This is why all drugs should be legalized (not just decriminalized, decriminalization still leaves a black market). Cartels are meeting a demand, but cartels make up their own rules and will do anything they want to stay ahead.
Just legalize them, it solves so many problems.
1. Quality and proper labeling (no more mystery drugs/dosages). Buyers know exactly what they are getting, which would decrees the amount of OD's.
2. Vast reduction in violent crimes (legitimate, licensed distributors are very unlikely to have violent turf wars as this would jeopardize their license). Black market would suddenly have no market (provided the taxes on legal drugs aren't stupid), which means no money, which means there is nothing to kill/fight over.
3. Increased tax revenue
It is a win/win/win for everyone, I just don't get it....and please just don't with the tear jerking "What about the children!" The kids will be fine. No legalizing doesn't send a message that "drugs are OK". No it won't make them more accessible to kids, please stop fearmongering you don't know what you are talking about.
The result of this is all drug dealers going bust, and no drug dealers - no one to market the drug, so no new users. All addicts in Switzerland are now old people, and as they die of related diseases and old age the Swiss are having hard time keeping the clinics open because there are not enough takers for free heroin.
I think all opiates can and should be taken care of this way. Not sure about stimulants though - one doesn't just lie down on a clinic bed after a dose of meth or crack. Maybe if regular coke is legalized people will give up meth and crack?
I don't know about heroin, but there are something like 3/4 Swiss cities in the top 20 for cocaine consumption based waste water sampling.
Why do you think the world will flock to drugs if they were simply made legal?
Drug addicts (people who need to get high) will find an alternate high if they can't get illegal drugs.
How many adults do you know that have never done, or tried, heroin would suddenly do so if was legal? I think the amount of people that would try heroin because it became legal would be staggering low. I don't think there are many people out there going "Man, if heroin was just legal then I would totally try it!". People that want to do heroin are already doing so, it being illegal isn't stopping anyone.
"Heroin" has a bad name, so your legalized version would have some innocuous made-up marketing name, backed by tens of millions of dollars of advertising and it would sell like hotcakes.
I'm certainly not saying opiate addiction is a neutral/good thing, but I don't think it would cause the societal harm that we see today with them being tightly regulated.
Potential case in point: illegal methamphetamine usage/addiction is a huge issue today in the US. I qualify that as "illegal", because meth is available by prescription under the trade name Desoxyn. Many drugs with similar effects are likewise available and much more commonly prescribed - but I'm not aware of anyone calling for them to be banned. If anything, I suspect in that case the overall societal impact is positive: I know I would be much less effective as a developer if I were to lose access to ADHD medication.
Meaning doctors where more likely to prescribe them, that whole episode was one of multiple fuck ups at every level backed by some unscrupulous fuckers.
How is that a counter argument? This is a breakdown/fault of the medical community and has no relation to making drugs legal. To be clear, I am arguing that all drugs should be legal for recreational use (not require a prescription).
No question, doctors need to vet information on drugs better (they should not be taking literature/studies that come from the drug manufacturers as a reputable sources of truth). No question doctors should be extremely hesitant prescribing any opioid at all. No doubt that a lot of the current opioid epidemic stems from doctors (either unwittingly or not) prescribing things that they shouldn't be. Those are all medical industry issues that need to be solved (regardless if things like heroin are legal).
I don't suppose, and don't recommend, doing a self diagnosis and getting whatever drugs you feel will help. The medical community is supposed to be the experts on that subject matter.
That said, people need to be free to determine their own risk tolerance level regarding what to put in, or use on their bodies.
Me personally? I am not going to stop going to the doctors to get medicines when I am sick, even if I could buy any and all drugs over-the-counter. Also I am sure prescriptions aren't going away even if all drugs could be bought over the counter, there is no way insurance would pay for drugs that weren't prescribed by a medical professional.
If you have regulations on drugs, then you have all the problems, to some extent, that people attribute to their illegality.
I am afraid of opioids, and I don't trust even doctors, so I never took the ones I was offered and didn't get addicted. But there must be millions of people who wouldn't trust a heroin dealer and would trust their doctor, so legality makes a big difference.
Do you see doctors promoting cigarettes? Alcohol?
I would say that your reasoning why you aren't doing CBD is highly rational. Do you really think that even if you wanted to try heroin and if you did it, it would automatically addict you? Like you're instantly gone in to the abyss?
People try heroin and nothing happens to them. Some even hate the experience. People use heroin for prolonged periods and then simply stop (non unusual in the late teens, with some kind of a trigger in the mid 20).
