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Comment by hackercurious | Hacker News Reader

As Milton Friedman once said, - “See, if you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel." - this seems limitless in its effort and scope.

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> What do I mean by that? In an ordinary free market--let's take potatoes, beef, anything you want--there are thousands of importers and exporters. Anybody can go into the business. But it's very hard for a small person to go into the drug importing business because our interdiction efforts essentially make it enormously costly. So, the only people who can survive in that business are these large Medellin cartel kind of people who have enough money so they can have fleets of airplanes, so they can have sophisticated methods, and so on.

In addition to which, by keeping goods out and by arresting, let's say, local marijuana growers, the government keeps the price of these products high. What more could a monopolist want? He's got a government who makes it very hard for all his competitors and who keeps the price of his products high. It's absolutely heaven.

Source, in case someone is interested in reading more: http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/misc/friedm1.htm

>It's absolutely heaven.

I'm pretty libertarian and everything Milty says makes sense. And I get what you're saying. But 'absolutely heaven' is a bit of a stretch, especially in that unregulated, illegal drug game where a dispute is solved with force.

Search this page for deceased or captured to see what I mean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mexico%27s_37_most-want...

Obviously not heaven, but pretty close. The DEA helped the Sinaloa cartel own 80% of the drug market in Chicago by partnering with it to eliminate its competitors:

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-us-government-and-the-sin...

This is a good article and describes how dynamic the drug war is. Currently the Sinaloa Cartel is really struggling to keep it to together, they can't even control their hometown of Culiacan.

Obviously, he means from the perspective of an economist, not a human being living in the midst of the drug hell that is being wrought upon the world by those in power.

The lack of a second '>' might have fooled you: sorry. The sentence is not mine, but Friedman's.

> So, the only people who can survive in that business are these large Medellin cartel kind of people who have enough money so they can have fleets of airplanes, so they can have sophisticated methods, and so on.

This is actually the opposite of what's going on in Mexico. The large drug organizations have splintered into regional groups. There is no need for fleets of planes, Mexicans drive drugs the border and smuggle them the same way they have for hundreds of years. (Through underground tunnels, empty parts of the desert, and by bribing/sneaking in through customs.)

> and smuggle them the same way they have for hundreds of years

Well, there has been some innovation.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/22/world/drug-drone-crashes-us-me...

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