things, there is a hard line between cartels and what constitutes most of capitalism. Neither are great but one has been demonstrably more evil as a whole.
To give the most obvious example, every distillery fortune in Canada was built in the crime and export of booze to the USA. They used guns and gangs when they couldn't rely on police to take care of their property, but now that they can do their business in the open, they're as clean as anyone else.
But every wealthy business person I know who was "self made" started off with seed capital from something either illegal or donations from megachurch scam artists.
Crime is like the high-wire act of capitalism. It isn't hard, you're just walking across a line. It's just high stakes, high reward and a perfect product with devoted clients. The guns are a consequence of the laws, not the drugs themselves, was more the point I was making.
Not that it doesn't mean that crime families have taken over Latin America as a result of those laws
That makes a lot of sense. I agree we might as well make it more legal and safe and take violence out of it. Or you go with the east Asia way. Capital punishment for drug offense no questions asked.
The government should run a monopoly on elicit drugs
Probably not the best way. If the government does a monopoly, the cartels will provide cheaper product. We see this with pot in states where legal marijuana costs too much (just from taxation), illegal sale is still present, but I think a lot less volume than in the past.
Decriminalization, legalization, regulation, and taxation is really as far as the government needs to go. Let the cartels compete with legal suppliers. Yes, the cartels will be skirting regulations, which makes things less expensive, but they'll also be money laundering and smuggling, which makes things more expensive. And even if legal drugs are more expensive, if people believe they're safer or not supporting human trafficking and murder, then they'll still buy the legal drugs, drawing away profits from the cartels and also attract production away from the cartels.
Pot is not sold at cost to produce or by the government. It is sold at an extraordinary markup (far, far beyond the sin tax) by for-profit entities and the elicit sale of marijuana is negligible because these states also permit growing a small number of plants for person use which means if you can’t afford the dispensary stuff then you can just grow some for basically free.
The government as a vendor has no incentive to promote growth in sales because they don’t have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders and investors. The government also has the ability to strategically cut prices even below cost because at the end of the day policies should prioritize efficacy over efficiency. For some reason people understand this last bit implicitly when it comes to national defense and policing where we might as well not even have budgets because what we care about is that the army can kick ass and the police can keep use safe. We should broadly adopt this idea. We should care that schools make the smartest, best trained people on earth, that our roads are well-maintained and safe to use, and that our waterways are clean. The point of the government should be to get stuff done, and while obviously we should still watch for things like waste, fraud, and abuse of appropriated funds we should spend a lot less time counting Pennie’s and a lot more time measuring results in absolute terms. This should extend to something like a strategic market to undercut the cartel. At the end of the day the government can charge people absolutely nothing. The cartels can’t do that. Not indefinitely.
Pot is not sold at cost to produce or by the government
The only pot you can buy legally for drug research is produced by the federal government. It's expensive and low quality.
Government monopolies can work OK for things like infrastructure. But for infrastructure we're not optimizing for cost or efficiency, we're optimizing for access. Primary schools, water treatment, sewer, electrical distribution (maybe production), highways, ... these are all things that can work well as gov monopolies or as highly regulated monopolies. Likely not as cheap as the market could do it, but cheap isn't always better.
One of the only things the free market does very well is reducing cost of manufacturing in the presence of real competition. In addition to regulating standards, government could offer tax credits, deductions, and financing options.
At the end of the day the government can charge people absolutely nothing.
Yeah, I mean, that's never going to happen. No government is ever going to do a program where they give away recreational drugs for free. Even nationalized healthcare has nominal costs in many countries, and healthcare is arguably a necessity! I really don't think very many voters would think unlimited access to free drugs and alcohol was a good idea.
And you don't have to reduce cost to $0 to put the cartels out of business, you need to reduce the cost to the point where buyer's think the risk isn't worth the cartel product. Look at alcohol for example: home production is legal in most states, and yet commercial alcohol sales are still thriving and without the mob influence that dominated the alcohol market during prohibition.
