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"marijuana and cocaine"

WTF. This isn't 1989. The two drugs are meth and fentanyl. This is so inaccurate I don't even know where to start. You can buy Marijuana in a store on the west coast as easy as a beer - the cartels have moved on. There is zero money in Marijuana. Cocaine was taken over by the Dominican Republic ten years ago. Cocaine takes actual agriculture - the cartels are no longer interested in mass slow farming competing with 3rd world producers.

I don't know where you're getting your information, but the frequency of media coverage of a drug is not indicative of the market size. See e.g.:

https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/R41576.pdf (page 16-)

>Cocaine of Colombian origin supplies most of the U.S. market, and most of that supply is trafficked through Mexico,

>In 2017, Mexico seized 421 metric tons of marijuana and eradicated more than 4,230 hectares of marijuana, according to the State Department’s 2019 INCSR. However, some analysts foresee a decline in U.S. demand for Mexican marijuana because drugs “other than marijuana” will likely become dominant in the future. This projection relates to more marijuana being grown legally in several states in the United States and Canada, which have either legalized cannabis or made it legal for medical purposes, thus decreasing its value as part of Mexican trafficking organizations’ profit portfolio.

However, the same report indicates I underestimated the relevance of heroin coming via Mexico. In this case, poppy production in Mexico has increased in recent years, so apparently "actual agriculture" is still not too much work for the cartels.

Unfortunately, opioid use is a much more difficult question, due to the "laser-like" effect of opioids: the capacity for non-drug pleasure is slowly degraded[1] and users may not notice until it's too late, similar to the way that the visual cortex will try to correct for laser damage until the retina is irredeemable. Decriminalizing any opioids comes with significant risk, since they are easily the deadliest sort of drugs.

Instead, approaches similar to that currently applied in the Netherlands may be more fruitful. A bright spot is that medical cannabis seems to decrease the likelihood of opioid prescriptions, which narrows the medicine-to-streets pipeline.

1: https://www.nature.com/articles/npp201317

Meth is produced locally no? Wasn't that one of the main reason meth became much used.

i think you are not mentioning meth and heroin, despite them being on the RAND report from 2012 (one may suspect that order/rank may have morphed significantly since then), because the conversation around legalization around them would be an immensely unpopular sell in the US.

i don't see why cartels wouldn't switch overnight to meth or heroin (or both) the moment that cocaine and marijuana become legalized. what then? we know that the illegality creates the massive black market/financial incentives for these regional drug powers to exist, so it seems important to get all cards out on the table, lest we "fix" two problematic drugs only to have at least two left over.

> i think you are not mentioning meth and heroin, despite them being on the RAND report from 2012 (one may suspect that order/rank may have morphed significantly since then), because the conversation around legalization around them would be an immensely unpopular sell in the US.

Heroin, mostly, comes from Asia, so I did segment a little there. In particular, a lot of heroin comes from Afghanistan, specifically, and American interventions there may have contributed to the opioid crisis. See e.g.: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47861444

Really the post was just too long and I was tired of writing. Opioids will indeed be another problem we have to deal with.

In the case of methamphetamine, there is some hope of substitution with less dangerous drugs like amphetamine, methylphenidate, et cetera. One of the biggest reasons people start using meth is that it's cheaper than other drugs; it's by far the easiest for chemists to make. It's heavily ingrained in various "party" subcultures for this reason, and also features in stories of rural poverty. But that also means that even a strikingly different (hopefully safer) drug could potentially take its place, if it were stimulating and pro-social. In that case we have no appeal to tradition; we have to confront the question of whether "party drugs" can have a place in legal society, which is another matter entirely.

Luckily, the market for methamphetamine is significantly smaller than that for marijuana or cocaine according to the RAND report, and I think this is because demand for meth, which we might call the "ramen noodles" of drugs, is more price-sensitive than other drugs. If the power of cartels is reduced by decriminalization efforts targeting the marijuana and cocaine markets, the price of meth may not be able to rise so easily without impacting demand.

