Because of the massive profitability of illegal goods, there's a strong incentive to prevent them becoming legal again.
The weird mutually-fractal nature of states and organised crime is discussed very well here -- http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2012/11/08/coercive-competition/ -- where I picked up the Bootlegger and Baptist reference.
Pick a handful of communities in the legal states: Wealthy, suburban districts that went blue, but narrowly. Send a couple of guys to each one with ten pounds of marijuana and ten thousand dollars in cash. Have them recruit some bored 21-year-old stoners, give them each twenty bucks for snacks and a dozen rolled joints, and have them hang out at the skate park or movie theater or wherever and just pass out free weed.
Those joints will inevitably wind up in the hands of teenagers and even young children. Ramp up the operation enough, and you've got a full-blown weed epidemic. Without any further prompting, parent groups will petition the state and federal government to intervene, and if not repeal the law then at least impose enough additional restrictions to keep an illegal operation cost-competitive with a legit one.
Of course, there are lots of ways this strategy could fail or even backfire.
Alcohol? You could get a few cans of beer or maybe half a bottle of vodka, but anything more than that required a degree of planning or connections. Fairly easy, but nowhere near as easy as pot.
And not those with just an economic interest, but relatively political interests in imprisoning/disenfranchising hard-to-control parts of the population, and limiting free travel over the southern US border (due to things like NAFTA).
I know correlation doesn't mean causation, but that doesn't mean the data point would not be interesting. Is that kind of data publicly available?
If they weren't, they'd quickly got kicked out from the market by someone who was.
> Those guys are regular greedy criminals, some with sociopathic tendencies.
Like some enterpreneurs are much different.
You assume that because they're doing bad things (morally and/or legally), they're not thinking, but instead they are driven by their impulses. It's a silly assumption and I think disproved many times. Freakonomics comes to my mind as one example.
It's pretty naive to imagine that black market cartels are competing in anything like an idealized free market. In the lawless environments being talked about, a worse businessman can always beat a better competitor simply by being better at violence.
Gang warfare and mass killings are rife down their. This isn't some naive libertarian fantasy market where La Familia is just another scrappy silicon valley startup.
Speak for yourself. I'm not.
BTW, I didn't assume anything, I just read the news and talk to people that have been through the fear of losing their lives by these crooks hands.
I don't understand what you're trying to rationalize here, probably you've never had someone determined to take your life away for nothing.
The Nicaraguan counter-revolution backed by the CIA took an estimated 29K lives.
The two seem comparable. And the comparison in this case is reasonable because the Mexican war stepped up when mercenaries who had fought in Central America joined the cartels.
Am I detecting a request for startup here?
[1] - http://www.palantir.com/
Are they big enough to really be thinking along lines like this?
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-cit...)
$20 billion "flowing back to Mexico".
> One Mexican national-security expert estimated that the [Sinaloa] cartel moves a kilo of cocaine over the U.S. border about every 10 minutes.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Drug_War#Sinaloa_Carte...)
> Mexico's most-wanted drug trafficker and whose estimated net worth of US$1 billion makes him the 1140th richest man in the world and the 55th most powerful, according to his Forbes magazine profile.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinaloa_Cartel)
> The United States Intelligence Community considers the Sinaloa Cartel "the most powerful drug trafficking organization in the world" and in 2011, the Los Angeles Times called it as "Mexico's most powerful organized crime group."
(http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1031785...)
> Los Zetas — a paramilitary group that acts as enforcers for the Gulf Cartel, the organization of drug gangs that controls narcotrafficking on Mexico's east coast. Many of the Zetas are former Mexican soldiers who were trained to combat drug gangsters. Some of the gunmen are thought to have received training in the United States at the military School of the Americas.
[...]
> The Zetas were among the first criminal groups in Mexico to employ military tactics and heavy weapons, including 50 caliber machine guns, grenade launchers and even ground-to-air missiles.
Unfortunately, the mainstream media usually quotes these biased sources as if they were speaking gospel truth, without a shred of criticism or doubt. These sources are virtually never held to account, asked to justify how they came up with their estimates, or have their estimating methodologies critically scruitinized.
It's an unusual war because the cartels don't care about actually controlling territory too much, they just need to be able to operate, so there are rarely large scale battles between cartel and government soldiers, if the government moves in to some area in force the cartel can just melt away and then hit the government forces opportunistically. Although typically the cartels don't even do that, instead they kill civilians, police, children, and politicians in order to maintain a state of terror and get people to keep their heads down and ignore cartel activity.
Right now a powerful argument in favour of legalization in the states is that it will reduce drug related violence, since the cartels will be forced out. Try to make it seem that Mexico disagrees. You don't even need to counter the "legal => less violence" argument with logic or facts; just use FUD combined with the inherent additional credibility you will have in Mexican affairs by being from Mexico.
In the short term, I would bet that the legalized outfits would be co-opted by the drug cartels and used to launder money, and then 'caught' within a year or so.
Since devout Christians (especially Evangelical) are their #1 ally, I would guess that numerous churches would start being built in these battleground states, and that the people who would be administering would be told about how future 'proceeds' into their personal and church funds would depend on their conversion rate of the local populace. Probably risky, and not likely to work all that well.
tl;dr legalized outfits are going to have overstated connections to criminal organizations and the people in the outer neighborhoods are going to try and won over with rhetoric about separating them from the sinful ways of their neighbors.
If you were looking to launder money, why would you pick a front that probably had some of the most intense government scrutiny of any business in the country?
Furthermore, do you see many legal aspirin manufacturers co-opted by illegal aspirin cartels? Beer manufacturers co-opted by illegal beer cartels?
Organized crime has been getting in to cigarette smuggling as high cigarette taxes have made legal cigarettes prohibitively expensive and created a black market for them. But this problem did not exist when cigarettes were plentiful and cheap.
We should learn the lesson here and keep legalized drugs plentiful and cheap, so that organized crime has no incentive to get involved and there's no demand for a black market.
I'm not saying this makes any sort of business sense, it's just a way of influencing public perception.
- Go to both main cities where marijuana is legalized and make up fake scenes where marijuana seems to be responsible for some tragedy (like multiple fatal car accidents where there is marijuana all over the car). People love sensationalism and controversies.
- Another way is so to lobby for all the politicians who strongly oppose legalization (using a legal company as facade of course)
- Another way is to kill political leaders that are in favor of legalization and make it look like unrelated accidents/crimes (otherwise the movement gets sympathy by the victimization of the cause).
Their weak point is that they are not as organized as one may think; and their savageness sometimes lead them to do stupid things (like kidnapping hackers to steal credit cards); most of them are probably not tech savy so there may be many ways to intercept their communications.
They have been careful to keep the violence south of the border and I think they are cognizant of the fact that killing south of the Rio Grande brings profit, killing north of the Rio Grande can bring ruin.
Proly make money running the drug smuggling as loss-leader just to keep prisons full.
edit: to answer PGs question, follow the money trail.