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Comment by elboru | Hacker News Reader

I would love to see something similar applied to Mexico. The scale would have to be a lot bigger, and I guess it would be a lot more dangerous since we are literally facing wars for territory over here, taking soldiers out of the battlefield wouldn't look appealing for the drug cartels.

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No need for anything complicated. Just end drug prohibition in USA, and Mexico will change drastically within a year. Human beings respond to incentives.

Makes me wonder what the existing organizations will do instead. Removing drug money will make them much less powerful, but they sure won't go down without a pivot.

I guess you could look at what happened when prohibition ended in America.

Soooooooo politics?

Become legal producers?

Not sure if you know this or not but they're already pivoting to avocados...

When the US pot market became saturated through legalization the cartels just shifted to other drugs. If you legalize those they will shift to something else. With the money, power and guns they have I don't think expecting them to take legal jobs is realistic.

If you legalize drugs in Mexico though and they can start legitimate companies that might end the violence, but would be a huge blow to the rule of law.

Right. The cartels shifted heavily to ecstasy and methamphetamine. Some heroin too, though they can't beat the Chinese on price per dose compared to fentanyl and carfentanil. Sure many members of these cartels will be loathe to take mundane jobs but what other choice will they have? The profit margin of legal recreational drugs will be driven down somewhere to the area of alcohol and tobacco.

I disagree with your perceived loss of justice should drug use be legalized. Laws exist to protect people. Drug laws have only served to hurt nearly every person on earth when considering supply chain and tangential effects. By opening up the law to allow people to self medicate we are actually reducing harm at every step from the companies producing raw materials to the end users. To only consider a solution that outlaws the existence of an addict is inhumane, immoral, impossible, and outright delusional. To learn more about these topics and hopefully gain some empathy for addicts I suggest reading Gabor Matès "In the realm of hungry ghosts."

https://barnesandnoble.com/w/in-the-realm-of-hungry-ghosts-g...

I'd be afraid that they'd turn to other illegal activities like kidnapping and bribery before entertaining a legal job.

If the cartels are allowed to operate legally, I'm worried about them having committed crimes for decades and being rewarded with first moved advantage into the new market. I think that would be a slap in the face to the rule of law. I'm not worried about the consumer as typically people should be able to self medicate and experiment as you suggest.

They can't if they've commited crimes and are in search and capture, like most of the heads are. If you're a mid scale weed producer that didn't use violence, sure, you have a headstart.

If you're a meth producer that killed (suspected) competitors and snitches, you're in for a lot of problems if you want to make your business legal.

"Oh, hi. I'd like to register a new LLC, these are my papers..."

>Just end drug prohibition in the USA

I’m not sure you’ve run the numbers on this. In 2016 there was 11k gun homicides in the US, and about 64k people died from opioid overdoses alone. I can’t really see an insentive here for the US.

You can make an argument that many of those opioid overdoses are due to the illegality of these drugs. People switching from pills to heroin, when they can't get pills. Heroin, or even non-opioid drugs being cut with fentanyl. People relapsing for various reasons.

You could, but it wouldn’t carry much weight without any evidence, and it does seem pretty preposterous. I remember when the legalize marijuana campaigns started to gain traction, and they were often parodied by people saying we should also legalize heroin/meth/coke... They were strawmans, but not any less absurd today than they were then.

Opioids have always been a social problem. Even when they were legal in 19th century England, "Opium dens" were places of decay and destitution.

Didn't much of the current opioid problem originate with legal prescription drugs?

Anyway I don't think people calling for legalisation are suggesting heroin should be handed out to school kids at break time. You can legalise it and setup strict regulations around it as well as redirect money spent on enforcement to health and prevention.

There's still money in human trafficking and the USA won't legalize that.

Is that market volume even 1/100 the size of the drug market? What's the point?

But even in Mexico really violent places (50+/100k/yr) are pretty highly concentrated in known areas. Not all Mexico is violent, like not all Maryland is violent, like not all Honduras is violent (it happens in pockets) often fueled by the drugs trade.

It would be interesting (and a welcome outcome) to see if this insight and method of fighting crime is accepted and used by locales high relative violence rates.

It's true. The Yucatan peninsula is quite safe and also gorgeous. I only lost $250 when the police robbed me [non violently] the last time I was there.

I'm not even joking, I'm planning on going back this fall.

Last I heard, the police are doing this in Australia now.

Lauren Southern receives $68,000 bill from Victoria Police

https://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/lauren-southe...

Not sure that's true, I haven't read about it (live in AUS). A lot of the campaigns by the opposition in the upcoming state elections are heavily focused on being "tough on crime".

Got an article or something?

Lauren Southern receives $68,000 bill from Victoria Police

https://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/lauren-southe...

Here's a much better link http://www.theunshackled.net/rundown/victoria-police-issue-s...

I only spent two hours driving through Honduras years ago (the part between El Salvador and Nicaragua is very skinny) but the police tried that three times. They got it right at the border, but the other times we got away with just acting dumb for an hour until they got tired of us (easy to do since we spoke no Spanish.) I'd never go back there, life is finite and there are less dangerous, nicer countries to visit.

Has Mexico thought about legalizing all drugs yet? Do you think this violence would exist if drugs were legal? It's hard for me to imagine such violence when people are just going to their boring jobs in the legal drug trade. Yeah the US might not like it, but who cares now with the current administration's hate for Mexico and Mexicans. Imagine what it could do for Mexico. Becoming the top economy in the western hemisphere would be trivial while eliminating violence, corruption, and crime.

There are many aspects to violence but I think it comes down to opportunity cost.

Until the police/military are strong and law abiding enough, cartels will continue to see violence as a risk worth taking even if their main business becomes legal.

They tried that in the past: https://www.historyextra.com/period/modern/1940-the-year-mex...

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