If there was not so much stigma involved and so much risk taking the stuff, we might see people coming out of this juvenile experimenting phase in a much much better state.
Also, do you really think that people that lifelong addicts, don't have some kind of deeper psychological reasons to go down that path?
I have no idea. Lots of people experiment with things and it's no big deal and they insist that must be a universal experience. There's a selection effect. If you try something at 20 and don't survive, you're not around at 40 or 80 to tell people it's no big deal.
When I was young, I enjoyed alcohol a lot, but didn't really struggle giving it up when I had to. Nor did I ever drink until blackout or vomiting, which you know, whether or not it's pathological/alcoholism, is common. I am certain that the level of compulsion is very different for some people.
I have a sibling, who I believe smoked cigarettes off and on but it never became a permanent habit. But a lot of people find them extremely addictive. I never smoked my first one, just because there was never an anticipated reward that seemed worth it. I might have been wrong, or right. Some people seem to get substantial cognitive benefits from nicotine.
Occasionally having a negative reaction to a prescription drug makes me wary of recreational or unregulated stuff, too. Seeing homeopathic stuff in the drug store makes me fearful that a CBD product might be fake too. So when I had wisdom teeth pulled and I was given a bottle of big pink pills (I think it must have been oxycodone/paracetamol based on a quick google) I didn't use a single one.
Along with wondering if "legalization leads to increased rate of usage" holds true, I also wonder if the following is true:
> legalizing drugs also means easier access
Criminality is a "barrier to entry", surely, but I'm not at all sure that ease of access changes because of it. In Arkansas, where I live, cannabis is illegal. Even though I don't consume it (the risk isn't worth the benefit to me), I'm extremely confident I could make a couple of phone calls and have some delivered to me if I wanted to. That's really no different from my experience in the LA area.
In fact, it might actually be more difficult to obtain it in LA through legal means. Generally you have to seek out a dispensary (physically, or via phone/app) and provide identification. I wouldn't need ID to get it illegally in Arkansas. If an ID requirement has a negative participation impact on other things (like voting) then I would expect that to hold true for this as well.
The risk of legalization isn't so much ease of access as it is the normalization of drug abuse. We have shown with cigarette usage that education, propaganda and marketing laws can de-normalize drug use.
If anything, by making high risk drugs safely available through official venues, you can provide social services better access to those who need help.
I would say that you would likely see an initial increase in users but that a well run program would lead to both a overall decrease in users and more importantly a reduction of average harm per user.
Edit: The answer I guess is that those who have supported the war on drugs had other goals than "reducing the number of addicts". If you look at the history of how the war on drugs has been used by western intelligence agencies to grow their surveillance powers and finance and the fight against left-wing/communist organizations, the real reasons become more clear.
Governments can and do tax illegal drugs. Just issue tax stamps. If drugs are found without them, you also get them for tax evasion.
All drugs used to be legal in the US. There is a reason that they became controlled a hundred years ago or so, and it does not involve conspiracies by big pharma. Go research the history - it's fascinating.
Alcohol is one of the leading causes of death in the US. A large share of car accidents, suicides, crime, heart disease, and many other things is caused by it.
This libertarian trope has gotten more annoying as I get older. No matter what you want legalized/deregulated, there is something that even you can't stomach. And organized crime can focus their business on that something. They probably already have.
You say legalize everything and then you say there will be "quality and proper labeling". Well duh, you have to enforce that; that means drugs that don't meet the standards are illegal. And your organized criminals will deal in them. There's no way out.
Current drug laws can be framed as a matter of "quality and proper labeling", we're just quibbling about the details.
At the bottom usually. Either that, or you'll need some specific smarts or connections that are sought after. That's how it survives the loss of members. Many are low level and are replaceable, they have no actual knowledge about the high level trade. The high level bosses hide really well and try to stay untouchable by letting others do the dirty work.
From what I understand about Dutch organized crime, if you'd start for yourself, you'd have to fight a turf war and will always be at the top of multiple hit lists.
The safest bet is probably shipping drugs by mail through dark markets. A Dutch guy (SuperTrips) got arrested in Miami a couple of years ago. He sold drugs from his bedroom in his parental home. Was estimated to have earned 385k BTC through this.
