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Comment by 2_listerine_pls | Hacker News Reader

It's surprisingly simple to locate the plantations using LIDAR + spectrometry. Even easier in Afghanistan, where fields are cultivated in the open. It's so well documented that the UNDOC provides an anual report with the amount in acres. I could go on, but this is enough to make one wonder why they aren't being stopped.

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> I could go on, but this is enough to make one wonder why they aren't being stopped.

Except for that pesky sovereignty thing.

I was thinking of police corruption myself.

Is that the same sovereignty that stopped the US from from drilling their oil after overthrowing their government?

It's odd reason given that narcotics are/were supposedly one of the principal sources of the Taliban’s financing.

We all moved on after finding out there were no weapons of mass destruction without even an "oops" from the public, so I wouldn't hold your breath on anyone launching a successful campaign there- still, if that's true, I would really like to see someone make a documentary or some articles about it in a format the masses will see. Could be really compelling to people not typically reached by advocates of drug reform.

What oil in afghanistan?

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...

Sovereignty and the concept of hostile action/influence on life can make the line blurry.

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.

> The US has millions of economic and war-affected Mexican refugees.

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...

I used the refugee term in the sense of "they came here to escape poverty and gang wars", not "the State Dept allowed them in".

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.

Here's an interesting podcast on the supply of drugs: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2017/02/tom_wainwright.html The guest mentions that in the Ande's mountains it is still tough to identify drug growing.

LIDAR can go through canopy because there are spaces between leaves. Take a look at the Carnegie Airborne Observatory's tech.

Because the farmers get paid next to nothing so disrupting supply does nothing to raise costs (the usual measure of the effect a supply side policy has). Mexican weed production soared because the authorities were pulled into cities due to violence leaving the rural terrain uncovered.

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.

Well, who knows why mexico doesn't take advantage of that.

But they are the only people who can.

>>Insatiable drug appetite is a constant

Says who?

The decades upon decades of failed abolishment efforts speak for themselves.

So I'm by no means pro-drug, and I agree that most people who say "it's impossible to fix because we haven't fixed it yet" lack imagination, but there is absolutely some fishy stuff going on with drug policy.

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.

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