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Comment by weq | Hacker News Reader

Unlike the rhetoric of "Just Say No", this is what black markets are. They are not run by idiots, but generally desperate people with no other means. Once you are over the line in that world, the good doesnt matter. You are working underground, anything goes. Desperate people get taken advantage of, but the yakuza are just one link. This route is usually controlled by the triads, they have been arming conflict in the golden triangle for years. Like any other capitalists, blackmarket syndicates expand and fight for terroritory.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meth-syn...

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>They are not run by idiots, but generally desperate people with no other means

Eh I wouldn't say that's entirely accurate. Much like any other domain there's opportunity and cost. When an illegal enterprise is profitable, there's very little incentive to actually stop. These people aren't necessarily desperate, their business models are more directly... amoral. It's true that the underclass dominate petty crime, but that's not really an accurate description of the underground criminal enterprise. They're just the most visible victims, and in an industry that essentially tries to keep itself faceless and out of the limelight, it might appear to the untrained eye that there's only a little more beyond that.

The addict engaged in robbing your car is but one end link of a long chain of traffickers: transporters, producers, middlemen, and corrupt officials that lined their pockets with a little bit of the proceeds. Few or none of which even consume any of their product.

I dont know about yakuza specifically.

But in general, this is not true or at least not true everywhere. Our local mafias and "black market" were not desperate people. They were people seeing opportunities and taking advantage of them to the max. Some of them generated desperate people among their victims, sure. But, those rarely turned into bosses or gang members.

Most of what they did were choices and not a result of "not having any other choice".

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