If you want to see it at work, you could go to some of the Caribbean Islands. Drug trafficking runs through many of them and you can actually see the impact it has on some communities. In Haiti, I was warned to stay away from packages on the beach (though I didn't spot any). Apparently they throw them overboard near the coast, locals find them and sell them back to drug traffickers for about €50 a kg. This way the traffickers don't need to be directly involved with bringing them to shore.
Hopefully this gives you some info. There's lots of books and documentaries about this stuff too, by ex-criminals, insiders and researchers.
Ah, the infamous square grouper.
Not my experience at all. The expats I met are usually doing some combination of bar work, yoga classes, and other such things. Among the entire cohort of the hostel inhabitants (mostly tourists I imagine?) I haven't seen one drunk or drugged person.
I did see plenty of drug dealers though - some shady dealers on the street and some very presentable resident dealers inside various venues. So there has to be a lot of drug use going on, just none that I have noticed.
I doubt he made _that_ much out of his parent's house.
Edit: I was wrong holy shit that's a lot of money.
I did spend that time pondering and scoping out the work because I found it a fascinating challenge to design an ecommerce platform with very heavy requirements for user privacy and anonymity.
The source code for an existing platform that I was granted access to view showed me that a lot of encryption techniques were just smoke and mirrors. Mostly, everything was stored unencrypted or using symmetric encryption with the encryption key stored on the same filesystem as the server generating the pages.
It was fun designing an asymetric multi-key encryption system, where a user's "second password" with a hash (stored with a microservice API on another server in another data center) generated one of the multiple keys required. Even server seizure wouldn't result in anything usable.
Another challenge was how to prevent servers from being overwhelmed with DDoS attacks. That would have been achieved by using the Tor API to generate custom onion addresses for each user and vendor that they could bookmark. The only site that could be DDoS'd would be the landing page. It also allowed for an easy route to horizontal scaling.
The old system also didn't properly delete stuff, it just flipped a boolean "deleted" field to prevent it from being visible anymore... Not very smart for data hygiene.
I've been wanting to use what I planned out to build a product for the last few years, but I can't think of anything legal & legitimate that would have such strict security requirements that also has potential for profitability.
If the market were compromised and the URLs exposed, this would make it easier for a bad actor to connect a user to the URL, right?
That weekend there was a police raid to that house. The poor guy ended up being arrested along with others and got 20 years jail time because there were drugs and guns in the house.
Not worth it.
with friends like that, who needs enemies!
Narconomics[1] has a pretty good discussion of the economics (including recruiting) of cartels.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Narconomics-How-Run-Drug-Cartel/dp/16...
It's no way to live - and don't even think about having a family/kids after you get involved. You'll die early of the stress.
If you think you're a master 1337 hacker or online drug dealer - just get a job in IT security. It pays better, comes with zero stress.
Spoken like someone who has never done either.
15+ years ago when I was hacking and doing credit card fraud, I could make $1000 cash a day without a lot of effort or time. Because I was careful about protecting myself and didn't work a lot I didn't have much stress. I have far more stress with a full time job.
That said, the drug game would be a lot more stressful.
So even in criminal enterprises, I think you have to move up the distribution chain a ways to see the big $
I beg to differ. All IT jobs have stress, but security by definition stresses you about things that haven't happened yet. If you have zero stress doing IT security, you're doing it wrong. Still immensely better than crime, though.
<< Sudhir Venkatesh never imagined that as a result of this assignment he would befriend a gang leader named JT and spend the better part of a decade embedded inside the projects under JT’s protection. From a privileged position of unprecedented access, Venkatesh observed JT and the rest of his gang as they operated their crack-selling business, made peace with their neighbors, evaded the law, and rose up or fell within the ranks of the gang’s complex hierarchical structure. >>
You can get rich from drugs very easily but getting rich from drugs while minimising your risk enough to live out your days comfortably is hard.
The smart way for a nerd to get rich from drugs is to formulate a short-term high risk plan that utilises the dark net to acquire and sell drugs before moving on very quickly. The problem is, if you’re making a lot of money very quickly... can you give it up? What’s one more day? What’s another week? You’ve been going 6 months — what’s 7?
Drug dealing groups are not a carefully designed and well oiled machine, there’s no knowledge passed down from generation to generation: there’s a group of people who haven’t yet been caught out by their mistakes. The people mentioned in this article made a mistake by using this app, and that mistake finally caught up to them.
The whole drug industry is predatory, the smartest people involved in drugs are the most predatory because minimising risk for yourself means offloading that risk onto others using violence and coercion.
