[wybiral]

True. It sounds like the site was mostly dealing in drugs, which for small time dealers I feel is a waste of time to prosecute... But the problem is that larger organized criminals often get their funds to do worse things from the drug market.

[rhizome]

Wait, it sounds like you're saying big drug dealers are just selling drugs to get money to, I don't know, go on murder sprees? I'm not saying violence is not a part of these kinds of crimes, but I don't think the purpose of their participation is just to enable other, more serious crimes.

That is, I don't think it's very common for someone to say "I want to sell a lot of drugs because I can't afford to kill enough people otherwise," rather than what I think is more common, "I want to sell a lot of drugs because I want to buy a house without a lot of effort."

[PhasmaFelis]

The cause-and-effect is backwards. They don't sell drugs so they can kill lots of people. They kill lots of people so they can sell drugs.

Either way, there's a lot of violence happening directly because of drug cartels, foreign and domestic.

[hn_throwaway_99]

Great, legalize drugs and that all goes away.

[rothbardrand]

For an example of this, check out Portugal that legalized and had great success.

I wonder if anyone can point to place where drugs are legalized and violence increased? Where addiction increased?

Seems absurd, yet people don't think the drug war is absurd-- they don't immediately see this takeover of Hanza as the government illegally operating a black market for weeks and thus committing massive crime, and they don't see the shutdown of the market as a further crime violating the rights of the sellers to sell something that morally and practically their buyers should be able to buy (when it comes to drugs anyway)

[Mtinie]

The legality of committing crimes while in pursuit of criminal prosecutions is interesting.

Here's a reference for your reading pleasure (though this is, I believe, U.S.-centric, so not exactly the case here)

https://www.quora.com/Are-undercover-cops-allowed-to-break-t...

[rhizome]

You might be interested in the Playpen case going on now:

https://www.eff.org/pages/playpen-cases-frequently-asked-que...

[wybiral]

> it sounds like you're saying big drug dealers are just selling drugs to get money to, I don't know, go on murder sprees

No. I'm just saying that the people upstream manufacturing massive quantities of meth and heroin probably aren't the kinds of organizations that you want to be making that kind of money.

[valuearb]

Then legalize drugs so they can't make that kind of money.

[msla]

But until that happens, don't buy from big drug sellers.

In a broader sense: We can acknowledge that there's an underlying problem, and how to fix it, while at the same time being willing to advocate a temporary fix until the underlying problem actually is fixed.

Think of it like polyfill: The underlying problem is that old browsers exist, but we can't boil the ocean and make everyone upgrade, so we use polyfills to gain the functionality we want on those old browsers.

[gorkonsine]

These laws don't usually get changed until people violate them en masse, showing utter disrespect and contempt for the laws.

Remember Prohibition? That wasn't lifted because people wrote to their Congresspeople, but otherwise respected the law and followed it. It was lifted because it was widely disrespected, and a huge black market for alcohol was created, along with a lot of brutal violence. Same goes for civil rights for black people in the 1960s. Same goes for civil rights for gay people (like legalizing gay sex, previously criminalized). People committed the crimes and got caught, it went through the justice system somehow, and either a law was passed or the Supreme Court rule on it. It took a Supreme Court case to nullify the anti-gay-sex laws when some people in Texas were prosecuted for it and it got appealed up to the supremes as a privacy/freedom issue.

[msla]

Until those laws get changed, the money from buying drugs from the big cartels funds real crimes.

Changing the laws is the long-term solution.

Not buying drugs from big cartels is the short-term one.

[blubb-fish]

and those chemists producing acid in Swiss university labs? are they also eating babies?

[isoprophlex]

Yes, probably, for their fresh pituitary glands..!

[rhizome]

And I'm saying that it sounds like you think "the kinds of organizations" are using drug money to enable worse crimes. I mean, it's no secret that the purpose of certain laws are to prevent anybody from making "that kind of money," but to me your comment read as if there was more to it.

[freeflight]

Because that's also the case. Big organized crime groups often have access to exactly the kind of logistics required to manufacture and smuggle drugs across large distances.

They have the muscle to stay competitive in a market where there is no state authority to give you guarantees on anything.

This isn't an outrageous claim at all, rather it's a well-known fact: https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/Studies/Il...

That's why prohibition is such a bad approach, it creates exactly the kind of black markets where these organizations make their massive profits.

[rhizome]

Most drug dealers are not "big organized groups." I don't know from Hansa, but I'm betting a big organized group is not likely to use them as a single point of failure.

[freeflight]

Of course, it wouldn't have been their only market, but it's among them. Even something ostensibly harmless as cannabis can finance quite questionable people and groups.

A while ago Arte France released a series titled "Cannabis", where the plot revolves around a shipment of Morrocan hashish lost on the Mediterranean sea, with the consequences playing out all over Europe. And while it's a fictional plot, it still paints a somewhat accurate picture how a lot of this business goes down.

[TeMPOraL]

> Most drug dealers are not "big organized groups."

Who do you think provides them with the drugs?

[rfrank]

> That is, I don't think it's very common for someone to say "I want to sell a lot of drugs because I can't afford to kill enough people otherwise,"

This depends very much on who you're talking about.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ana-davila/drug-cartels-where-...

[valuearb]

You are correct. Making drugs illegal has funded the creation of massive cartels who use that funding to pursue other crimes and to war against any competitors.

The solution will never be shutting down darknets and arresting people.

[rhizome]

Like I said, I'm not saying it doesn't happen.

[rfrank]

I think you underestimate the frequency pretty dramatically.

[darawk]

The fact that criminals are funded by drugs is a reason why their criminalization is wrong. Not why their use/sales is wrong.

