This sort of snide question can be better employed in the BBQ Pit. Knock it off in Great Debates.
[ /Modding ]
I thought the premise of free trade is the free flow of capital and labor across borders. It is generally much easier for capital to flow across borders than it is labor, but Mexico is our neighbor.
Free Trade/ globalization has not created the economic utopia envisioned by the ideologues. In poor countries like Mexico, the wealth flowed to a small group of elites and wide spread prosperity became a myth. Since there is a strong correlation between poverty and crime and free trade has caused deeper poverty in an already poor country, trade policies and porous borders have magnified the crime problem. And the increased poverty in the U.S. has lead to resentment and scapegoating Mexican emigrants
Narcotics would be a legitimate business subject to regulation. The players there now would crack down on the more violent elements and they’d get down to the business of being businessmen instead of murdering people all the time.
Well how would you like the idea of MS 13 and Mexicali Cartel having open warfare with RPGs on suburban streets?
There’s a difference between free (even open) borders and secure borders. It’s possible to stop drugs and criminals from flowing through our borders and still let workers through; for example, by searching people.
It would suck. However, it could be dealt with by the military, if such drastic measures became necessary. Might have to break out that part of the Constitution that allows Congress to suspend habeas corpus in case of “rebellion or insurrection”. And of course the *Posse Comitatus *Act would have to be repealed.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
A few posters above commented on the impotency of drug legalization. I’d like to offer some counterpoint:
1)cartels will move onto other crime --> Sure, but there’s no law of conservation of serious crime. The cartels’ core concern is drugs because they are commodities frequently & widely consumed and hence needing regular replenishment. Also, the transaction is consensual (whatever the internal drives of the buyer), and hence the buyer has a stake in protecting the trade. Other crimes like rape, murder, or more likely, kidnapping, burglary…etc involve at least one unwilling participant i.e. the victim. These malum in se crimes cannot sufficiently restore the lucre of the drug trade. Finally, the thinking caps within the cartels aren’t stupid. If crime activity X were more lucrative than drugs within a tolerable threshold of risk, then the balance of prevalent crime would shift towards X. But drugs remain the most lucrative commodity in a developed and free-market economy. Guns, OTOH, make a “thin market”, with not as many buyers or frequency of purchase, in a similar period of time.
2)Mexican cartels will focus on Mexico --> The US is the largest national drug market by far. More people, greater paying power, as well as an established culture on college campuses, and many urban locales, not to mention the more discreet use elsewhere. Legalization in US but not Mexico will not be just an annoyance to the Mexican cartels. They will lose a bulk of the target market.
3)cartels will simply operate with legal mandate --> this seems to be the notion that legalization implies the current situation but without law enforcement on the tail. That would be decriminalization. Legalization entails legal domestic entities within the trade. Strictly speaking, it will depend on the regulatory regime post-legalization. Many of the popular drugs command a very high profit margin, both due to the risk involved in the work, and the lock on options for the buyer. If politicians decide to maintain a tax structure which can be undercut by the cartels, then they will survive. But a discounting curve applies here. If cocaine can be sold for, say, 20% less, then cartels have work, if a 50% cut is required, then it is that much more unattractive; 70%+, then no dice. Of course, I’m just illustrating the behavior, not pegging firm numbers. There was a report released by the UK Home Office within the last year or so where many incarcerated drug traffickers and dealers were interviewed to build a profile of the drug trade. The margins estimated from that survey were around 15000% for the hard drugs. Only a puritanical regime would prop up the cartels, but that does remain a possibility.
Of course, all of this is moot because legalization is not realistic in the short-term, even for cannabis. But demographics seem favorable, so 20 years hence, who knows…
The After Action Report specifically mentions Mexico City as a huge problem area. Is it really like that where you live? I find your take to be an interesting one, since, well, you live there!
It is a problem area but Mexico City is so huge that the problem seems less than it is here. Most people are rarely affected by the drug war and more by other unrelated crime. That said, it has hit close to home several times. 3 or 4 months ago a safe house with an armory, thousands of dollars in cash and two disappeared cops was found 3 blocks from my house; police said it had been active for several months.
Those are the rosiest tinted glasses I have seen in a long time. What kind of people do you think these are? Do you really think that gangs and cartels that non-nonchalantly decapitate people and hang the corpses from overpasses can become legitimate businessmen? Do you want to do business with people that have done those sorts of things?
Yes, because it has happened throughout history again and again and again.
Ever hear of a guy named Joe Kennedy? He was a drug runner whose son went on to be President.
There business isn’t killing, it’s selling drugs. The moment things went legal they’d be shopping their supply chain to corporate distribution networks.
These aren’t the Kennedys they’re dealing with down here.
