I really wish Americans would boycott drugs from Mexican cartels. How bad does an industry have to get before there's enough outrage for a boycott?
Pushing for US government to legalize and regulate these drugs is probably the most effective action.
Is it cobalt mining that involves lots of child miners in Congo to produce your mobile phone?
If you had a time machine and could boycott drugs in the 1980s then it would have had an impact...now not as much.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/oct/12/p...
When prohibition 2.0 ends in failure maybe some will learn that it doesn’t work.
Mexico is a beautiful place of warm people, brave journalists and contradictions.
They're dangerous as shit and anyone who accidentally crosses paths with them might get killed for the hell of it. You ever read Borderlands Beat? That's real news coming out of Mejico. That country is bullshit and it can't keep its act together and never has. But, oh, my quaint villas and excellent tacos. Yeah, right. Drink the water and get back to me.
As far Chicago, that city is a mess, too. I was there just last year. It sucks there for all kinds of reasons.
You know what Chicago and Mexico have in common? Failed liberal policies.
I never said they wouldn't, there are crazy cartel members just as there are crazy gang members.
> They're dangerous as shit and anyone who accidentally crosses paths with them might get killed for the hell of it. You ever read Borderlands Beat? That's real news coming out of Mejico. That country is bullshit and it can't keep its act together and never has. But, oh, my quaint villas and excellent tacos. Yeah, right. Drink the water and get back to me.
Im literally living in Mexico, not in a resort but in a border town.
> As far Chicago, that city is a mess, too. I was there just last year. It sucks there for all kinds of reasons.
Agreed but there are nice places as well.
> You know what Chicago and Mexico have in common? Failed liberal policies.
I agree and corruption.
There's a ton of propaganda in mainstream media claiming that Mexico and America are both heaven and hell depending on what you watch but as an outsider (I'm neither Mexican or American) I can honestly tell you it's somewhere in between.
But in the end it's not so bad. It keeps Mexico interesting and unadulterated by tourists.
Some of these commenters you'd think walk around with a helmet on because they might trip and they won't risk that possibility. I'd love to see someone like that look where I've lived for five years in a beach city and tell me how bad I must have it and how much I must fear for my life in this war zone.
Some people need the air conditioned sense of suburban safety that bores me to fucking tears. Other people like a little bit of ruggedness and adventure and maybe even adversity in life. Or something in between. To each their own.
How long did you spend here to reach your conclusion that Chicago sucks for all kinds of reasons? I've been here for 6 years, and I like it better here than anywhere else I've lived (Detroit, Indianapolis, West Lafayette, and New York City).
>You know what Chicago and Mexico have in common? Failed liberal policies.
Chicago has a bustling tech scene. My rent for a big, nice apartment is only 23% of my take home pay each month. It's a fine place to live. I assume you're saying that it's a dangerous hellscape because we have a lot of homicides annually, but per capita, about 10 US cities are more violent. And the violence is really still a residual effect from the redlining practice codified in the National Housing Act of 1934, which forced black people to live in bad neighborhoods regardless of their income. Redlining was legal up until 1977, which was only about 1 generation ago, which is not long enough for a significant population to save enough to move to better neighborhoods and give their children educations that enable social mobility. And redlining was a racist policy, which is hardly "liberal" (although both major parties supported racism, until the Democrats reversed course).
So I guess I don't see the basis you use to arrive at your conclusion.
https://checkyourfact.com/2018/12/16/fact-check-percent-repu...
That ignores decades of prior history, including the 1956 act that was defeated, making "both" even more clearly incorrect.
It's so funny when people say this, especially with snark. I mean, you thought you had a real mic drop moment just then. As if there aren't a bunch of Americans who get Sparkletts delivered to their door just like Mexicans.
You get used to it on day two.
Agreed. It's time to get Tough On Crime, and declare a War On Drugs. Shame no one's thought of it before.
I’m from Spain and I’ve lived in Mexico for a decade. I’ve never seen violence or crime in front of me.
Many people think Mexico is a war zone which isn’t true at all.
> Casualties are often measured indirectly by estimated total deaths from organized crime in Mexico.[253] This amounts to about 115,000 people in the years 2007 - 2018.
also, it seems questionable to extrapolate the outcome of legalization in the US based on data from mexico.
You might think that but the data doesn’t really support it: http://polyticks.com/polyticks/beararms/liars/uscentury.gif. Homicide rates were spiking in the US long before prohibition. Likewise, after going down post WWII, homicide rates started spiking before the drug war. They had almost doubled from the previous low point by the time Nixon was elected. Nixon coined the phrase drug war, but didn’t really fund it aggressively. That was Reagan. But homicide were near the peak by the time he was even elected.
> also, it seems questionable to extrapolate the outcome of legalization in the US based on data from mexico.
Not really—the cartels supply demand for drugs in the US. And OP was blaming the US drug war for violence in Mexico.
I've noticed you have a tendency to pop into threads, lob in an out of context chart or factoid, and confidently assert a contrarian opinion. As someone who shares that contrarian impulse, I'd strongly recommend you try to master that urge. You're a very insightful commentator when you stick to what you know.
That’s progress!
Its not realistic to get enough people voluntarily stop to destroy the planet, it is however feasible to get a government changing its policies to alter the structures that incentivize pollution.
People don't need meat.
> clothes
People don't need leather goods or slave labor or fashion brands.
> transport
People don't need SUVs or Corvettes.
> optimizing for good is a complex problem
This is not a complex calculation: in all cases they're more expensive, worse for you, and worse for the world than readily available alternatives. And yet here we are, because, just like drugs, they're fun.
- Balancing your family's diet without meat requires specialist knowledge and effort that "not buying drugs" does not.
- Balancing your family's transportation needs with environmental friendliness requires specialist knowledge (chiefly the carbon impact associated with different candidate vehicles) and additional cost (an environmentally friendly vehicle with equivalent capacity is almost always going to cost more) which is also not true for "not buying drugs".
- Assessing every candidate clothing item's working conditions requires lots of specialist knowledge and effort that isn't true for "not buying drugs".
And this is without comparing the marginal impact of an individual's environmentally inefficient consumer choices to a drug user's significant and direct impact on drug violence. You'd have to place a pretty low price on human life (especially the minority communities that are most impacted by drug violence) to make this equivalency.
See The Social Network Movie, Wolf of Wall Street, etc. The drug use was not as dramatized as you might think.
That's like saying that websites shouldn't have copyright violations on them, since every single piece of content uploaded to them can be manually reviewed and approved to prevent violations. Good luck with that.
There will always be a way to get it into the country if there is a paying market.
The reasonble choice is to make the trade more difficult and raise prices. Cigarette prices have shown demand for some very addictive substances are far more elastic than some would believe.
I think there's better solutions than increasing exposure to addictive drugs. Non-addictive stuff I really don't care about. But they don't drive the drug trade either. I'm also for decriminalizing addiction to encourage people to seek help. Your suggestion is a bit too much anarchy for me
And even with a perfect wall in place, we still let people through it and over it and around it via other channels. The problem isn't really just people physically walking across the border away from checkpoints.