I saw this. Watched the whole Europol conference. Those numbers are indeed low: 9 tons of cocain, 5 tons of cannabis/hashish. Some guns and 15m USD, if I remember correctly.
I still don't think I exaggerated. There's no way that's all they got from it after 3 years of eavesdropping. There's just no way that those tens of thousands of messages only incriminated some drug lords. What they did with these press conferences was a pure PR, they just wanted something for the press, but I still believe that the actual aftermath of this will much larger.
If they did, they’d get defunded. We’d get more off the streets by just buying it.
Drug markets will operate with similar incentives.
If you want to kill the drug trade, what the government needs to do is to start selling drugs. When drugs are cheap, violence and interest in the drug trade plummets. Nobody wants to go to jail over their drug dealing 'job', when its earning them $8/hour.
The "Cobra effect".
I highly doubt it. The main drug operations run with state approval. If anything this was just an attempt to either clean the country from competition or just keep law enforcement busy. If you read the reports, what they have collected, this is nothing if you compare what kind of volumes are being moved every day.
For example, in the UK alone it is estimated that yearly volume of illegal cannabis sales is in the region of 6 billion of pounds and the haul of entire operation was like how much, a 100 million?
What it is going to achieve is a slight vacuum, new youth "get rich quick type" will take place and resume operations.
If this wasn't announced in the media, I doubt drug consumers would have ever noticed something happened. If someone is using illegal market, they have plenty of alternative contacts if their main dealer goes bust.
Also these things are already included in the pricing, so this will be just written off as cost of doing business.