Drugs, Murder and Mexico

i wonder what percentage of cartel money is made from north and south america? i imagine that while it's not incredibly easy to get drugs across the border, it's probably a lot more difficult to get drugs overseas.

i imagine that while it's not incredibly easy to get drugs across the border, it's probably a lot more difficult to get drugs overseas.

plenty of european/mediterranean/asian syndicates working with the cartels

in a spirit of brotherly cooperation

yeah true

whether it's in the very large historical trends toward capitalization, toward gov't bureaucratization, or toward greater justice, i think in 50 or 100 years it will seem nuts that this huge multinational industry was conducted entirely illegally.

or not, i dunno. it could be the ideology supporting 'the drug war' will hollow out and seem more and more ridiculous to more and more people, but it'll continue on anyway, since no political actor wants to take the risk of tipping it over.

I see this as exactly the kind of thing that politicians would use to prop The Drug War up...

I'm actually for decriminalization, though I'm uncertain as to its impact.

i'm all for it esp. since anyone who wants drugs can get them at any time and the impact of law enforcement is pretty negligible despite the pictures of DEA agents smiling in front of bags of cocaine. i figure they just keep pushing more and more across the border, assuming some of it will get caught, and not particularly caring if it does since they just keep making it and keep pushing it over.

Been reading more about legalisation in Portugal and it's pretty startling and seems like the only rational option-

On 1 July 2001, Portugal decriminalised the possession of all drugs, including heroin and cocaine. You can have and use as much as you like for your own needs, and if you are caught, the police might refer you to a rehab programme, but you will never get a criminal record. (Supplying and selling remains illegal.) The prohibitionists predicted a catastrophic rise in addiction, and even I – an instinctive legaliser – was nervous.

Now we know: overall drug use actually fell a little. As a major study by Glenn Greenwald for The Cato Institute found, among Portuguese teenagers the fall was fastest: 13-year-olds are four per cent less likely to use drugs, and 16-year-olds are six per cent less likely. As the iron law of prohibition predicts, the use of hard drugs has fallen fastest: heroin use has crashed by nearly 50 per cent among the young who were not yet addicted. The Portuguese have switched the billions that used to be spent chasing and jailing addicts to providing them with prescriptions and rehab. The number of people in drug treatment is now up by 147 per cent. Almost nobody in Portugal wants to go back. Indeed, many citizens want to take the next step: legalise supply too, and break the back of the gangs.

Portugal is no fluke. It turns out that wherever the drug laws are relaxed, drug use stays the same, or – where spending is switched to treatment – declines. Between 1972 and 1978, 11 US states decriminalised marijuana possession. The National Research Council found that the number of dope-smokers stayed the same. In Switzerland, a decade ago the government started providing legal centres where people could safely inject heroin – for free. Burglary rates fell by 60 per cent, and street homelessness ended. A study by The Lancet – one of the most respected medical journals in the world – found that the rate of people becoming new heroin addicts fell by 82 per cent. Why? Heroin addicts didn't need to recruit new addicts to sell to in order to feed their habit. The pyramid scheme of heroin addiction was broken.

So the drug war doesn't achieve its goal of reducing addiction. All it does achieve is horrific gang violence – and in some cases the cartels gut whole countries like Mexico and Afghanistan. It does unwittingly press people into using harder and more dangerous drugs. And it does waste tens of billions of dollars that could really reduce drug addiction, by spending it on treatment for addicts.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-accept-the-facts-ndash-and-end-this-futile-war-on-drugs-1818167.html

for the record:
i don't eat much chocolate, but when i do it's fancy fair trade chocolate (but i will eat someone else's choco chip cookies if it means being polite or not) no snickers, thanks. i drink fair trade coffee every goddamn day. it's true that occasionally i stop at dunkin donuts for a cup of blood diamonds, but it's rare.

I don't always eat chocolate, but when I do, I prefer Dos Equis.

I just don't get the US at all - it's like, a country with whom you share hundreds of miles of border with is being completely destabilized by your policies and your response is to...do nothing? stick your head in the sand? idgi.

it's not just the US...and it's not just Mexico either...

yeah that's the big problem there. every move is just baby steps in the right direction rather than a solve-all-problems move.

yeah I know. it's just that it's like, you live in a pretty nice house, you have a nice life. the house next door is a crackhouse. what are you gonna do, build a higher fence?

sell yr kids crack so they don't have to fund the ppl nextdoor?

truth, plant coca leaf and marijuana plants in your own backyard.