Why is there still a mob if alcohol is legal again? They just want to make money, so, why do they racketeer? Why did they switch to drugs? They can’t sell beer imported from Canada anymore? Why do people even mug? Can’t they just get jobs if all they want is to do business?
These cartels did not exist before the drug trade. They exist BECAUSE of the drug trade, period. If the cartels became legitimate businesses they would have investments to protect and have a stake in the stability of the nation. It’s not a difficult concept. This stuff about them just finding something else to do is pure poppycock because that’s not the way it works. They aren’t killing to kill, they are killing to control the trade. If the trade is legitimized the fighting will reduce because there will be no more need to kill snitches. People didn’t switch to drugs immediately after Prohibition ended. Drug trafficking became a big business AFTER they were made illegal. Again, it’s pretty simple.
Yes there will be petty crime, but there won’t be organized mafias on the level that there are now because those mafias will turn into corporations.
These kinds of black markets with inflated profit margins exist only to provide a service that is in high demand but is deemed unfit by the government. The high profit margin makes the risks reasonable. They don’t get simply replaced by other forms of crime because there would have to be another high profit, high volume business that people would organize around. Mugging isn’t that kind of business. With the trade legitimized the state gets in on it legitimately, collects taxes and uses those taxes to pay police and the military who are no longer compromised by bribes because the corporate business doesn’t need to pay bribes for the same reasons any longer.
FYI, the L.A. Times has a very good ongoing project on this subject, titled Mexico Under Siege. Highly recommended.
I looked through that LA Times series last night. Very powerful stuff.
What counts as realistic? That people will ever be educated enough to assess that the costs of the war on drugs far exceed the benefits? I wish I knew what it would take to happen. Probably we’d need a cultural revolution to get rid of moral absolutism that permeates American society and move on to something like pragmatism. Fat chance of that in such a Christian nation. So yeah, I guess it is unrealistic.
Then I propose that there is no realistic solution.
I think the legalization argument misses the point. Mexico is a very lawless and corrupt country right now. It’s not just drug trafficking. Kidnapping is a major problem. There’s a fundamental disconnect between the wealthy and those on the fringe. The Mexican government and people tolerated criminality for too long, and it’s made their efforts to clean things up very difficult.
Mexico is just the provider. If we blew them up someone else would send drugs. The problem is we are the biggest buyers of drugs on the planet. trafficikng is not the problem. We can not stop the drugs coming in. That has been made perfectly clear. We should deal with our huge drug problem here.
The problem with that is our ‘huge drug problem here’ is no bigger than it is anywhere else. The problem is that people want drugs, they want them everywhere. It’s unreasonable to try and control them.
The problem in Mexico isn’t that so many people consume them, it’s that the drug trade has created an immense criminal organization.
These aren’t regular people that just want to make a simple living or entrepreneurs that would otherwise be honest businessmen if their product was legal. These are career criminals, spychotic individuals and professional mercenaries (The Zetas - defacto rulers of the Gulf Cartel - are former guatemalan and mexican special forces). These people aren’t just going to settle down and compete legally with pharmaceutical companies. The cartels have to be eliminated not legalized if Mexico is going to see this through.
Anyway, the idea of legalization is not going to get done. The best way to deal with this is with realistic propositions and solutions. I compare it to using nuclear weapons in war; it is an option, even one that could get you though easy, but a drastic one and not something you want to start out with.
What kind of “drastic, bloody action” do you think would work? A Pinochet-style military coup-and-crackdown? A Zapatista revolution? Something else?
There aren’t too many countries bordering the US, and the traffickers don’t have, I would guess, a huge enough fleet of planes, boats and subs to move their entire ration of supply by air and water.
The latter is due to the former. If only a thousand people wanted to use drugs, there wouldn’t be any cartels, or even a dedicated law enforcement apparatus to stop the trade, for that matter. What seems to have been overlooked here is that there’s a low marginal cost for a buyer to switch to a legal dealer.
You’re being unrealistic. Law enforcement takes out a minor cartel every year or two, and a major one, every three or four. That doesn’t stop the trade, only temporarily puts a partial clog in it. IOW, a cartel can be eliminated, but cartels, not. Eliminating cartels is a tactic, not a strategy.
I wouldn’t liken legalization to a nuclear weapon, even in the mapping of the analogy, but in any case, we wouldn’t be starting with legalization. Drug prohibition has been prosecuted in its modern incarnation, The War on Drugs©, for over 35 years now. At the global level, the UN adopted a commitment in 1963 to have a drug-free world within 25 years. Then again in 1998, to have a drug-free world by 2008 (slogan: “We can do it”). It’s 2009 and the war goes on…