Politicians constantly talk about stopping the illegal immigrants that are coming from Mexico, but putting a wall has never and will never be a solution since the reason why so many displaced keep coming across the border is mostly to escape the crime, corruption, inequality, and violence of they have to live in their home countries. The worst part is that most of these terrible things is that happen in third world countries are rooted in constant subversion by developed countries, primarily the US. I feel like since we caused this (even if in part) we should help stop it now, even if we didn’t publicly admit guilt to save face.
So, how do we do it? Do we straight up invade Mexico and go on a full out war against the cartels like we did against Osama Bin Laden?
If not, why not? And, is there anything that can be done?
I would like to keep things civil. Please, let’s keep this respectful as I know this is a tough issue and there is anger on both sides of this issue.
Legalize all the drugs. Stop providing them a market.
Just a reminder that, while drugs are the cartels’ biggest income, it’s not the only one. They’ll just move onto produce and other goods like avocados and lemons. This was news years ago but I’m not at the computer to link.
For that it would help to properly design and enforce laws against tax evasion, money laundering and criminal financing. But i am afraid the rich around the world would rather have another world war than pay fair taxes and be barred from doing business with murderers.
Good. Let them justify their private armies to the accountants when police protection for legal operations is free.
They’re displacing and controlling domestic farming operations. It’s the reason why lemons and avocados shot up in price a few years ago despite there not being a shortage. They essentially monopolized the entire industry across the northern half of the country and would squeeze newcomers out via intimidation and other mob tactics. At least, that’s what my family tells me who used to have a lemon processing factory.
Here’s the thing - most people aren’t actually interested in trying hard drugs. The people who are, will probably obtain them irregardless of legality. Given that, what is the harm in mass legalization? It keeps money out of the cartels and back into the community via taxation; it ensures the drug is pure and safe to consume with no additives; and for the individuals who afterward decide it is not for them, they can get the help that they need without worrying.
Exactly this. When Portugal decriminalized drugs, they saw a decrease in usage-related deaths, drug crimes, and an increase in rehabilitation. Overall, there has been a decline in drug use as a result.
No. Regulate and offer known recreational drugs pure.
Very few people take fentanyl on its own or intentionally. Even tranq (which I hadn’t heard of but just looked up) is primarily harmful because it’s often tainted with fentanyl or other potent yet potentially fatal additives. Fentanyl does not need to be legally sold, because there is no real market for it.
Hell, even fucking weed is tainted, primarily with silica-based desccants, in countries where it’s still illegal (*cough* UK *cough*).
However if people could get pure, laboratory tested recreational drugs then these issues could disappear overnight. Heroin is bad when you fall deep into addiction, but most heroin users wouldn’t get into that state if they could take the drug legally without taboo or victimisation of illicit dealers. 100 years ago opium dens were a thing, and there were some people deep in the poppy - but there were also people just as deep in their alcohol suffering worse. Alcohol is less of a problem today, and back in the 90s there was a study funded by DARE (and subsequently unpublished because they didn’t like the results) that determined most heroin users were in fact business men and women earning large salaries with enough income to support their habit with high quality product.
Just like digital piracy is a service problem, drug addiction is a societal mental health problem, and criminalising it only allows the problem to fester to extremes.
Decriminalise possession, keep supply of the most fatally harmful drugs illegal, legitimise and tax known recreational drugs.
I don’t support that. I support a FDA regulated opiod pill that has known dosages. It will get you high and if you OD posion control knows exactly what to do. Even forgetting about human dignity for a moment, it will save us all money to do it this way. If someone really wants to spend the next 18 hours of their life on a couch zonked out they should it do safely.
The pill will be in certain stores, on the outskirts of town. It will be taxed. You will have to sit through a video on exactly how you are to use it safely. You can camp out in a safe usage site and have a locker for your keys. At least in my ideal version of it.
As expensive as this all is it is nothing compared to what we have now.
Maybe instead of invading the US should stop arming cartels? https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/02/stopping-toxic-flow-of-gun-traffic-from-u-s-to-mexico/
Maybe the US and their DEA should stop funding and working with cartels https://world.time.com/2014/01/14/dea-boosted-mexican-drug-cartel/
https://jacobin.com/2023/03/us-mexico-war-on-drugs-garcia-luna-calderon
Maybe the US should stop israel from selling tools like pegasus which are used to hack and attack journalists https://web.archive.org/web/20240116033152/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/18/world/americas/pegasus-spyware-mexico.html
Or maybe the US should stop doing coups across latin america and putting dictators in power (too many to link)
This is a very simple take that fails to capture any of the nuance or depth that these stories require for context. It’s rage bait.
First link: contains the allegation by Mexico that the US is largely responsible for flow of illegal guns across the border. Case dismissed by federal court.
Second link: cited an investigation by a local Mexican newspaper that appears to have deleted the story. No other coverage of this claim except from Business Insider that copy and pasted this article. Each one has broken links to the original newspaper story. My understanding of thr allegations are that the US policy preferred one large cartel instead of numerous medium sized ones, so the DEA backed off Sinaloa to successfully focus on the smaller cartels, and then turned their attention back to Sinaloa.
