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Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

TFA talks a lot about corruption and it's way worse than people think.

Not that long in Belgium, in the port of Antwerp ("Anvers" in french), non-corrupt employees found a container with cocaine.

Before the authorities came to seize the shipment, corrupt cops tried to bribe the port custom employees to gain temporary access to the container (basically to steal part of the shipment before it'd be officially weighted).

I pity these people: when shipment go undetected, it's their fault. Then criminals try to bribe them. Then corrupt cops try to bribe them.

It's a sad state of affair.

Whether cocaine should be legal or not is another topic but it's not legal and there are killings related to cocaine traffic in Europe: consumers of cocaine have their share of responsibility too.

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>consumers of cocaine have their share of responsibility too.

consumers of any product. consumers of chocolate are responsible for... consumers of electronics are responsible for... consumers of cotton are responsible for...

there's only so many options consumers really have. there are somethings you cannot vote with your wallet. blaming addicts teeters precariously towards victim blaming.

totally right, consuming is polluting, which is a big responsibility nowadays for the environment

So the best is to minimize consumption, and obviously things like drugs, travel, and many things are not essential products

And having children

"You'll own nothing and you'll be happy eating bugs"

I already eat bug from a lot of foraging and fruit market waste, not very intentionally, but they are there and they eat the same thing, so can't be bad, extra proteins actually

No need to minimize consumption for cocaine, ~90% of the resources used are in the distribution.

If legalized, the cost of distribution would crater to that of other products, just a few dollars per kg.

it costs pollution to grow, transport, stock, plastic-wrap, etc..

it's like saying: "it doesn't cost pollution to buy those avocadoes grown in another continent since they're already there", it's true immediately (above all if very ripe), but in the mid-long term, reducing consumption reduces production & pollution (at all level of the chain)

Sure there are some essential production and distribution costs, but let's remember that cocaine is a minimally processed leaf extract.

You can industrialize its production and get close to sugar level production pricing and distribution. Sugar sourced from Brazil hits my Toronto supermarket shelf bagged at CAD$1.50/kg at 99.9% purity, including retailer markup. Which is like 1/50000th the retail price of cocaine.

Even if it costs 10x as much due to lower volume/weaker extracts/slower growth/additional processing, you're talking a 99.9something% reduction in resource expenditure per dose.

Price of something is a good representation of the resources destroyed ("costs") in its production.

Minimally processed leaf extract? You make it sound like extracting cocaine is the equivalent to making sugar.

Most sugar today comes from beets and is extracted through an industrial process. Drug cartels rely on things like gasoline because they are commonly available, but if there were not criminal sanctions on the process, then it’s possible some higher-quality means of extraction would be employed.

It’s almost all from sugarcane in Canada, crude juice is extracted in places like Brazil and refined in Canada.

You can chew out the sugar or cocaine if you like.

(I think coca needs an acid base extraction to get a crystalline form, but that’s straightforward chemistry at scale)

Most sugar in my own backyard originates from beets, but I see I was wrong about it being most sugar worldwide. Wikipedia[0] gives a figure of 30% of world sugar for 2013.

If crude juice is extracted in Brazil and refined in Canada, I’m surprised that it is viewed as cost-effective to transport so much unneeded liquid by sea.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_beet

I could be mistaken on the form of sea transit. I just know it gets refined in Canada (which also seems like a waste: why not refine at source?).

Sea transit is cheap, sugarcane grows better in the tropics than beets in cooler places. Harder to harvest below-ground stuff.

Canada used to subsidize/protect sugar beet producers (to keep them competitive), but largely got out of it.

Maybe that’s why we still refine it: because the plants still exist.

> it’s possible

Nope it's not possible and it's more than obvious way.

The cocaine content in coca leaves is 0.23% to 0.96%. Sugarcane has a magnitude or so higher sugar content.

It is. Then you’re an acid-base crystallization away to powder product.

Cocaine is not a synthetic drug. Been around long before any human was walking around.

But it's the refining that is modern. Chewing on coca leaves is not the same thing as a little key bump. Let's not try to confuse what's happening

Solvent-extraction and crystallization isn't very modern.

Are we really arguing about the pollution caused by the cocaine trade instead of the violence and destruction of lives for addicts. What a proposterous contention

Right, let's just sit around in our tents in the dark and try not to move or speak unless absolutely necessary. Moving is not always essential, and has a caloric cost, which means food consumption. Are you sure being on this site right now is actually necessary? In fact, why bother being alive at all?

Yeah, have fun with that. I'm going to enjoy my life!