The cartels aren’t drug evangelists, they’re businesses. Take away drugs and they’ll violently monopolize other profitable export industries. In fact, they’ve already done this with avocados.

If you want to stop the violence and corruption of the cartels, you’ll have to either change the culture that makes their existence possible, or defeat/imprison/kill them all. I’m not sure which of those would be more difficult.

There are no other criminal enterprises that offer a comparable revenue source. Not one. It's utter nonsense to think that organized crime is just going to switch to avocado extortion and keep bribing their way out of jail.

The Sicilian Mafia has gone mostly “legit,” in the sense that they operate in legal industries, e.g. olive oil. They just use criminal means to extract hugely excessive rents from those industries.

They aren't competitive internationally, though. And can't be unless they're also going to go down to Morocco, fight the Army, invade Tunisia and Algeria, and then force the extraction of high rents.

The amount of violence the Sicilian Mafia inflicts, while staggering, is an order of magnitude or more off from the cartels.

Human trafficking and gun running are the cartel’s other significant sources of revenue. Then there are extortion and protection rackets. You could legalize absolutely everything and you would still have cartels. In Africa they are run by warlords and drug smuggling isn’t a big thing there — anywhere you have poor people and a weak government, you’ll have some form of “cartel.” The product is irrelevant.

You could legalize migration.

In any case, even if legalizing drugs still leaves you with some cartels, you would still have fewer and smaller.

If they could violently monopolize some other industry, why aren't they already doing so?

I would assume they are already trying to expand as much as possible. Legalising drugs doesn't look like it would make that expansion easier. If anything, it would become harder, because funding dries up, so investments are harder to make.

If true then what is a workable solution? Does Mexico need UN peacekeepers to reinforce the government's efforts to retake control from cartels and corrupt militaries?

How sustainable is any change if people believe criminals will just regain power once help leaves?

There are no other export businesses that they can monopolize and make nearly the same profit on: if there was, they would have done that already.

While I agree that the common populace of the US has mostly reached an understanding that marijuana prohibition has far higher costs compared to gains (and was initiated for extremely unjust reasons) - we aren't there yet. National legalization is unlikely to happen regardless of who takes the Senate+House+Presidency in the coming term with a possibility of it happening if a lot of pressure is applied on the Democrat side (and assuming they hold significant political power).

The fight isn't over. While the populace has coalesced the political will is still lagging behind.

>> Unlike powder cocaine, coca leaf has a long history of relatively safe use in the northern Andes. Widespread coca tea use is not considered a public health crisis of any particular concern in Peru and southern Colombia:

> The decriminalization of coca tea in Western countries may lead to less gang activity as illegal cocaine manufacture economics shift from large-scale to small-scale extraction.

Who would substitute coca tea for cocaine? Decriminalized marijuana has same sought-after effects of criminalized marijuana, so can reduce the crime associated with it. I don't think you'd get the same reduction in cocaine trafficking crime unless you decriminalized refined cocaine.

Few people would, that's not the point. It seems you are not understanding this part: "shift from large-scale to small-scale extraction". The claim is that cocaine would partly shift to "at home" and local production, which GP correctly points out is currently very common with DMT. The comparison is made because DMT currently has a similar legal situation to what GP suggests for cocaine: legal plant material, but the purified/extracted substance is illegal.

> It seems you are not understanding this part: "shift from large-scale to small-scale extraction". The claim is that cocaine would be fabricated "at home" and locally, which GP correctly points out is currently very common with DMT.

Couldn't you say the same thing about meth, especially in the past when pseudoephedrine medicines were easier to get? It sounds simple enough that regular people can make it from a receipe, but the cartels still traffic it: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bvgazz/sinaloa-cartel-dru....

I believe cocaine is a bit easier than meth, though I'm no chemist. In any case, you're certainly right that it wouldn't kill the black market, but it would still weaken it (I edited my post on this point, sorry for the confusion).

If you can get an ephedrine compound a synthesis for meth is possible where you just throw everything in a pot and come back to it. Small scale production used to be fairly prolific based on total consumption. That said its total production volume in that manner was low.

