[rayiner]

Those people who are capable of those things and that level of corruption to make a few bucks on illicit drugs would still exist.

I just don't get this line of reasoning. If you take marijuana out of the equation, 80-90% of Americans think drugs should be illegal. They don't want drugs in their communities and in their society. And they're the bad guys for exercising their democratic right to regulate their own society, because some opportunists in Mexico are deranged enough to kill a bunch of people to circumvent those rules?

[dragonwriter]

> Those people who are capable of those things and that level of corruption to make a few bucks on illicit drugs would still exist.

Those people exist everywhere (including, in no small numbers, in the United States), though not everywhere has as much poverty as Mexico combined with as much money being tossed onto both sides of the illegal narcotics trade as Mexico due to its proximity to the US.

> If you take marijuana out of the equation, 80-90% of Americans think drugs should be illegal. They don't want drugs in their communities and in their society.

Manifestly, making drugs illegal has not stopped drugs from being in their community or in their society. So either the unsupported support numbers for prohibition you presented are wrong, or they don't mean that people don't want drugs in their communities and in their society, or the people involved have tenuous grasp between cause and effect. (I suspect all three are involved, to varying degrees.)

> And they're the bad guys for exercising their democratic right to regulate their own society, because some opportunists in Mexico are deranged enough to kill a bunch of people to circumvent those rules?

If your policy choices knowably have negative impacts, and don't achieve the positive ends that you cite to justify them, and you continue for decades to make the same choices, yes, there is culpability there.

That doesn't mean the people making that choice are the bad guys -- responsibility is not exclusive.

[keithnoizu]

It's the difference between how we would well meaning-ly like the world to function and the way in which it actually does.

The war on drugs is responsible for the cartel situation in the same manner that the prohibition was responsible for the rise in prominence of the Mafia during the 20s. Individual individuals decided to go down the path of providing these illicit services but the well meaning legislation provided the substrate on which they could go about making their fortune exploiting.

This is simply the economic reality of what happens under these scenarios. The conservatives Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell correctly predicted many of these negative outcomes decades ago during the start of these policies.

[WorldWideWayne]

I don't buy it. American people do want drugs in their community and in their society or else the US wouldn't be the biggest market for illicit drugs in the world.

[rayiner]

Only about 10% of Americans over 12 use any sort of illicit drugs, and most of that is marijuana. The vast majority of Americans don't use illicit drugs and don't want drug use in their communities.

[wfo]

The most recent two sitting US presidents used cocaine. They certainly wanted illicit drugs and drug use -- and harder drugs than marijuana, which an overwhelming majority of Americans have tried -- in their communities at some point in their lives though they may or may not want that now. I think your statement is very, very far from correct (even if you don't include the enormous proportion of Americans who illegally abuse prescription drugs which are generally much 'harder' than the drugs you get on the street) and just the wishful thinking of a small number of social conservatives for whom drugs have been turned into a convenient bogeyman to blame when anything in society goes wrong.

[rayiner]

As I said, I'm not talking about marijuana. The vast majority (75-85%) of Mexican drug cartel revenues come from other sources: http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/05/22/how-can-mari....

And I think you're delusional about the "small number of social conservatives" who think drugs are a problem. Support for keeping drugs like cocaine and heroin illegal ranges from 80-90%: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/17/drug-legalization-p.... Marijuana is the only one that a slim majority think shouldn't be legal.

Also, most people do not try drugs harder than marijuana at any point: http://archive.samhsa.gov/data/NSDUH/2012SummNatFindDetTable.... 70% of people never try an illicit drug other than marijuana, and only 7.5% report using an illicit drug other than marijuana in the past year.

And even if a substantial minority of people do try an illicit drug other than marijuana at some point, what does that mean? 13% of surveyed Americans reported driving drunk in the past year (double the percentage that report doing any non-marijuana illicit drug in the past year): http://www.fairwarning.org/2010/12/more-than-30-million-amer.... How many of them do you think nonetheless believe drunk driving should be illegal? Does the fact that a minority of people engage in conduct that may be hypocritical negate the sentiments of the majority?

[wfo]

I think you're excluding the abuse of prescription drugs (and for that matter alcohol) in your assessment with the 70% and 7.5% numbers, which are very important -- they are the drugs which haven't been the victims of a concerted and well-funded aggressive propaganda campaign by social conservatives spanning many years to demonize the drugs.

I think your point about drinking and driving isn't quite accurate: I think if you refine your definition of drinking and driving in both survey results about actions and survey results about laws you may find different results: many people have drank a couple of beers before driving home; fewer have driven blackout drunk. Most agree the latter should be illegal, but the first? A more appropriate analogy would be, instead of suggesting we ban drunk driving (a universally laudable goal to ban not a substance but a particular misuse of it), how many Americans do you think would say alcohol should be illegal? I'd say on the order of zero.

You need to understand survey results in the context of the previously mentioned propaganda campaign: people don't quite exactly say what they really believe in the face of this, they say what they have been conditioned to believe in some sense. We need to look at their actual actions and provide context for the responses from them in terms of what they do. If someone really believes marijuana should be illegal, they won't try it or use it. Similarly with the harder drugs. We are slowly undoing the damage that has been done to this country with the anti-drug campaigns but it takes time; marijuana is the beginning. It's not really fair to say Americans are actually anti-drug after such an effective brainwashing session.

Also all of your points are based on survey results: and when it comes to drugs what people say they do or want and what they actually do or want are quite distinct. I don't think relying on them is reasonable: instead to get some accurate proportion we'd need to look at the drugs coming in and do some calculus based on how they are distributed among the population.

[monstruoso]

http://www.gallup.com/poll/163835/tried-marijuana-little-cha...

[tsotha]

10% of Americans over 12 has to be, what, 20-30 million?