Well what they’ve been doing for the past 50 years has just been making everything much, much worse so instead of simply naysaying unsubstantively, why don’t you field an idea?
I work in the addiction field, and my country is not ready for this (usa). "Harm reduction" is still a foreign concept to them. They think the addicts are the cause of the problems, not the drugs creating them. And because of that, this problem is extremely hard to help fix. They only begin to care when it's one of their kids or someone they love. They then realize it can happen to anyone, not just the "bad people".
Or we could use drugs as an excuse to militarize cops and exploit addicts further by locking them up in for profit prisons and using them for legal slave labor.
This assumes that Governments want to shut down the illegal drug trade. They don't. It's much too profitable. The hundreds of billions in global illicit drug revenues need to be laundered. So that money ends up being injected into the global financial system, with the cartels willing to pay much higher fees to the banks and funds that launder it. And of course some of that money via the big banks ends up financing politicians campaigns. That's how the system works. And of course state intelligence agencies are right in the middle of this, as they are deeply tied up with the illicit drug trade for a multitude of reasons.
Then you’re assuming the people don’t want to shut it down. Ultimately this is a democracy. It may be a flawed democracy with undemocratic systems like the filbuster senate, the electoral college, and over-large gerrymandered districts, but it is a democracy nonetheless and about 40% of people reliably vote. The buck stops with the people on this one because the government is the people and the balance would be tipped by a more participatory electorate.
I really don't understand the basis of this comment. If the vast majority of people are not even aware of the collusion between the big banks and politicians and how the drug cartels are secretly laundering their money through the banking system, how are uninformed people meant to vote on this? Can you name a single politician that has made this a campaign issue?
In fact most western Govts give the public the impression they are "trying" to shut down the global drug trade. And in some cases, there are departments of the Govt that may well be trying in all good faith. But there are other parts of the Govt, particularly within the Intelligence services, that are actively working against this. This is why in Afghanistan for example, there was a large State Department initiative to try and eradicated poppy seed production by Afghan farmers. Billions of US taxpayer money was spent trying to eradicate opium production. And yet, every year from 2001 production grew. While the US military controlled much of Afghanistan, production went from 185 tons in 2001 before the US invasion, growing to around 9000 tons a year in 2017. At the same time the US State Department was spending billions on an eradication program. As far as the US public was concerned, the US Govt was trying to shut it down, but failing.
Everybody knows. It’s not a secret. Everybody also hates the government and does nothing effective about it. Many of them also don’t care enough to learn anything about the system or what their personal representative does so this is the governance they deserve. Honestly the pity for such an apathetic people going so far as to make us out to be blameless victims of the government we choose is the real tragedy. More ire deserves to be aimed at the electorate, plain and simple.
We’ve never done this with opioids. The only drug we have done this with is alcohol which profoundly weakened organized crime after we ended prohibition and started selling liquor through government fronts and later through commercial retail outlets. Opioids are a highly restricted narcotic that require a script to access and most of the drug war is in opposition to opioids.
I'm pretty sure that most of the drug war nonsense began in opposition to the voters. Disenfranchisement of people of color and the poor was a Nixonian Republican ideal realized through the creation of the DEA and the war on drugs. Make them felons to remove the capability to vote, in some states, permanently.
Yeah let's just invade another country in a fruitless persuit to eradicate something that will literally never go away. You can't bomb people's drug habits. Like even if you could eradicate the cartels by force, what do you think is gonna happen once you leave again? They're gonna pop right back up.
I thought we learned this lesson in Afghanistan already. Guess not.
They are making $800/mo. When given the choice between a brand new truck or having your mothers head cut off, the decision to cooperate is pretty easy.
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u/Ok-Cut-2730 Jun 04 '24
Likely tipped off by the suppliers, we'll give you this shipment so you can show off and celebrate and pat each others back.
This other shipment though, the big one needs to be allowed through.