Looking for the US to make some pre-emptive military strikes in Mexican territory in 2013 or 2017, depending. A "national security imperative," yknow.

http://ezpicshare.com/images/1215ba-1283388187.jpg
http://ezpicshare.com/images/2148xl.jpg

one wonders what the cartels, being so used to power and wealth and the freedom to basically kill and rape at will, would do if there was some mass worldwide legalization movement. i would imagine they would attempt to maintain those in other ways? even if they did, i cannot imagine they would have anywhere near the level of influence or violence.

they would resort to selling pirated DVDs

that would take a while to happen xp

the cartels would rush for windfall profits and probably compete even more violently for whatever markets would remain after legalisation (kidnapping/protection etc, perhaps counterfeit pharmaceuticals)

yeah this si precisely one of the reasons why I'm kind of dubious on the whole 'buy local weed' solution. I imagine druglords get nicer with less money in their pockets...

Consumerism is a weird, weird ontology.

'imagne' = 'doubt'

u sound like yr justifyin tbh

iirc the point of not funding these dudes isnt to make them 'nicer'

If the money dries up the crime and violence goes away.

Didn't see it linked earlier, but this New Yorker article from May seems to be a decent primer.

As far as why shoot up a rehab clinic, there's the sense (as Lechera said) that the gangs keep the streets clean and run the rehab centers in their region, so the centers can be turf and a symbol of pride and progress.

nothing to justify. i don't really care about whether or not people do coke; my focus is purely on the lives being lost in Mexico. Cartels getting meaner and increase in violence might be a regrettable side-effect for those who go with 'fair-trade' drugs, but it seems to me it would just a worsening of the problen (though admittedly its very possibly a problem that would necessarily worsen before it got better anyways)...

I guess I kind of feel that our responsibility in the matter extends beyond the kind of drugs we choose to use...

(and for the record I haven't done anything remotely cocaine-related since 2003)

remotely cocaine-related = cocaine, crack, laced joints, etc.

i know someone who always rhapsodizes about fair trade coffee but still does the occasional line of cocaine, which i think is kind of "funny."

I know plenty of people who go on about the evils of coke but still bump lots of coke-rap.

out of sight, out of mind seems to be the mantra of the day

:(

A couple of questions I've been thinking about, dunno if they are worth asking but here goes-

1. I can understand that Portugal's problem was mostly heroin abuse and legal use is done in a doctors office, supervised, and not able to take any away or enough to od. But unlike heroin, cocaine is a party drug - if it was legalised, how would it be sold? No-one would care for a similar way to what i've read about this legal heroin use. Would you be able to go to a pharmacy to buy yr dose?

Ok just noticed the time and so its less a couple of questions more like one and run.

Considering how differently different states treat alcohol sales, I would imagine it would be done differently depending on where one lives. We still have dry counties in the US! I grew up in Ohio thinking that every state had drive-thru liquor stores. Whoops.

i wonder if there is an underground alcohol trade in those counties? it seems kind of pointless either way, you could drive one county over for your fix.

i think that's what most people do but who knows -- maybe there are still moonshiners?

or they drive to ohio and use a handy-dandy drive thru liquor store and then drive home

a guy i know made moonshine and shot cans in the woods with a handgun (that was what he did all the time.) i think he was being ironic but eventually ended up all too sincere.

I know plenty of people who go on about the evils of coke but still bump lots of coke-rap.

― Hubert Lolz (lpz), Thursday, 2 September 2010 17:30 (4 hours ago) Permalink

do you

I was in a speakeasy in Kentucky a couple weeks ago.

I know plenty of people who go on about the evils of coke but still bump lots of coke-rap.

― Hubert Lolz (lpz), Thursday, 2 September 2010 17:30 (4 hours ago) Permalink

do you

― the embrace of waka flocka is v pertinent (deej), Thursday, September 2, 2010 9:49 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

Yeah.

not to blow ur mind or anything but i know some ppl who go on abt the evils of religion but still bump a love supreme

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/17/Saint_John_Will-I-Am_Coltrane.jpg/535px-Saint_John_Will-I-Am_Coltrane.jpg

fuck will.i.am

I was genuinely shocked when I read a recent news article saying that the current war on drogs in Mexico has led to some 30,000 deaths.

It's pretty fucking crazy. Murdering mayors, chiefs of police, army generals...

It's like a war, on drugs!

lol

itsafuckingdisgrace.gif

i know some ppl who go on about teh evils of drugs & watch the wire -- crazy!!