[xwvvvvwx]

good argument for legalisation....

[jandrese]

The counterargument is that if drugs are legalized then the crime syndicates will need to find a new line of work. It's possible they'll go "legit" like the mob did after prohibition and get into the Casino business, but it's also possible they'll switch to human trafficking or gun running or some other harmful trade.

This is an especially big danger if you're talking about a gang that currently deals mostly drugs but also smuggles forced prostitutes over borders on the side. Take away the drugs and they're likely to expand the side business.

[valuearb]

If they could expand the side business, they already would have. The massive profits of illegal drugs gives them the capital to invest in new side businesses, take that away they can't expand anything.

The Mafia was all about prostitution, gambling, and protection rackets. The prohibition gave them a business where you could make far more than all the others combined, and all you needed to do was to kill people who got in your way.

[xtian]

Right, we need to make sure that selling drugs continues to be a viable black market business model.

[TotallyHuman]

Or conversely, we need to legalize gun running and trafficking.

[jitix]

I dont think human trafficking is as easy as drug trafficking and gun running is a much smaller market than drugs. Legalization will be a severe impediment to the activities of the cartels.

[senorjazz]

Then use the billions saved targeting gun runners and human traffickers.

[ven_bug_trap]

And the added billions from the taxation of the now-legal drug market.

[jack9]

> The counterargument is that if drugs are legalized then the crime syndicates will need to find a new line of work

Is that a counter argument? There are bad actors (in society). Some bad actors have social, moral, physical, intellectual barriers that prevent them from acting WORSE. Raising the social barrier (marketplace) isn't any different than the social barrier (legality). If you rather not compete bad actors out of the market because of what they might do, why legally punish them out of the market? Why bother trying to stop them at all?

[krapp]

Society doesn't want to consider certain transactions to be legitimate.

Allowing a marketplace for murder or human trafficking (or the other nefarious things organized crime gets up to) allows the most efficient and effective bad actors to prosper, as markets are designed to do. But society doesn't want bad actors to prosper, it wants them prevented from acting badly.

[jack9]

I agree. This is why the "counter-argument" doesn't make sense. It assumes that it's not preventative (so it's a negative effect?). Might as well let them carry on?

[adrianratnapala]

The point is that gansterism will become a smaller part of the economy, have "less funding" if you want to think of it that way.

Gangsterism is funded by various econmic oppornities which for one reason or another are illegal. Some things like assasination and extortion need to be illegal by their very nature.

But by passing laws that make new things illegal, we increase the amount of resources available to fund criminalality.

[blawson]

Or selling avocados. People with guns who are used to power are not just going to go home because the lucrative product du-jour is legal.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bloody-struggle-erupts-over-avo...

[msla]

The counter-counterargument is that we can legalize difficult-to-police but high-volume "sin" crimes, such as drug use and prostitution, regulate them to the point it's impossible to be a criminal syndicate in those realms, and leave the syndicates with lower-volume crimes, such as murder for hire.

Sure, we can't possibly legalize murder for hire and still have a functional society, but how much profit can you really make filling those kinds of contracts, especially in a world with no illegal drug trade and no human trafficking because hookers are now clean and legal? They can try to expand side businesses all they want, but some of them have a natural cap to how much demand there can be.

[problems]

Ultimately though I think any effect there would be temporary - there's less money available and sooner or later they'll go out of business.

[wybiral]

Agreed.

[tw04]

Like the CIA?

[rfrank]

And 'small time' drug dealers get their supply from the bigger fish. The value in prosecuting them isn't in stopping end users or sales that max out at like $200, it's in working towards shutting down large international suppliers. Because they don't just ship drugs, they ship people and weapons too. Regardless of how one feels about drug use, the realities of the trade are grim.

I think there's also value in defining what people mean by 'small time dealer' in this context. To me, that connotes someone selling a bit of pot to their friends so they can smoke for free or something. People who ship misc. substances internationally and in some cases earn six figures plus annually don't fit that definition in my eyes.

[valuearb]

The reality of illegal drugs is by making them illegal you give massive amounts of capital to the worst people in the world, who invest those profits into other awful trades.

You legalize drugs, you take away their massive cash flies and cripple their organizations.

[rfrank]

> You legalize drugs, you take away their massive cash flies and cripple their organizations.

I'm not convinced this is true, there's lots of ways to make a big profit illegally, drugs are just comparatively easy. I'm a proponent of full drug legalization (it's a space where I have large amounts of first hand experience that won't be discussed on HN), but it's still important to separate an ideological position from reality. The international drug trade is directly tied to human trafficking. Turning a blind eye to one is turning a blind eye to both.

[valuearb]

Drug trafficking funds human trafficking. It's not the other way around. Removing profit incentives from bad behavior is an easy way to improve human behavior. Our murder rates plunged after prohibition was repealed, for example.

And human trafficking is for a purpose, take away it's incentives and it mostly goes away too. Legalizing prostitution eliminates a big incentive for human trafficking. Rationalizing immigration laws eliminates most of the rest.

[rfrank]

Extortion, money laundering, racketeering, human trafficking, illicit organ selling, slavery, gun running, piracy (Somalia not Napster), poaching, assassinations, political violence for hire, etc. are all independently profitable. There will be profit incentive for bad behavior as long as laws exist that people don't want to abide by. People are terrible to each other on a daily basis, the world over.

> Rationalizing immigration laws eliminates most of the rest.

This is indicative of what I'm taking about, approaching these problems in an extremely reductive way. Did you know there's an estimated 21 million slaves in the world today?

http://www.endslaverynow.org/learn/slavery-today