They actually made drugs legal in Mexico, then the USA put an end to that:

https://www.historyextra.com/period/modern/1940-the-year-mex...

The drug cartels were losing out on a lot of money too as a result apparently.

This is the correct answer.

https://www.historyextra.com/period/modern/1940-the-year-mex...

Decriminalizing drugs also had a similar effect in Portugal. To be honest, I think that if the government really wanted to they could stomp all these cartels out of existence. The problem is that there is a lot of incentive not to.

I believe that law should be modeled after reality, not the other way around. If there is demand for drugs, then there will also be ways to satisfy this demand, legal or not. On the other hand, there is also demand for murder so obviously this problem is not as easy as it seems.

Where does a lawmaker draw the line?

Portugal doesn't treat users as criminals anymore but they still consume product that's illegally imported or produced by criminal organisations and the black economy is very much alive.

What legalisation can achieve is to reduce demand. I believe Holland has quite a low incidence of cannabis consumption.

> I think that if the government really wanted to they could stomp all these cartels out of existence

As long as there's demand (and the US has oh so much of it), someone will provide it. Trillions have been wasted on the drug war and nothing has been stomped out of existence. This has nothing to do with lack of incentive.

A side effect of pot being legalised in parts of the US is that cartels now push more heroin and meth because their profits from pot have dwindled so much.

As much as I'm pro legalise everything, I struggle to come up with a scenario where meth & heroin become legal apart from a kind of "look the other way" method Holland uses for cannabis. But this still involves illegal large scale cultivation and import of product that keeps criminal enterprises alive. Afaik most of the hash sold in Holland is smuggled in illegally from hash producing countries like Morocco, Pakistan, Nepal.

"Make drugs legal" is not actually as an easy a solution as it appears to be.

I claim (without any evidence) that increasing the palette of legal drugs would reduce the demand for the nastiest ones.

Furthermore, making drug use legal and moving law enforcement resources to addiction treatment would make more people seek help in battling their addiction.

One of the nastiest facets of war on drugs is that it creates criminals of people who harm no one and stigmatize them to the outskirts of the society.

> Make drugs legal, and the problem will fade away with time

For this to be true, organized crime would have to be largely reliant on drug money. My understanding is they're not. Prohibition fueled the creation of these organizations, but if you're suggesting they've an inability to diversify, that seems questionable.

I used to believe that, but there was a recent article on here a few days ago about cartels diversifying their sources of profit by dealing stolen fuel, so although I support legalising drugs, I no longer think this will put an end to the cartels.

While I understand your point, I don't think there's that much more money to be made from stolen fuel compared to the goldmine of drugs. A kilo of cocaine goes for around $26k in California. How much fuel would you need to sell in order to make that much? In Mexico a liter of fuel goes for about $1.

Drugs are also dense: $1mm in fuel is a huge quantity and hard to distribute.

That's why I wrote 'it will slowly diminish their might.'

Without less money they will have less power, and less appeal, reducing the pool of capable candidates for leadership roles and therefore decreasing their effectiveness as an organization.