I like how everybody is an expert on the drug trade because we've all seen a 60 Minutes piece on violence in Mexico. Violence in Mexico is not a new trend and neither is the hysteria of violence spilling over. The fear of violence spilling in to the United States from Mexico was prominent one other time, during the Mexican Revolution. The current thread of drug related violence in Mexico is often attributed to the presidency of Felipe Calderon but it can actually be traced back to at least 25 years as it is evident in the culture of the narco that is prevalent there.

We can shut down the drug cartels in Mexico, like we did in Columbia, but the drug trade will be next be passed to another country like a baton. The next country to be promoted as a drug state will be Afghanistan with it's fields of poppies fulling the growing heroin demand.

I'm all for Proposition 19, but legalizing marijuana will not stop drug cartels just like legalizing prostitution does not stop the flow on human traffic.

I was talking about Afghanistan, opium and RPG's. I was also speaking from personal experience not from TV experience.

Afghanistan is actually much simpler than Mexico, making the case for either decriminalizing opium or at least doing the Italian red cross plan of buying all the opium produced much more significant than it is in Mexico, as I'm sure you're aware.

Drug smuggling out is fairly widespread and finances bad stuff; very little else is smuggled in or out, except for a bit of quasi-legitimate reimport of stuff on the Pakistan border to get around absurd Pakistani tariffs on stuff like cars, and moving fighters across the Pakistan border.

Child (or general human trafficking) isn't a viable market: Afghanistan can't afford to smuggle children in, and Afghan children mainly are consumed in the domestic market. ("woman for breeding, boy for pleasure, melon for sheer delight"). Very few Afghan women become prostitutes outside of Afghanistan or Pakistan (unlike Iraqi women in the neighboring states/Gulf).

There aren't many migrant workers moving across the borders either, mainly due to a lack of an economy in any of the neighboring states. Iran and Pakistan have a fair number of refugees, but they are fairly static, and don't actually work in Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Iran.

Eliminating opium as a profit source would eliminate the weird choice between befriending farmers as local allies AQ/Taliban vs. destroying opium (and thus making those farmers into enemies or enemy sympathizers for purely economic reasons), and would definance most of the Taliban (if not AQ, still financed via Saudi recreational jihadis).

> We can shut down the drug cartels in Mexico, like we did in Columbia, but the drug trade will be next be passed to another country like a baton.

Sounds like an argument for legalizing drugs.

> legalizing marijuana will not stop drug cartels just like legalizing prostitution does not stop the flow on human traffic

Why not? Legalizing alchohol did seem to stop the flow of moonshine.

Mexico has decriminalized possession of drugs for personal use[1]. The most noted country to do so is Portugal. But this alone does not address the drug trade.

Touché in regards to the commend on moonshine. But it is well document that The Netherlands, who have a long standing liberal view on prostitution, are a leading destination of human traffic[2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_liberalization [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_the_Netherlands...

[2]'s only example is a case where women were brought to the Netherlands then sent to neighbouring countries for prostitution. If this is the norm, then it's not unreasonable to think the liberal laws are merely a low-risk funnel for traffickers rather than increasing demand for sex workers.

> We can shut down the drug cartels in Mexico, like we did in Columbia, but the drug trade will be next be passed to another country like a baton. The next country to be promoted as a drug state will be Afghanistan with it's fields of poppies fulling the growing heroin demand.

So American, lets just go and make a mess where nobody called us. Anyway, if you were so successful shutting down the cartels in Colombia, how come it is still the world's leading producer of Cocaine[1]?

[1] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

>if you were so successful shutting down the cartels in Colombia, how come it is still the world's leading producer of Cocaine[1]?

who said that it is the cartels who produce the cocaine nowdays? How about government for example?

"Drug networks move terrorists, weapons, nuclear material, slaves and child prostitutes just as easily as they move bags of powder."

Taken literally, this seems extremely unlikely.

Why? Drug cartels move tons of drugs at a time, and have the mechanisms to move them across borders relatively unnoticed. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine that they would be able to move other things too.

> Why?

Detection and logistics, mainly. Weapons are a special case, since if we're still talking mainly about the US/Mexico border, I would expect that weapons do not move in the same direction as drugs, and expertise in smuggling one way across a border may not translate to smuggling the other way.

Nuclear material will require at least some shielding to avoid detection, and it would seem to me that a well-implemented detection system would notice abnormally quiescent cargo as well. That would mean that you have to carefully tune shielding to present the right level of radioactivity, rather than just piling on more to make it as low as possible.

Smuggling people of any kind requires life support; there are a lot of tactics you wouldn't be able to use without losing them. For some types of human cargo, the smugglers might find some losses acceptable, but angering terrorists by losing a container of their buddies might not be healthy. In any case, it seems that there's already a lot of people walking across the border into the US, and I'd expect that if there were an obviously safer or more reliable way, they'd use that. Lots of assumptions, there, of course.

The way I understood it, all your objections are covered by the fact that drugs are moved in several ton bundles for a while.

Consider the cargo container. A large metal box. It'll hold several tons of drugs, or just as easily 50lbs of radioactive material and 1 ton of shielding. Or 5 people and several jugs of water.

I'm not saying there are no potential solutions to the problem. I'm saying it's not "just as easy". With some of those types of smugglers mentioned, you have to keep them quiet (but more or less unharmed, I would expect) as well as alive, for at least days, and maybe months if there's a snafu. Or accept that some containers aren't going to make it.

It's not clear to me what the challenges are with smuggling radioactive material, or how good detection protocols are. That doesn't mean I can't think of any, or solutions to same, but it means that I expect there are at least some consequences I'm not thinking of, and it's certainly not as easy as some sealed, inert cargo.

He said "just as easily." Smuggling coke is much easier than children.

Smuggling children is probably just as easy as smuggling thousands of pounds of coke, which happens regularly.

The largest cocaine bust was on the order of 48,000 pounds. Drug smugglers, on the high end of things, have access to submarines and secret tunnels that cross nation boundaries.

Child trafficking happens, and it the overlap between the major drug movers and the child traffickers is significant -- because they are both serving black market commodity on the level of distributors.

There are, however, a whole lot less people out there interested in buying children compared to the number interested in buying pick-a-substance. The reduced amount of profit available to high-level black-market distributors when you take away the market for drugs would, in my opinion, make it harder to find people willing to smuggle children.

Smuggling people is actually easier than smuggling drugs (well, adults, either as migrant workers or prostitutes; children are kind of borderline depending on the country).

In a lot of places (US Southwest especially), the penalties for drug smuggling are far higher than for escorting groups of people -- if you get caught, you might go free if it's just a group of workers. The humans can transport themselves on foot. The humans can be held hostage afterward and you can try to extort more money from their family; if a $20k kilo of coke is held for ransom, no one is going to pay more than the discount to an alternative kilo for it.

A lot more people and money are looking for coke, I'm not so sure it's easier.

Which is a fantastic reason to get it legalized. If there's profit, there will be a business around it, which can then be regulated as any other food / drug business can be.