L E G A L I Z E
Cartels gone overnight. Handle addiction as a medical problem. With legal MDMA, mushrooms, weed and acid, the hard stuff isn’t going to be anywhere near as big an issue as it is currently.
This is true to a certain degree, but the cartel’s way out of the bag on this one. They don’t just produce/traffic substances, they’re firmly entrenched and armed to the teeth. They are not going anywhere, even if you take one of their major cash cows away - they’d just pivot to something else.
Now, getting MDMA and psychedelics into a therapy setting is something I hope happens very soon, ideally long before anything is fully legalized as I imagine that will be a long time.
I know some people in that industry though in Europe. Legalisation is like game over for them. They move on to other countries.
Seriously what do you imagine they will pivot to that will have even a fraction of the income?
Human trafficking, illegal gambling, protection rackets, prostitution, etc. All of those are “markets” they are already involved in.
It’ll be like after prohibition. They will diminish over time, but it will take time. They won’t throw their hands up and say “gosh golly guess we’re all done here”. They will still try the black market, there’s already reports they’re protection racketing legal producers, producing other stuff legal or not but by unsavory means, etc. We should do it but it will take decades for the cartels to diminish.
That doesn’t stop the cartels, not by a long shot. Ending prohibition in the US didn’t eliminate the organized crime families in the US, it just moved them to different areas of corruption. If it’s not alcohol, it’s drugs. If it’s not drugs, then it’s gambling, tax evasion, prostitution, loan sharking, organized theft, and so on and so forth. And without correcting the underlying issues driving alcoholism and drug addiction in the US–particularly poverty–complete decriminalization would lead to huge problems. Has led to huge problems in some cities.
While decriminalizing drugs would help to a degree, you need to correct the underlying problems that have allowed cartels to amass so much power in the first place, like weak governments, lack of opportunities, and high rates of poverty.
Dude it’s 90% of their income - of course it will hit them. They won’t disappear but believe me legalisation is the biggest thing they fear.
All I can do is point to how much power the mob amassed in the US during prohibition, and how long they held that power after prohibition ended. Sure, their revenue took a hit, but they moved fairly smoothly into other areas, and corrupted other power structures in order to build and maintain illicit revenue streams. It wasn’t until the 80s and 90s that the mob families in NYC really saw significant consequences.
As an example? Mozarella cheese on pizza. That was fully controlled by the mob for a long time.
A. Consume less cartel produced drugs.
B. Stop giving the cartels guns
Honestly, we shouldn’t consume drugs at all, but to each their one I always say.
However, I completely agree that the ATF should change their policy and prohibit ALL gun sales without a US identification and simple background check at least.
You’re gonna have a hard time defining “drug” in a way that all people agree with.
Presumably you don’t mean prescription medications, though of course many of them are abused. Does caffeine count? Coffee is linked to many measurable health benefits. What about alcohol? No health benefit and a clear risk of abuse, but there’s also thousands of years of social history, and I think plenty of people would say that, at least sometimes, the benefits of a great night out with friends or meeting new people and developing new relationships is more than worth the cost.
Then you have things like hallucinogens, which generally have only minor health concerns and were mostly criminalized for political reasons. Marijuana is literally a plant, and while the health profile is mixed, at least for some people, it’s without a doubt a net positive. In comparison, and especially relevant to Mexico, there’s heroin, which is incredibly addictive and dangerous while also funneling tons of money into the cartels.
I’m not trying to be pedantic here, but more to make the case that any kind of policy or position on “drugs” as a whole is way too widely scoped. There are too many different substances with drastically different social and medical costs and benefits. Probably no one should ever consume heroin or meth. People with a risk of schizophrenia should absolutely not touch LSD, but people with PTSD may genuinely benefit from MDMA. Alcoholics should never touch alcohol, but your average person having a few drinks on a Friday night out with some friends probably isn’t making a bad decision.
As an aside, and having nothing to do with your thoughts or arguments, I’d like to take a moment to communicate that the common talking points of “it’s a plant” and “it’s natural” regarding marijuana should come with massive asterisks, for a variety of reasons. Not least of which is that cocaine and heroin come from plants too. And that there are synthetic THC-related products which aren’t generally distinguished from the actual plant products in such discussions. There are also highly concentrated THC products, such as oils, which are pretty inarguably incomparable to using the plant as it occurs in nature.
So, we can nitpick about maybe banning concentrates and delta-8 and whatnot and maybe only legalize the plant in it’s natural form, right? Well, that brings us to another point: modern marijuana strains have been bred to have a THC content dozens of times higher than what occurs in nature, as well as a dramatically lower relative ratio of CBD (CBD counteracts some of the bad of the THC, by my limited understanding, but that’s outside the scope of this discussion), so calling it “natural” now is more than a bit misleading. It IS a plant, but so are poppies (from which we derive opium/heroin), coca (doesn’t even need processing to get the cocaine), and belladonna (deadly nightshade, from which we derive digoxin), and, well, nobody here is arguing that those are safe to consume on the basis of their being or deriving from plants.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Decriminalize the use of currently illegal drugs, and increase penalties for the dealing of illegal drugs. Then increase funding for the medical treatment of addiction. And homelessness. And food insecurity. Too bad none of that will ever happen, since our stupid government prefers to solve all of its problems with cruise missiles.
