Destroying drug cartels, the mathematical way

Re:Destroying drug cartels, the mathematical way by dllthomas on Sunday November 04, 2012 @12:14PM (#4740249)

To the many talking about legalization in favor of this kind of approach, I think you're missing the point. I am entirely in favor of legalization, and I think it is a necessary component of fixing things, but things have gotten seriously broken. The drug trade has built massive criminal enterprises which have built themselves infrastructure and organization and connections that can be used toward ends other than just shipping drugs. It keeps pouring money into these enterprises, and making things worse, but if we turn off (or down) that spigot we still have to deal with these organizations. And as someone put it, they're not in drugs because they have a deep interest in agriculture, it's just profitable, and their competitive advantage is that they're willing to do illegal things. Most of them already deal with other things as well, and I'd expect them to try and ramp up income from those to supplement a loss of drug related income.

All of this to say, we have a problem we need to deal with. An important part of that is to stop making the problem worse, but then we still need to fix it - something like this could be valuable to that end.

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Re:Destroying drug cartels, the mathematical way by jseliger on Sunday November 04, 2012 @01:37PM (#4740512)

>The drug trade has built massive criminal enterprises which have built themselves infrastructure and organization and connections that can be used toward ends other than just shipping drugs. It keeps pouring money into these enterprises, and making things worse, but if we turn off (or down) that spigot we still have to deal with these organizations.

Actually, after the U.S. ended alcohol prohibition virtually all of the organizations devoted to booze either went legit or drastically shrank in size and scope. We would've been better off without alcohol prohibition in the first place, but ending it was certainly a net win.

If you're interested in the history and parallels of alcohol prohibition to today's drug prohibition, Daniel Okrent's Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition is pretty good: http://www.amazon.com/Last-Call-Rise-Fall-Prohibition/dp/074... .

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Re:Destroying drug cartels, the mathematical way by dllthomas on Sunday November 04, 2012 @02:07PM (#4740626)

I wholeheartedly agree that ending prohibition of drugs would be a net win here, as well. In fact, I said it was probably necessary. I just don't think we should overlook the fact that there's likely to still be issues to deal with. The history of prohibition, so far as I understand it, doesn't undermine these points in any significant way. Law enforcement still had to deal with organized crime, and the size, scope, and influence of the cartels seems larger than that of bootleggers on the whole (though I would welcome hard numbers in either direction).

It's not impossible that the problem would just poof go away, but it seems a poor choice to bet on it. Again, that doesn't mean that legalization isn't the place to start!

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Re:Destroying drug cartels, the mathematical way by munin on Sunday November 04, 2012 @12:57PM (#4740373)

something perplexes me about talk of "winning the drug war". okay, we're at war with the cartels. let's characterize the enemy. the enemy:

- has no land, territory, or people that we can lay siege to. in fact, their civilian population is our civilian population!

- has more military funding than we do

- as a result, they have an endless supply of soldiers for all levels of their command hierarchy

- has less oversight requirements than our military (effectively zero)

- has no need for popular support

- has no need for large infrastructure, facilities, or anything really. if you take away some building of theirs with soldiers, vehicles and drugs, they will buy 10 more to replace what you took. they can continue to do this because for every dollar that you produce, as the state, to fund your war, they produce 3.

so you're fighting an insurgent war against everyone and they have more money / resources than you do. and you expect to win? hey, maybe if we took away their ability to make money and recruit people, then this starts to make sense...

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Re:Destroying drug cartels, the mathematical way by dllthomas on Sunday November 04, 2012 @02:10PM (#4740633)

Agreed. The only sane approach is to legalize sensibly (funding education and treatment with taxes and money saved) and clean up the mess we've made.

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