[saint_fiasco]

The US drug market makes things shittier on the margin, but it is not the main cause. If they stopped buying drugs the gangs would fight over the control of some other resource.

For example, the town of Tancítaro became prosperous (and therefore valuable for organized crime) because they grow lots of avocados. The US doesn't fight a war against avocados.

[jessaustin]

The reason drug traffickers are billionaires is that they are drug traffickers. In the absence of that, they would have no money and no power.

[nitwit005]

They're rich because they have a large organization capable of carrying out organized crime. They're also do extortion, kidnapping, pimping, and anything else they can think of to make money.

[mschuster91]

Yeah but the most money can be done by dealing with drugs. Extortion or the other stuff is small fish compared to drugs - it's a pest for the small businesses but in the end it's passed on to customers. Pimping is vile but can be helped against by empowering sex workers, and the number of whores on the streets should be identical even after an end of drug criminality.... after all, the number of customers in a city should remain constant (if not shrink a bit because the gang-financed customers vanish).

[dragonwriter]

You are assuming prostitution is driven by demand-side concerns alone (or that eliminating trafficking gangs has no effect on the supply side.) Trafficking gangs using addiction to trap people into prostitution is not unknown, so eliminating criminal trafficking gangs should have supply-side impacts as well.

[mschuster91]

I was thinking about the angle "the drug trade vanishes, so the gangs will drift into pimping" - which is, imho, not really valid since where prostitution is illegal, the gangs are already in pimping and the supply/demand is more or less matched, so there are no new profits to be made there.

[jessaustin]

Yeah, it's amazing, the way to keep criminals out of any industry, is to make that industry legal...

[chasd00]

Do you think they'd just shrug their shoulders and go home and be poor?

[jessaustin]

Some violent predatory thugs die. Some go to prison. Some get old and chill out. Some remain violent predatory thugs. They all run through cash pretty quick, though, so when American drug users start buying their drugs from normal nonviolent firms, the violent predatory thugs will be poor.

Since they don't know any reputable trades, some problems with protection rackets etc. will remain for years. No one will be perverse enough to blame those echos of The Drug War on the fact that we finally decided to end it. What, did you think that narcos are somehow representative of Mexican national character? They most certainly are not.