> Legalise the drugs and allow legal production - and the cartels will have to find an honest way to make a living like the rest of us have to do.

This is magical thinking. Organized crime can make money in other ways. This story is about kidnapping, for example. Organized crime exists in many places where it’s not funded by drug trade.

There just isn't nearly as much money in any alternatives. At its root money is required to maintain cartel power.

Sure they aren't going to disappear overnight. But cutting out their most profitable product lines would make a huge dent without a doubt.

We have a real-world example of that from Prohibition so it isn't entirely theoretical.

If there isn’t enough money, it only ends up making gangs more ruthless as they now have to compete for a smaller share of money with other gangs.

They end up extorting even more money from the local populace, and try and extend their fangs into other activities.

I’m not saying that legalizing drugs won’t help at all. But it’s unlikely it will help in places that already have gangs without other actions in addition.

What I'm about to say is a broad generalization, but an important one:

Gangs exist as the most promising form of employment for people without other options. If you destroy the gang's single largest source of revenue, then it reduces their relative attracting as an employer. There are alternative to drugs like human trafficking, arms dealing and the wildlife trade but they have much much smaller markets. Perhaps in the short term violence would increase as gangs try to find a replacment for drugs, but even in the medium term I strongly believe that recruitment would plummet and attrition would rise as the money ran out.

It took a little while, but why did it help so much when we ended prohibition but wouldn't when we end other drugs?

You serious think that taking away the stream of income that has put trillions of usd in the hands of cartels / organized crime won't have a huge impact?

I have doubts that it will fix the problem. It's not just drugs that these cartels control--it's kidnapping, avocados, cross-border smuggling, etc.

It's possible the violence might actually increase, actually.

I think it is necessary — even if not sufficient — to end the war on drugs. The only exception I’m willing to make is proper labeling and safe storage conditions. It should ought to remain unlawful to distribute drugs without proper labeling. We will need to come up with labeling standards.

It will remove 90% of their power. The 10% will still be a force for evil, but then it becomes easier to attack them

Look at it another way. Do you really think an industry reaping trillions of dollars is going to go away without a fight?

You mean like putting a lot of money into opposing legalization efforts? Yeah, I expect that.

Wouldn't they be more likely to just enter the market as legal participants? Cartels kill and do heinous things to their competitors because they can't take them to court and sue them and get an injunction to stop bad behavior.

That's not what happened with Prohibition. Crime syndicates providing black-market alcohol didn't just set up as legitimate alcohol vendors, they moved into unrelated markets like controlling labor unions.

Note that labor unions were a legitimate type of enterprise, but organized crime ran them illegitimately anyway. The willingness to break the law is their competitive advantage; it would make no sense to give it up.

Agreed this is too simple and common sense for the government to do.

> Organized crime exists in many places where it’s not funded by drug trade.

Organized crime will likely never truly go away, but it has flourished because of the war on drugs (just as it did in America during the prohibition era).

Right, there is a keen difference between organized crime thriving or merely existing. That it would continue to exist misses the point.

There's also a difference in the way organized crime manifests itself. Kidnapping schemes can't really exist for organized crime in the developed countries. The state security forces would stomp them out too quickly.

Or if they do, they focus on high value targets. And those high value targets in a free market should be able to pay for their own protection.

But if organized crime didn't have the resources to buy off the government, military, and police wholesale the magnitude of the problem would be much smaller.

Organized crime can make money in other ways, but fundamentally it profits from regulatory and legal arbitrage: the difference between what is in demand and what is legal to supply. Decriminalization directly attacks the fundamentals of that arbitrage, whether it's drugs or prostitution, or more prosaic like fuel taxes or tobacco duty (smuggling both has been a source of funding for IRA in Northern Ireland, historically).

Kidnapping is more of a capital arbitrage situation. I don't think it scales like drugs. For it to be really worthwhile, it relies on people with a lot of capital coming into the area. If you scale up kidnapping, people simply don't come, or invest a lot more in security.

> Organized crime can make money in other ways.

None of these has the absurd profit spans of drugs, though. You need about ~600-800 US$ worth of raw coca leafs to produce 1kg base cocaine (https://www.businessinsider.com/from-colombia-to-new-york-ci...) - and make ~25-27k US$ once it's on US streets. A vertical cartel that controls everything from the leaves to the sellers can capture all that 41.000% profit margin for themselves!

When the biggest markets US and EU "dry up" for illegal sales of cocaine, the gangs literally don't have anyone any more to extort for money - the population of South America is dirt poor. And also, they can't afford running militia that are more capable than some nations' armies or bribing the utter majority of the political class any more once these tasty US dollars vanish.

Given that, according to your profile, you're an appellate lawyer, and the more crime there is, the more work there is for lawyers generally (though maybe not for you personally) that seems like an instance of

>“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Upton Sinclair ~ 1934

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-ge...

"What a cheap ad hominem" (me, just now)

Searching for their profile on their employers website, and you'll find not a single criminal case. As was to be expected, considering the vast majority of lawsuits are civil law matters.

Sugar and opioids are also legal, legality doesn't solve everything, it's also up to the consumers and the regulator to work on better ways to consume those products.

You would need to regulate doses, make sure it's not coupled with other substances to reduce ill effects on consumers, which isn't easy. It's obviously better than letting cartels thrive, of course, but legalizing drugs isn't a silver bullet, it's also a lot of work.

Remember how prohibition went into action: women were tired of their drunk husbands.

And in the meantime, we should all do our part by refusing to use illegal drugs, because that directly funds the violence.

But somehow this opportunity for personal action is never brought up.

But isn't aren't drugs de-facto legal in Mexico anyway? The cartels are thought to control the police, judges and politicians enough that they do not fear the rule of law much. If drugs were legalized in Mexico, wouldn't the cartels do what cartels do anyway and prevent everyone else from producing?

Or do you mean make it legal at the destination - the US?

They should be legal everywhere, but legalizing in the US will have the most impact.

It would be interesting to hear if they are actively lobbying against legalisation. Perhaps someone here knows?

The issue is deeper. War on drugs has created many little cartels, many of them don't make much money off of transporting drugs to USA. These local criminal gangs are there to extort money from businesses, kidnapping, selling drugs locally.

When PRI was in power, politicians and plaza bosses had mutual understanding: "you can transport drugs, but don't mess with locals who have no connection with drugs". Whenever USA tries to get rid of a kingpin, it will create more splinter factions, whose only way to fund themselves by kidnapping, ransoms, extortions, etc.

The solution is to use the Rico law to prosecute everyone involved all at once as a gang instead of one person at a time. It worked successfully on the 5 mob families of New York.

We half-legalized one drug (cannabis) and they pivoted to stealing oil out of pipelines.

...which is a vastly less lucrative business. It's much easier to protect pipelines than to stop two humans exchanging money for drugs in private.

A few more pivots like that, and the cartels will be toothless.