Legalizing all drugs would kill these cartels almost instantly. People who do drugs do them anyway and find a way to even if they’re illegal. If drugs weren’t illegal all that money wouldnt end up in mexican cartels pockets.
Their people, money and weapons don't vanish and what we see when cartels take a hit income is violence increases and the cartels look to other methods of making income using they're existing tools. Protection rackets and kidnappings are already used as supplemental income, these would only increase.
Now a long approach of gradual decriminalization and legalization may work, with the ability to operate legally the need to utilize violence decreases over time as it's generally bad for business.
For the record I'm pro-legalization, but just flipping the status quo overnight isn't going to fly here.
Saying "just legalize all drugs" doesn't solve the problem, someone still has to make the drugs, can we just give all traffickers amnesty for past crimes and make their operations legal? Maybe? But it's not something to hand-wave away.
I don't have the answer but flippant comments about how easy it is to dismantle cartels, is offensive to anyone who has fought to do such and likely a disservice to the intelligence of people running them.
By pure numbers, crime did hit a 20th-century high in 1933, right after prohibition was repealed, and they didn't pass those numbers until the 1970s-early 1990s (and only just barely then). But this was also the economic nadir of the century. And the mechanism for the decline in organized crime was that many crime bosses were killed or imprisoned, so it could've been the crime bill. So yes, it is what happened at the end of prohibition, but it's hard to draw firm conclusions between the two.
I don't know if that would start the process of gradual downsizing and elimination by security forces or if it'd instead first lead to a huge uptick in violence and perhaps civil war, but I feel like in the long-term it'd be much harder for most of them to hold onto as much money and power as they used to.
I'm absolutely not an expert in this area and could be horribly wrong, but I think this idea should at least be considered more seriously.
Why/how are the cartels not just "put down" immediately with some assistance? Is there something deeper, like people being born into it or politicians much rather having drug money than a living population? I don't understand why there even needs to be any form of civil war, unless the cartels have embedded themselves deep enough to be similar to guerilla warfare-esque with innocent actors.
Take a cop in rural Mexico making like $15k/year, and he'd be absolutely insane to flush his and his family's life down the toilet to go up against these guys.
Cop in the US in one of those militarized police forces is making upwards of $70k, and isn't up against organized groups of psychopaths with armored vehicles and automatic weapons. Those cops are going after guys growing pot in the closet, and the occasional small, low-level drug org that isn't too dangerous.
Theyre literally killing the competition for the avocado you bought yesterday.
Narcos are entrenched and not going anywhere anymore than Russian oligarchs.
Cato report (2018) on the effects of marijuana legalization on border smuggling. It's had a large and direct impact on the market.
1. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-08-14/californ...
2. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-09-11/californ...
I find the argument for legalizing drugs as some sort of a benevolent all-in-one solution a complete idiotic solution.
Drugs like Heroin, Meth, Cocaine, etc should absolutely be banned and IMV the scope and scale of punishments increased.
Humans are notoriously incompetent or weak-willed to make rational choices in many aspects. They are emotional, impulsive and irrational.
Imagine being able to obtain drugs at market prices and being able to sell to children in schools, illegally of course. Can you not see what is happening with alcohol?
Drugs are a social evil and must be dealt with. Legalization is not the solution. It will increase drug use exponentially.