Drugs are a fact of life, they've been used since the dawn of man and will be used likely until the end of man. They're not going away.
It's abhorrent that in order to access drugs, you've to essentially send money down the chain to people carrying out such acts...but people are going to do drugs, and in the face of no alternatives, this is where they're going to get them.
The people buying these drugs, generating the income for these cartels, are so removed from the reality behind them that it may as well be totally unconnected as far as all are concerned. We, first world Westerners, are generally very disconnected from the realities surrounding many of the products we buy, from legitimate products like those manufactured by Nestle, to cheap clothing manufactured in terrible conditions in the East, through to illicit substances such as cocaine which are manufactured in South America and whose trade fuels a bloody war there.
Indeed, many of our tech products that we all here use are manufactured by Foxconn, a company whose working practices are so bad that they had issues with people killing themselves on the job and tackled it by installing suicide nets around the back of the buildings and in the stairwells.
As such, there is a lot of inherent immorality associated with a lot of the consumerism we here fuel, but the reality for us is that we are extremely disconnected from these issues.
But what are the alternatives? Go even harder on those found with drugs, while continuing to let Western consumerism promote without any interference terrible working conditions for our manufacturers in the East?
One potential solution to all these issues is to apply a similar approach to all - manufacture these in the 1st world under regulations and subsidize their sale so that the consumer points towards these regulated manufacturers rather than using products manufactured abroad.
Unfortunately, while this may be the solution, it itself raises so many other issues. If we took coke production out of the hands of South America and made it in the US, for example, what in hell's name is going to happen when the vast numbers of not just cartel members, but relatively innocent coco farmers in South America can no longer derive anywhere near the same income from them?
Manufacturing these things ourselves would also, if not greatly subsidized for promotion, drive prices for the consumer up and thus have them pointing in the wrong direction again.
It's a complex issue and personally I'm not sure of what the best potential solution may be, but I find it hard to sit here and criticize those using coke in the US from a product containing FoxConn parts where people are miserable and ending their lives because of what our demand for the products being made there is doing to them.