>Who would substitute cocaine with coca tea?

There are really two things to respond to here: first, all powder cocaine starts as the leaf, so the powder cocaine market would move downstream to extraction from widely-available coca leaf. This is the biggest reason we haven't tried this already. However, I hope that the economics will not favor transporting large amounts of still-illegal cocaine across long distances, so that instead it will mostly be produced near the point of consumption, with lower profit margins and less violence.

Second, addicts are more likely than you think to recognize their own usage as a problem, yet rely on the drug to do things that most people expect to be able to do. Someone who uses cocaine so they can focus on work or participate in social activities would probably be willing to substitute at least some of their usage with tea, if it were cheaper than powder and legal. Drug abuse isn't usually a problem of simple uncontained hedonism. It's not a perfect analogy, but the availability of beer probably likewise moderates the demand for spirits.

Coca leaves are not a substitute for cocaine. Most coke addicts will switch to amphetamines and booze if they're desperate, not some tea.

You could say the same for opiate users but there's regular reports of kratom use amongst them. Kratom is just a herbal tea.

Kratom does not contain opioids and very little is still understood about it's pharmacology.

It is not the same as drinking coca tea for cocaine addiction.

Yup. Lots of opioid users use it to get off of heroin and other drugs.

Why is that?

Coca tea is far, far too weak to even get a similar effect to cocaine. For example, It takes ~1 lb of coca leaves to get 1 g of cocaine using chemical extraction, so the tea doesn't even come close.

Most coke addicts will switch to amphetamines and booze, which gives similar dopaminergic effects.

This is a bit of an exaggeration. 1 gram is well above a typical dose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca_tea

>A cup of coca tea prepared from one gram of coca leaves (the typical contents of a tea bag) contains approximately 4.2 mg of organic coca alkaloid.[1] (In comparison, a typical dose (a "line") of cocaine contains between 20 and 30 milligrams.[2])

It's fair to point out that there is still a discrepancy and many habitual cocaine users have some tolerance to the drug, but it's not impossible to drink five cups of tea. Also, it looks like you'd need more like half a pound.

A typical ingested dose is close to 200mg or so which is still a fifth of a kg of raw leaves. (A 200mg dose lasts longer than insufflation, about 4-6 hours, and during that duration is about as strong as insufflation.)

A "typical dose" is 40-60 mg, lasts 45 minutes, and leaves you wanting more. A coke addict will need at least a gram no matter what they're doing, hence why a gram is a benchmark for coke use.

Nobody is going to drink 10 cups of coca tea every 45 minutes. They're going to pop adderall and hit the bottle.

A 1920s alcohol prohibition that banned only hard liquor while allowing beer and wine might well have lasted until the present day. I think there really is a willingness to substitute legal "soft" versions of drugs (or other contraband) for "hard" ones.

I've actually had coca tea, and it's basically just tea.

Which is notably not like cocaine.

It would have to be some damn strong mate de coca. I've drank it on several occasions, and from what I could tell, it was less of a stimulant than coffee.

FWIW, legal items are also trafficked by cartels in Mexico. See: https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/blood-guacamole-me...

I doubt this is for the profit in that industry itself. It's probably more to do with the negotiation power they can get if they control an important export to the USA, maybe partly using avocado distribution chains for drugs, and maybe money laundering.

Violent criminal activity is not attractive from a business perspective. Security is expensive, paying bribes is expensive, mistakes are expensive. Without the huge money influx of drug trafficking (which is an insane source of profit) to maintain an army, it'd be more cost-effective to simply not have one.

Don't get me wrong, these aren't good people and right off the bat would probably still be involved in lots of corruption, blackmailing and even murder. But I doubt they'd be able to afford a paramilitary branch and maintain violent conflicts without the profits from drugs.

Isn’t Mexican heroin much bigger in dollar value than marijuana?

mexican meth...

Missing the synthetics, they have uncovered vast laboratories in Mexico in the past 10 years. Most of the precursors come from China

Interesting take on cocaine legalization. I like it.