There’s no romantic art to drug dealing: if you’re smart and willing to hurt others, you can be a millionaire before the year is out.
https://www.amazon.com/Wiseguy-Nicholas-Pileggi/dp/143918421...
It explains in great detail how he got into the mob and how the mob works. I would assume many organized crime groups follow similar paths. Essentially young kids with problems with authority meet hoodlums who can vouch for them, they get into the lifestyle, and start learning how to hustle. No one rats because doing so means death.
This book is also what the superb movie Goodfellas is based on, which is a fairly close portrayal of the book.
Friends and friends of friends. If you hang out with "dodgy" people you will eventually see those opportunities pop up.
The recruiting of violent, power seeking, poor impulse control people was one of the major factors in the decline of the five families. When better opportunities existed for 2nd and 3rd generation Italian-Americans, many took those better non-criminal opportunities. An organized crime life is a pretty hard life. This dramatically hurt the number of good candidates that organized crime could recruit from. The candidates they did recruit often placed their individual desires over the needs of the organization. This destroyed the internal trust which was a major enabler of their success.
In particular I recommend the episode freakyclown or OxyMonster as that seems to fit what you're looking for.
Crack Overflow?
Same is true of Paul Le Roux [1]. I think if you're criminally inclined you'll find a way.
Surely he will have to serve his sentence in solitary because I would imagine cooperating with the authorities makes you rather unpopular in prison.
I expect these days in developed countries most of them start with credit card fraud in their teens and usually go to prison. At that point they either reform (I know of two such individuals by name, one is a friend sysadmin/CTO now and the other is Stephen Fry) or they get recruited in prison into an existing criminal org. From then on they acquire knowledge on how to crime from people who have the experience.
It's great news that these crims have had their just desserts. It's even better the quantity of drugs taken out of circulation, and hopefully the decimation of the network.
I'm well grasped of the difference between the two, and for the most part I think white collar crime is worse. It's pure greed and the same kind of exceptionalism that's been growing and growing for the last 50-60 years. Blue collar crime is as old as civilisation, white collar crime is as old as deregulation.
white collar crime is as old as civilization - how do you think kings and nobles got their positions back then?
One was the system of governance for millennia, the other was enabled by the naivety of a failed ruling class who handed the power of states to the fraudsters of global finance.
Everyone understood (at a local level) how feudalism worked, I doubt many people could tell you what Wirecard were doing.
This is what anthropologists call an "oral culture". You have to be told it verbally, because those involved are strongly deterred from writing it down. For the deeper secrets you probably have to be part of the right family.
In the rougher neighborhoods you'll find plenty of people who know how the system works, if only so they know what and who to avoid getting caught up in it.
(The interesting thing about the internet is how we've developed an "oral" culture that actually does get written down, because we do so much socializing through text! IRC channels and the like.)
It's ostensibly a study of the specialized language of pickpockets, but actually goes in to great detail on how pickpocket gangs work.
Before reading this book, and knowing nothing about the subject matter, I had somehow assumed pickpockets worked alone and were just bottom-of-the-barrel amateur opportunists. I couldn't have been more wrong, as it turned out they work in highly organized units.
Fortunately, probably through the ubiquity of video surveillance, such gangs don't seem to be as widespread as they used to be.
[1] - https://www.amazon.com/Whiz-Mob-Correlation-Technical-Pickpo...
That is also a plot-point in ASSRIB.
Barring a time machine or wonder viewer that would make this possible I highly recommend this documentary from 2006 [1] “Cocaine Cowboys” its a tell all of the inner workings of the largest drug importers and follows the rise and subsequently fall of the cocaine trade in Florida which ultimately culminates in the major construction and modernization of Miami Florida.
So, basically, go down there with a sign stating what you can do and hope to get kidnapped...
You want to steal from oil pipes? Kidnap a few field workers. You want a solar-powered, encrypted, nation-wide radio network? Kidnap telecom workers.
They usually have some front business. "My guys" had a small logistics operation(obviously) - a single tractor trailer. Apparently the local liquor store was involved as well because it was run by the same people.
How do I know all this? Some of their trades, meetings and even disagreements happened out in the open. Nobody dared to be too curious about this. Also my friend's ex boyfriend was a drug dealer so she had a few stories to share.
I still vividly remember this one time when I saw one man handing out brick-shaped packages which were inside a car trunk to another man. At first I didn't know what I was looking at, but seeing how my eye contact made them uncomfortable I stopped staring and went on my way.
You would start from the bottom. Going around saying you want to part of the business, is a sure way to end up dead as a snitch.
