Perhaps we should end the fifty years long "War on Some Drugs" in the US that funds the cartels.
No, ir was a war on political opponents, not necessarily addicts at all. The War on Marijuana and Acid was to go after hippies, and the War on Crack was to go after inner city blacks. The idea being all of these groups would have voted liberal and the Republican base supported punishing these groups. This was all assumed for decades but made explicit as the strategy by one of Nixon’s top lieutenants in recent years.
So depends on how you define it.
> “You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying?
> We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
> Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
The majority of executions in Singapore are for drug offences. Since 2010, 23 prisoners have been executed for drug offences, while only five have been executed for other offences, such as murder. Death penalty supporters, such as blogger Benjamin Chang, claim that Singapore has one of the lowest prevalence of drug abuse worldwide. Chang claims, for instance, that over two decades, the number of drug abusers arrested each year has declined by two-thirds, from over 6,000 in the early 1990s to about 2,000 in 2011.
I don't think Mexico's problems would be solved if drugs disappeared tomorrow.
For example, the cartels are robbing fuel [depots, refineries, regular gas stations, etc]. They'll keep doing that, it's profitable.
So, how can Mexico solve its own problems? I have no idea.
Canada was winning best weed strain at shows but was never really supplying the US. The US was supplying Canada with weed/coke from Mexico and premium California bud if Canada was lucky. I'm sure some BC bud flowed south but everything was small operations.
Why isn't Canada a major narcotics manufacturing center? Why is Colombia?
I think the answer is probably complex and involves poverty (meaning switching from lawful occupation to unlawful occupation is a bigger difference than in, say, Canada) and corruption/lawlessness (which may also be consequently tied to the poverty, if corruption is a way to escape it).
It must surely go much deeper than "it's America's fault", and I think it may also be solvable without American intervention or action (though of course, it would be harder)
If this begs the question "why is Canada more stable than Columbia, Peru, or Bolivia", apart from the fact that those are developing countries, it's worth remembering that the United States was aggressively and violently intervening in their politics into the middle of the 20th century. The same can't be said of The Maple Leaf States.
Mexico is completely avoided when cocaine is sent to Europe from South America. Albanian mafia, Italians, and others use ships to transport cocaine from South America to ports in Europe. Mexican cartels are hardly involved in this. Same logic: why export to UK and other wealthy EU countries? More profit. If they were to sell cocaine to Iranians or Nigerians, they aren't going to make much money. Nigerians are also involved in Cocaine smuggling, because Nigeria is a transit point for some cocaine shipments from South America to Europe. Nigerian gangs get paid commission in cocaine for their help in transiting cocaine through their ports, so Nigerians sell the cocaine they obtain as helpers. That's why Nigerians use mules to send cocaine to India and other countries.
If Mexico were richer than Canada/USA, yes, people would be exporting drugs to Mexico.
Canada is a first world country with a social safety net. The risk/reward to crime doesn't make as much sense
Canadian's culturally inherited laws and culturally attitudes from Britain. Canadians are more fearful and morally against breaking small rules.
Canada's population is too small to produce the qualities needed
The US/Canadian police work together.
Thousands of Mexicans are coming to the US daily for a better life. Canadians have the same standard of life the average American.
Canadians are Americans. Most Canadians can look on their family tree and see relatives that came from America.
Does Canada produce Marijuana and Cocaine ? Mexico is an agricultural producing country
> I don't think Mexico's problems would be solved if drugs disappeared tomorrow.
Mexico was already in trouble before the drug trade kicked off
Low education, low productivity, limited opportunities
How many Canadians jump the wall to wash dishes in the US ?
But why don't they produce world-leading levels of illegal synthetic narcotics, purely in search of profit on the American illicit market? If farming isnt viable and drugs are massively profitable, why does Canada not suffer from the allure of American dollars?
> Mexico was already in trouble
I agree, but does that mean Mexico cannot solve its problems without an American Savior intervening?
I have begun to wonder if it's ever possible for a poorer country beset by corruption to be helped in any meaningful way by outsiders, or if change necessarily has to come from within.
There is less production of narcotics in Canada because Canadian law enforcement is more effective at suppressing it than Mexican law enforcement is.
No
But it’s a shared problem as most of the drugs trade targets the US
Mexico has a much more limited budget to deal with interdiction efforts
A weed or powder suddenly being very valuable creates a lot of problems in a poor country
In the 80s Rafael Caro Quintero offered to pay off Mexico’s foreign debt from drug proceeds
Mexico attacked drug producers and in turn they responded by arming themselves
Drug money buys a lot of guns, guns buy power, rinse repeat
I mean, it's great to be introspective and self-aware of what your country is doing, but not to the degree that you put the blame for drug crime on the people trying to eradicate drug usage. The problem with the war on drugs isn't that it exists, it's that it's done limp-wristedly (mainly because of objections by bleeding hearts), instead of being waged ruthlessly.
The end result of social libertarianism results in the same thing as for economic libertarianism: misery for the majority.
But this is exactly where the blame lies. Alcohol production and distribution related crime dropped to essentially zero once the prohibition ended.
Wanting more Clear and Present Danger-style ruthlessness in the war on drugs (after decades of failures of varying levels of ruthlessness) I guess is an idea if you don't care about body count and collateral damage, but just feels like without legalisation it's going to be a complete waste of time.
How does ending our prohibition on drugs resolve the a nearly total collapse of law and order in a neighbor?
Even in a Portugal decriminalization situation, we aren't going to be selling drugs at Walmart.
And the cartel isn't going to play fair. Undercutting the cartel means assassination attempts and kidnappings.
I suggest looking into the ways different states and counties in the US manage and regulate the sale of alcohol and marijuana to get a realistic idea of what legalized drug sales could look like.
Portugal decriminalized, not legalized, which is a gargantuan difference. Decriminalization is basically the government saying "we'll stop enforcing drug laws, thereby de facto endorsing violent criminal gangs to handle the sale and manufacture as they see fit". As a result, drugs don't get less contaminated and black markets continue to thrive. I think it's a cowardly half-step.
And if the US legalized drugs, who are the cartels going to assassinate exactly? US Senators? The President? Then there actually might be a US military intervention and I doubt the cartels want that.