Tents are made from nylon, and nylon is made from fossil fuels!

Jiminy Cricket, you're right! We shall build dung huts instead to be even more eco-friendly

Nerd snipe: Will the sequestered carbon from a grass and dung hut make up for the CO2 expended in manual labour to build one.

Humanity can have just 2 modes of operation (3th one is fake path). 1) is to consume less and less, so we end up like living in tents in dark with population 10B and more.. 2) Smart-manage population growth and cut bullshit jobs, so we end up with 200M-300M people living good live.

The choise is yours. I personally would go with (2) option, but its just me.

Before anyone hit the downvote button, think about it in math. You only have limited amount of resources and energy. How you distribute it, is up to you.

This is bullshit. Many cocaine users are not addicts but are just people with money partying.

They are not victims and even the addicts are not absolved of responsibility for their actions.

If an alcoholic drives drunk and kills someone, they don’t get an exemption.

If you buy cocaine from dealers known to be violent, you don’t get an exemption either. More generally, if you buy cocaine that comes from a violent cartel (most of it), you’re supporting the cartel.

It’s a party drug, you have a choice. Check yourself into rehab if you don’t.

I'm sure most buyers would looooooove to buy organic artisanal cocaine direct from the farmer shipped by DHL. But various governments make that impossible, so I'd pin the blame solely on governments.

Gives a new meaning to farm to table

So what you're saying is we need free trade, ethical cocaine (along with coffee, electronics, and cotton).

Cocaine was always easily available in Antwerp from my experience (~1995-2010). More so than weed which was always a little surprising given it’s not far to the Dutch border.

Friends of mine worked at customs both for the Belgian authorities and the US ones.

Antwerp did have a reputation for corruption. There’s too much money involved.

> but it's not legal and there are killings related to cocaine traffic in Europe

almost like those two are related

I had the pleasure to deal with both authorities and the business side of securing platforms that handle the container checks & harbour access.

The forces who are, let's call it "not happy" with any form of security (access control, logging, monitoring, malware, RATs etc.) is insane.

At times I felt nearly half of all involved parties were corrupt. Top to bottom. Commercial and governmental.

Sold absolutely zero solutions and decided to never again deal with the whole industry.

Edit: for completeness I should add that many did not want any additional security measures since this might leave the traffickers no other choice but to get more physical.

>Whether cocaine should be legal or not is another topic

How? It should be THE topic. Fucking stop all this bullshit waste of time and money and lives trying to police what fucking adults consume in their own home. How can anyone with a brain look at all the inane war on drugs and come to any other conclusion than all drugs should be legalized?

Let them buy it in a legal, controlled, licensed, tax paying store, like the adults they are.

Absolutely childish and the one of the biggest most consistently stupid thing we as a society do is prohibition of drugs. How many people will die, how many billions will we waste on the "war on drugs" (read, war on minorities and the poor) before we wisen the fuck up? It is actually insane that we continue to play this ridiculous game and pretend we can't ALL see what the solution is.

Its funny because i can literally go to any shop and buy enough alchool to literally go into a coma but cant use drugs for whatever reason

The only correct solution here is to recognize cocaine is a commodity that people want, and legalizing it and funding support systems etc etc with the taxes is a great way to go.

Can’t corrupt cops just go in and grab whatever they want without anyone stopping them? They are corrupt and they are cops after all. Who is going to do anything about it?

The port would report them to the part of the police that’s not corrupt, which as a Belgian, I like to think is most of the Antwerp police.

I have a hard time believing this story to be honest, most police corruption here would probably be a lot more covert, e.g. in the form of providing information or turning a blind eye at the right time.

Someone else already asked for a source and it’s yet to show up.

> Before the authorities came to seize the shipment, corrupt cops tried to bribe the port custom employees to gain temporary access to the container (basically to steal part of the shipment before it'd be officially weighted).

Link please.

> consumers of cocaine have their share of responsibility too

Arguably the gov't does also for creating the market by outlawing the stuff. But that's never discussed by anti-drugs people (BTW I'm not pro-drugs, before you assume)

I don't care how many people die, I feel no guilt, no remorse and no pity

Legalize drugs and the violence will end

So all (addictive or not) prescription drugs for instance should also be available to everyone freely and without any limitations?

Also unnecessary/avoidable deaths are only an issue if they are an outcome of violence or government restrictions if I understand correctly?

> all (addictive or not) prescription drugs for instance should also be available to everyone freely and without any limitations

Technically we already have that with cigarettes and alcohol, so maybe it's time to drop the double-standards?

