How the Plummeting Price of Cocaine Fueled the Nationwide Drop in Violent Crime

the problem with externalities is that the people who don't pay their costs have little incentive not to simply leave them off the books.

I think what's more is that police can use their time for more productive uses.

> It's the only way you'll get buy in

I don't agree. What you propose would stop the growth of the industry; who in the industry would agree to this, except the very lowest bottom-of-the-barrel employees, like the night-time guards?

Make them do some other type of gov't job. Post office, making roads, whatever. Paying them to sit on their butts - no thanks.

Well, except for the part where calculating income is still as difficult as it was. Somehow, I don't think the piecewise linear function that is progressive taxation is the cause of the difficult parts of the tax code.

"Territories we instantiate in states"? What are you talking about?

What is with the first person plural? The only way "we" are doing this is at a national level. On the other hand individual states could decide for themselves (assuming they can get around federal jurisdiction) but they would certainly not have it done to them.

I will skip over the "instantiate" word choice...

Explain?

There are a lot of factors that have gone into this, including but not limited to:

1) "American sized" amounts of money being dumped into a "Mexico sized" economy.

2) (related to the above) The increased utility of any bribe to somebody living in Mexico. (we see this phenomenon in developing nations across the world^).

3) Comparative resources available to the police forces.

4) Pressure from the US to overextend the Mexican police force.

etc.

To boil this all down to "the police aren't doing their jobs" is a huge mistake.

EDIT: ^Apologies, it seems Mexico is now considered a "newly industrialized nation", as of 2011. I don't think this effects my point however.

You can buy off US cop's with cash or threats of violence etc. The solution in the US has been the state cops and the FBI, which rotates people around enough so bribing them is less useful. Now add in an internal affairs office with some real teeth. Which creates a structure where bribed local cops tend to only ignore a subset of crimes.

In other words have overlapping independent organizations all investigating each other and add in people that don't stay in an area long enough to be bribed safely.

> How did it get to this level?

The same way the US got to the level where it decided to abolish alcohol prohibition.

This story is not new, just now politicians have a harder time admitting they did something wrong, and the prison (workers) lobby and the DEA will do all they can to continue.

"2) (related to the above) The increased tility of any brbe to somebody living in Mexico. (we see this phenomenon in developing nations across the world)."

Which is what I said. The reason the US isn't third-world is because most cops don't accept bribes. This sort of behavior infects society as a whole.

"3) Comparative resources available to the police forces."

Why are they out of resources? We need to figure things out if we ever want to stop it.

"4) Pressure from the US to overextend the Mexican police force."

It's because the violence and crime is spilling over to the US side of things. If they were stopping these guys, I don't think we would need to overextend anything. Does the US over-extend Canada's police force?

"To boil this all down to "the police aren't doing their jobs" is a huge mistake."

The police aren't doing their job because of a systematic problem of corruption. So I suppose it's just a symptom of a greater problem, but it still doesn't change the fact that there is a huge corruption problem with the Mexican police.

As I understand it, regular beat cops sometimes wear masks in Mexico, which doesn't happen in safer countries, not just special operations. In my brief visit to mexico (an afternoon in Nogales, pretty safe) I didn't notice any cops, but I did see trucks with soldiers in them, probably a third of whom had masks on.

I think the issue is more around the regularity with which authoroties have to conceal their identity.

It is rare to see a publicity picture that has Mexican cops not in masks. This is in court rooms and press conferences, not nighttime raids.

Your third paragraph doesn't follow from the first two paragraphs. The first two paragraphs make the interesting conjecture that increased police corruption in Mexico lowers drug prices in the US. This is something potentially worth discussing.

The third paragraph asserts that legalizing drugs won't stop the violence, and that Mexican police aren't "doing their job." The first point contradicts the original article, and thus requires supporting evidence (e.g. quotations from the original article, followed by references to contradictory studies). The second point is simply unnecessarily accusatory, and is ignorant of the reality expressed by burgerbrain (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3228850).

Meta: you've commented (and I've responded) in this pattern before. You start with something that will be perceived as inflammatory by the typical HN crowd (e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3172594), then follow up with a complaint about the votes you receive or the changing HN culture (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3172744). Maybe you're not trolling on purpose, but it sure looks like it.

As I said before (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3173159), you'd do a better job of conveying your message and be less likely to start a flame war if you restructured your arguments to be more appropriate to the audience -- present evidence, apply logical analysis, and draw a logical conclusion. State your assumptions (e.g. in this case if you believe that absolute societal order is more important than individual freedom, state up front that your argument depends on that). Most importantly, if you want others to change their minds, be willing to change yours if the argument goes the other way.

FWIW, I don't think you're right, but that your point presents a reasonable argument, and thus shouldn't be downvoted.

As to the police doing their jobs, you have to keep in mind that the drug organizations in Mexico columbia are heavily armed, more so than the local police. The Zetas for example, rose to power after being founded by Mexican special forces, a group analagous to our Green Berets. When you combine this strong knowledge of tactical warfare with a callous ruthlessness, they're not so easy to just shut down.

They are also very well financed. The drug gangs in the U.S are a joke compared to Mexico. They can't even be put in the same league. Drug gangs in the U.S. are like retail corner shops. Drug organizations in Mexico are like Walmarts, supplying these corner shops.

