It's us, the USA, that is causing this paper to shutdown. The cartels are financed by the insatiable drug appetite of its close neighbor. Our inability and/or unwillingness to legalize recreational drugs is the feeding tube for these vicious groups.
It is essentially funding terror and when you see the billions being made in only a few states such as Colorado with 1+ billion in 2016 [1]. Large amounts of wealth, probably 50-100+ billion going to cartels in the south annually to fund very bad things.
Prohibition always creates a criminal black market that becomes uncontrollable when there is a large demand for a product that is illegal. Better to make it legal, remove the revenue for cartels and use some for taxes and lots of jobs in the US. Colorado already has 20k jobs from ending prohibition on marijuana, that could be a 200k nationwide job creator. Legal markets, education, rehabilitation and safe use could also provide many jobs.
Legal marijuana markets in the US are already at such high growth rates that they rival the dot com boom growth [2]. It makes pro-business and safety sense to legalize and make it a health issue not a criminal one, because the criminalization of it is creating very bad blow back and funding terror essentially, destroying privacy and lives along the way. The punishment of non-violent drug users, enforcement and resulting black market criminals are way worse than the act and it is cruel and unusual punishment on individuals and people now on a massive scale worldwide.
[1] http://www.marketwatch.com/story/marijuana-tax-revenue-hit-2...
[2] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-01-04/legal-marijuana-sales-...
"The Nixon campaign in 1968 and the Nixon White House after that had two enemies: the antiwar Left and black people... We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black. But by getting the public to associate hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily"[1]
So taking into account things like cultural prejudice. Those things are unlikely to be fixed just with good will and altruism.
Says who?
What we are doing now is broken, has been broken, and everyone knows it's broken. There are hidden motives here, no doubt. Corruption is a very real thing and there are a lot of people with a lot at stake regarding drug policy.
The most important thing to successful drug prohibition and treatment is a semi-controllable grey market.
Except for that pesky sovereignty thing.
It's odd reason given that narcotics are/were supposedly one of the principal sources of the Taliban’s financing.
Even in iraq the oil reserves are managed by the iraqi ministry and went mostly to chinese companies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93Iraq_relations#R... http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/world/middleeast/china-rea...
If, through inaction, violent warlords displace thousands or millions of people, are the destination countries not adversely affected? The US has millions of economic and war-affected Mexican refugees.
Same with Syria... should Germany, Turkey, Greece, etc. say "Syria is sovereign, nothing we can do" when their countries are being overrun?
The US should look to improve life in Mexico and reduce cartel power first through economic and peaceful political means, and then, PERHAPS and after much thought, bombing the shit out of every cartel leader on the same night, Godfather style. I'm only half kidding.
This is false. According to the DHS, less than 1400 refugees have been granted asylum between fiscal years 2013 to 2015 (inclusive) [1].
> Same with Syria... should Germany, Turkey, Greece, etc. say "Syria is sovereign, nothing we can do" when their countries are being overrun?
Why not?
> The US should look to improve life in Mexico and reduce cartel power first through economic and peaceful political means, and then, PERHAPS and after much thought, bombing the shit out of every cartel leader on the same night, Godfather style. I'm only half kidding.
Doesn't seem like what the current administration is doing, though.
[1] https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2015/tab...
And "Why not"? Because of my point: Syrian war is having a very real, direct impact on the other countries, and is violating the Non-Aggression Principle. So even if someone is a Libertarian or non-absolute Pacifist, it could be argued those countries most affected by refugees have the right to self-defense against Syrian combatants.
But they are the only people who can.
Narconomics is a good read on the various measures that have been tried. Going after poor South American farmers these days means the cartels just means the cartels don't pay them as much.
Far too much policy making around narcotics is done by knee-jerk reactions, on both sides.
How do you explain nearly all of Latin America having wild murder rates? All of the most dangerous non-war zone countries on earth are in Latin America. And yet that same murder & violent crime problem isn't represented in Canada. What could possibly explain that consistency across ~15 different Latin American nations, except that it's a cultural and institutional problem? Colombia for example has seen dramatic improvements, despite the US demand for drugs increasing in the last 15 years. Or take Venezuela, one of the most dangerous nations, with a truly shocking murder rate, and it has very little to do with the US drug demand. Or take Brazil, a nation of 200 million with a murder rate 7 to 10 times that of the US (with up to half of all murders unreported in official stats), which also doesn't derive its huge murder problems from the US drug demand.
It's far too simplistic to just blame the US for everything.
Stop it in Colombia and it shifts to Mexico. Stop the routes along all of Mexico and the Caribbean and who knows - no reason to be so sure it absolutely couldn't happen in Canada.
[0] http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/latin_america-jan-june11... [1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/guatemalas-...
Nowadays it doesn't matter as much since a significant amount of production can be done in greenhouses and there are other more synthetic products with market share, but the damage is already done to those poorer countries, and the cartels already wield too much influence.
American and Canadian institutions are stronger. They have been able to stand.
Prohibition transforms capital spent by drug users into income for drug cartels. Under full legalization, drug users would have as little incentive to buy their drugs from street vendors as alcoholics would want to buy their liquor from some guy standing on a street corner.
The great news is that we are entirely responsible for this mess ourselves, so we can fix it if we want to.
Maybe legalization for only people who are proven addicts, but are probably the bulk of the cartel revenue would give a more favorable result ?
That's already an acceptable risk with cigarettes and alcohol, and marijuana in some places, why should it not be acceptable for everything else?
In general, lack of availability is not a strong limiting factor even in countries with full criminalization; illegal drugs can be bought by anyone willing, there exists a market in any population center.
On the other hand, drugs being available in a controlled environment makes it easier to recover from addiction, and also limits the proliferation of various highly addictive chemicals which wouldn't be preferred or used by anyone if e.g. simpler opiates were available.
Saying that full legalization will cause a huge increase in drug addiction sounds plausible, but what evidence we have (e.g. Portugal decriminalization) shows that it doesn't really cause any disaster.
1. We have the option as a consumer of not buying illegal drugs?
2. Cartels have the option of not doing horrific things?