Cigarettes are really harmful, but still not as hard as drugs.

Uninformed Prohibitionist nonsense

How so?

that is literally not true lol. No other drug gives you cancer in various area of your body. No other drug makes you more of it in less than an hour, except maybe heroin. And heroin should never be tried.

Yeah sounds like youve no idea what youre talking about. First off heroin last longer than an hour. Second, many drugs make you want more within an hour (cocaine, benzos, sometimes amphetamines, alcohol) and many drugs can can increase your cancer risk because many of them do damage to your organ tissue cause they are caustic.

if you want to do coke and benzos more than once an hour sounds like you got a big problem

sounds like you've never done coke or benzos

I literally grew up in crackhouses.

well idk what to tell ya then. People do coke and benzos until theres no more coke and benzos and the frequency just depends on how much you can handle, or in the case of benzos, how quick it takes you to forget your last dose.

>that is literally not true lol. No other drug gives you cancer in various area of your body.

Uh, how many years of smoking or after how many years the cancer appears on average?

10? 20? 30?

Other drugs like cocaine/heroin will destroy your life way, way faster than that.

Freely? Without any limitations? Of course not man.

25+ for hard drugs, daily limits, mandate taxes go to facilities for treatment and rehabilitation. Take the hundreds of billions from the global black market for drugs and the tens of billions we spend impotently pretending to stop drug dealers with idiotic agencies like the DEA and all of the sudden we turn a GIGANTIC minus in our budget in to a GIGANTIC increase in funding.

why 25? lol random age like 21 for drinking in the US

brain fully developed. I was trying to be as conservative as possible

i mean... just go by legal age

for most drugs I agree but if we were going to be serious about legal heroin and coke and meth and the heavy shit to me it makes sense to say 18 for most shit then 25 plus a license to get the heavy shit

Neurodevelopmental reasons

It's not uncommon for people to "grow out" of a supposed "addiction"

> 25+ for hard drugs, daily limits,

So we can start with prescription drugs I assume? Unlimited access to OxyContin for everyone 25+. It's much safer than any illegally consumed opioids after all so what could go wrong? Oh wait..

> GIGANTIC increase in funding.

That's a silly claim unless you tax them to such an extent that black marker drugs become more competitive.

>>daily limits

>unlimited access to oxycontin

Did you even read what you quoted? Who said Unlimited?

You did. Daily limits is a silly idea that's trivial to workaround (effectively users will just end up paying markup on anything above the 'daily limit').

>That's a silly claim unless you tax them to such an extent that black marker drugs become more competitive.

Not at all. First off, all the money we spend on the dea and other drug enforcement could be instantly recouped. Billions for those d.a.r.e clowns ALONE. Plus, I'd wager to say cost of legal production would be a lot lower than illegal production + illicit shipment to end users. That leaves plenty of room to make a decent buck on taxes. But yeah a big portion of money would come from all the idiotic shit we no longer would have to do with drugs legal.

> all the money we spend on the dea and other drug enforcement could be instantly recouped. Billions for those d.a.r.e clowns ALONE.

No. That can't happen unless the tax are extremely high which makes black market drugs more competitive. Also it should be perfectly obvious that full legalization would also significantly decrease costs for illegal producers as well.

> But yeah a big portion of money would come from all the idiotic shit we no longer would have to do with drugs legal.

Hard to believe since you don't actually have any figures to show.

> there are killings related to cocaine traffic in Europe

Which is a problem created by the stupid “war on drugs”. If you make it impossible for parties to access the legal system to resolve any disputes, you’re forcing them to resolve them via extrajudicial means.

You don’t generally hear about killings within the traffic of any other commodity such as vegetables or IT goods. In fact we don’t even call it “traffic” but just trade.

There are killings and exploitation for a lot of other things, gold, diamonds, rare earths, coffee, avocados you name it.

Avocado farms in New Zealand get robbed when prices start approaching $8NZD a a avocado, :'(. I feel sorry for the farmers. We have no avocados on our farms.

Quite a bit of olive oil recently as well

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/spanish-police-seize-74....

> You don’t generally hear about killings within the traffic of any other commodity such as vegetables

Of course you do, especially if you’re in Mexico where the cartels have now expanded beyond drugs. A web search for "mexican cartels avocados" might do you well.

Another example is vanilla in Madagascar, where dozens of murders have occurred. Beyond local turf fights, Russian and Chinese organized crime has been involved in Madagascar’s spice and hardwood sectors for many years now.

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