So in effect you have drug organizations which are more powerful than in the U.S. and a law enforcement system which is weaker than the U.S. Law enforcement couldn't easily stamp out these organizations (without HEAVY loss of life) even if corruption weren't an issue.

Troll or not, I think your post is being downvoted, at least in part, because of the gaping logical chasm you constructed. It may help if you explain exactly how falling cocaine prices would increase corruption in Mexico.

> I'm shocked at the number of closed-minded members of the HN community. ... I get down voted.

> I thought this was a community of intelligent people, yet I'm beginning to realize that this just isn't the case anymore.

Yes, it could be that we're close-minded and not smart enough to appreciate your brilliance.

Or, it could be that "we" thought that you were an annoying self-important git and/or point-whore and are downvoting you for that.

For the record, I didn't read your brilliance or down-vote you. That said, it's never the audience's fault.

"If the Mexican police were actually doing their job, the criminals wouldn't be running the show."

This suggests a very simplistic understanding of the issues surrounding Mexican police. You're just mindlessly finger-pointing and didn't even hint at ways the Mexican police could counter some of the obstacles they face.

I hate the downmod system here as well - entirely anonymous and trivially easy to reduce someone else's comment - but I can see why your comment might have been downmodded.

You have no supporting evidence to what you say and it doesn't really correspond with anything seen in real life.

You got it totally backwards, it is prohibition that causes the corruption. We have seen this before with alcohol prohibition in the US.

Not all views are equal. Just because creationism is an alternative view doesn't mean it should be given the same weight as evolution.

Views are comprised of smaller discrete points which can be objectively measured. I think some people have dissected your arguments and determined that added up it comes up short when compared to the other view.

Prison guard unions would be one. The War on Drugs is a major contributor to the sad statistic that the US has more prisoners than any other country on the planet (not per capita, more prisoners, period). That means good business for prison guards, and the prison guard union wields a disproportionate amount of power, at least in California.

One possibility: big financial institutions. Michael Rupert has done a lot of work in this area. IIRC, the illicit drug trade is the world's largest commodity market -- bigger than oil. That money has to go somewhere, and wherever it goes it is bound to be massively influential. Rupert argues that the links to big financial institutions are often quite clear, and he backs up his arguments with fairly prodigious research.

Aside from the prison/leo system mentioned below, Drug cartels have a vested interest in the continued war on drugs. There is no way they could reap the profits they currently get in any other way.

The Correctional Peace Officer union is the second strongest/most powerful union in California (behind California Teachers Association). Privatized prisons also contribute great deals of money to political candidates.

Prison operators and their employees. To a lesser extent police departments and officers.

>> Who are those people? Politicians? (serious question)

Prisons and drug producers/dealers use lobbies and politicians to keep drugs illegal.

The fact that they're illegal is the biggest factor effecting their high price.

Prison contractors. It's a huge industry.

Cops. District Attorneys. Prison Guards.

Lots of folks.

Actually, LOTS of people benefit. In no particular order: 1) Wackenhut (GEO group), private prison operator, and the entire prison complex (guard's unions etc) 2) Law enforcement. Even if the DEA had a 99% interception rate, that economics of the trade mean that it is still profitable at 1% supply. Hence, no matter how many busts the DEA makes, they will always need more resources/money/helicopters etc. 3) Banking and Finance. Drug money is the global financial system's liquidity float. It kept Wachovia solvent for nearly a decade. 4) The US Treasury. Do your own research. Suffice it to say, opium production in Afghanistan now exceeds pre-Taliban levels.

Just to note that those studies that suggest some alcohol is good for you are observational, and they conflate two different kinds of non-drinkers:

1) those who do not drink for personal reasons 2) former alcoholics.

Its quite plausible that the poor health of recovering alcoholics is responsible for the differences in observed health seen in these studies.

I agree with the rest of your post.

I'd like to know that too. But for the record: "Alcohol Consumption per Capita" does not tell us HOW alcohol is consumed (I can drink 1-2 bottles of beer 7 days a week, or binge drink on weekends). To me "Binge Drinking" implies an aim towards delirium.

EDIT: According to the telegraph (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/7616405/Britain...) a research (http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_272b_en....) found that the EU countries that drank the least also drank the most frequently. While relatively absent countries like Britain and Scandinavia tend to drink more at one sitting.

The evidence is personal experience. I'm not trying to publish a peer reviewed article, just convey personal experience that may be insightful to others as to why things appeal to people.

If you'd like to run a study to falsify my hypothesis you're welcome to, posting vaguely relevant stats is not such a falsification if you want to go all theory of knowledge on my statement.

It's the idea that to a large segment of the populace that when they turn the age of majority they should go consume large amounts of alcohol simply because their now "of age". Or that when they consume alcohol before the legal age they should consume as much as they can because they may not get the opportunity again in the near future.

Instead of looking at alcohol consumption per capita you'd probably want to look at alcohol poisoning per capita near the age of majority. (I have no idea what the stats on that actually are). In my personal experience not too many people consistently binge drink much past the legal age for drinking (because they discover it's actually quite boring).

I'll just point out that your chart, while relevant, doesn't necessarily disprove the original statement. Binge drinking is defined as a certain number of drinks in one night (four for women and five for men, I believe). It's possible that other countries drink more, but they spread it out, so they end up binge drinking less often.

And what's wrong with that? "On topic" is anything that interests the group.

A political article that entirely avoids discussion of politicians and partisan politics and has only a tangential reference to public policy?