Yeah there's a LOT of money: cocaine costs as little as $2k a kilo in Columbia and can be sold in EU for close to $100K when accounting for cutting. I guess a lot of it is segmented. For example: one group brings 800kg from Ecuador and sells it to local gangs and so on. If they get caught, other groups fill the void.
If we look at what trading corporations do in times and places where they can get away with it, we see:
-Aggressive acquisition of natural resources to protect the supply chain
-Use of armed force to gather and protect said natural resources and the geographic territory wherein they're contained.
-Use of armed force to protect and expand market capitalization (markets, trade routes etc)
This is pretty much identical to what a drug cartel does on a day-to-day basis.
Imperialistic nation states of the 1700s and 1800s followed this playbook, in a time where the biggest enterprises were state-owned (in Empire of Cotton, Beckert refers to it as "War Capitalism").
But those systems fell apart because they were too volatile. Eventually, an inability to control that volatility compelled the same imperialistic nation states to divorce themselves from private enterprise, and took the monopoly on violence in the settlement; so far, it's been a more stable equilibrium.
Both systems are "capitalist", in that they permit the private accumulation and investment of wealth. I would argue that the main difference is the state-owned monopoly on violence, eminent domain, and regulation of financial sector.
Regions with strong criminal underworlds tend not to to be governed by institutions with such monopolies.
There's an interesting 2012 Ted Talks presentation by Peter van Uhm the then chief of defense for the Netherlands. He discusses the state monopoly on violence as a central point of how and why the military exists.
"Peter van Uhm: Why I chose a gun"
Ted: https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_van_uhm_why_i_chose_a_gun?la...
That is not capitalism.
Not by the definition used by the people who named and defined capitalism.
It's true that after that, the conceit that capitalism involved only voluntary, uncoerced trade was adopted by it's defenders as a rationalization of the system, but that was not true of either the specific real world systems for which the name “capitalism” was coined to refer or subsequent real world examples, and certainly has nothing to do with the definition of capitalism.
If you want to distinguish the proposed scenario from capitalism, it would be in that it does not involve private property rights in the means of production, but instead on their forcible seizure and defense, but that's a slippery distinction because commonly such systems evolve into a degree of legitimization and trade with recognized rights between the parties, and the roots of capitalist property also start in forcible seizure which is later legitimized.
Given the diversification most capitalists have and looking at what major corporations do globally, yes, though I'd also expect them not to think of themselves that way.
Drug cartel leaders, I'm sure, often have similar self-serving rationalizations of their role.
We can't go any further on here, too much ground to cover.
Do you consider executives of, oh let's say, the Coca-Cola Company, to be capitalists?
Assuming you are probably thinking of linking something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinaltrainal_v._Coca-Cola_Co. ?
Illegal activity is illegal. Capitalism has law and a stable society as a prerequisite.
The definition of capitalism, and the world in which capitalism operates, are different.
The final transaction between buyer and seller is voluntary.
But all of the backend infrastructure may be highly manipulated in unethical, forceful ways.
A person buying some whale meat willingly pays the merchant at the meat market.
But that whale meat was acquired because one group killed the whale before another group. And that group killed the whale first because they setup groups who threatened other would-be whale hunters, and as this group gained a bit of financial traction they paid off local officials to pass some “coastal safety” ordinances that provide them some level of monopoly on killing whales, and worked out another ordinance that lets them dump toxic byproduct in a local river to place some of their cost into the public that won’t be easily rectified for decades.
So a perfectly ethical capitalist fisherman might well find themselves facing men with guns who forcefully prevent them from competing, when the police show up to enforce the local coastal safety law.
I was replying to the comments about use of force.
Also looks like ZeroZeroZero is an Amazon Original series now as well.
$13M in cash is an impressive amount. It makes me wonder: There must be all kinds of operations happening around us daily, yet nobody knows about them. And those operations need members. Where do they come from?
The inner workings of this stuff is fascinating. To be honest, I wish it were possible to go observe the system in action as a spectator. I'd love to see how the packaging is done, the supply lines, the transport logistics...
(I balance this with a deep hatred for cartels. If you trace these questions far enough, it seems to often lead to "the cartels are at the center of it all." And they're responsible for unspeakable miseries.)
To be clear, my question is: how is the knowledge necessary for such operations preserved? I'm a programmer. I learned it from the internet. Where do they learn? And these aren't street dealers. It's an organized, carefully designed, well-oiled machine. How does this machine work? How does it survive the loss of so many members?