[boterock]

About that last sentence: "former U.S. Ambassador [...] said in April that López Obrador views the fight against drug cartels as a distraction ... So he has basically adopted an agenda of a pretty laissez-faire attitude towards them, which is pretty troubling to our government, obviously.”

Not from Mexico, but from Colombia, where we also have a very hard time with drugs. The real problem with drugs has never been here. It is always because the US which always pushed us to fight drugs from this side, while they don't seem to do much from their side, this way they push the war to this side. while they get to enjoy the benefits of unregulated markets.

The true solution to the problem is regulated drug market, where the country people can make a profit out of it, and every link of the chain pays its due taxes. But cocaine is so big of a business that mafias aren't letting that happen.

US doesn't even care about cocaine, otherwise they would be doing a far better job at eliminating the trafficking. It is just that if they're not the ones making a profit, then no one should make a profit.

Typical case of a northern country exploiting a southern country.

[totalZero]

Exploitation in the drug market happens in the reverse of what you think. The target market is the first world, because the product has maximal value there.

The positive externalities are all gained by the producer countries. Traffickers and coca producers have even risen to become major politicians in places like Venezuela and Bolivia. Meanwhile, negative externalities -- crime, addiction, and so forth -- get distributed to the consumer countries.

The product is addictive, so you can't exactly be surprised that consumers continue to buy it. It is all too common in Latin America to hear people complain about the big bad USA, but that line of reasoning is casual and has its limitations.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

I think most people would consider the violence and murders associated with cartels more of a negative externality than coke & weed addicts.

61% of Mexico's drug exports (by dollar value) is marijuana. 61,000 people in Mexico vanished related to drugs / cartels last year. 105 people were killed in a single day. 40,000 people were killed by cartels between 2006-2010 alone [1].

The overdose crisis in the US was mostly created by our own pharmaceutical industry. Recently, Mexico started supplying SOME of the Fentanyl. The vast majority of it comes from China - either directly or indirectly through Mexico [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_drug_war

[2] https://www.brookings.edu/research/fentanyl-and-geopolitics-...

[boterock]

The case here is that coca traffickers and producers are very different. Producers the bottom of the chain, who live in the violence, sometimes they’re threatened if they try to change their crops. Traffickers are the ones that have got into politics, actively sabotaging any effort of legalization, while also controlling the mass media, and preaching under the blessing of US drug fight. That is the very same group of right wing capitalist politicians that have signed disastrous coal/oil mining regulations, and signed free trade agreements that have hit the local farmer the hardest. The moment when the money of cocaine actually reached the people was back in the time of Pablo Escobar. Since then almost none of the profits have reached the actual farmers.

[tacitusarc]

This comment feels like trolling to me...

[RobertoG]

Why Mexico or Colombia should care about exporting drugs? As you say, it could be a net win for them.

Instead of that we see a state of war in the country, because the pressures of the "big bad USA" and their "war on drugs". I suppose it's easier to have a war when the deaths are in other countries.

[josephcsible]

> the US which always pushed us to fight drugs from this side, while they don't seem to do much from their side

Isn't the typical complaint that the US does too much to fight drugs?

[nemothekid]

The complaint, as I understand it, hasn't been the US does too much; it's been that the US has adopted an incredibly violent and inefficient system to fighting drugs by heavily punishing users.

Throwing an entire generation of drug users in jail did little to curb the actual inflow if illegal drugs into America.

[boterock]

Maybe they do the same that politicians do here... they keep the cops busy grabbing individuals, but they turn a blind eye to the shipments of tons that are sent via airplanes that could be intercepted easily. In the end everyone knows that it is a deal between traffickers and politicians.

[darksaints]

Large shipments quite literally rely on small individuals being busted. For at least ten years now, border security agencies have been receiving training on how not to act in the face of a small bust. Their typical response is to start waving people through with little to no scrutiny, because all of the agents want to have some part in the bust, if at least just to have a rubbernecked sort of view at the excitement going on. Now they are being trained that the presence of a small bust is the cue to start raising scrutiny on all vehicles, and larger vehicles in particular.

One of the most disturbing findings is that the largest busts are almost always precipitated by some individual getting caught who is absolutely insistent that they didn't know that a brick of coke was taped to their gas tank (or similar). Previously, those individuals might go straight to prison for a decade or more on trafficking charges. Now that agencies (and defense lawyers) are catching on, there is now a lot of credence given to the idea that those individuals are actually unwitting drug mules used to distract CBP agents from doing their jobs while they slip truckloads past them at the border.

How many "drug traffickers" have we imprisoned that have merely been pawns in a drug trafficking scheme that they had no part in?

[boterock]

Small captures are just the distraction, heck, they even made a tv show “alerta aeropuerto” where they show how efficient they are grabbing mules (that’s the name we give individuals who transport cocaine). The truth is that cocaine transportation is a business that airlines and politicians are into. Nothing unexpected, knowing the dirty records of very high security agencies from both sides.

Well, I can only speak from this side, I don’t really know what happens in the US, but here we have always been fooled by the media, so maybe it can happen there too. And we all know what politicians are capable of.

[imtringued]

No wonder the "war on drugs" is a failure, it literally is the delivery mechanism.

[edgyquant]

It’s definitely not like that in the US (at least on a large scale) and we regularly have large busts and individual cities taking down large operations. Even large scale gangs don’t tend to last long as a centralized bloc because then the fed launches an operation and seizes bank accounts/arrests all the guys at the top.

The problem is that people want to do cocaine, they just do. I’ve been to plenty of parties full of people who aren’t into drugs, the type from well of families with good degrees and good jobs who’ve never been arrested, where cocaine is brought out because it’s considered a party drug like ecstasy among the American middle/upper class. When people like that are willing to spend hundreds of dollars there is a lucrative market and someone is going to supply it. So when American agencies take down large scale operations another (usually decentralized) group swoops in and the cycle repeats.

[boterock]

The skeptical part of me makes me think that it is just smoke... the police takes down large gangs as it draws too much attention, so they gotta do their job. But really big fishes never get caught, and everyone gets good scores in their reports. Down here it is known that some cops are in the trafficking network, and micro traffic is the norm.

[midev]

> In the end everyone knows that it is a deal between traffickers and politicians

This is not true in the US. We have no politicians that are suspected of being involved with cartels.

While our policies might not help the situation, no politician is actually working with traffickers.

[boterock]

Yes you’re right, I can’t say from that side.

What I can say is it has happened here for a long time, and no one questioned as they were also in control of the media. Just until recently it became widely known the 20+ years of smoke of “fight against drugs”. Maybe over there is different, or maybe is not a big of a deal, as, even if there is a lot of money in drugs, there is orders of magnitude more money in big tech, and also from a cleaner origin, so who knows.

[disgrunt]

No, that's what the CIA is for. [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_coca...

[ipaddr]

"Typical case of a northern country exploiting a southern country"

Like Canada exploiting the US. Or Columbia exploiting Chile. Or Sweden exploiting Denmark. Typical? No...

[boterock]

US and Canada are very into southern politics, to do a lot of coal/oil/etc mining very below the actual worth, because it is always so much cheaper to lobby local politicians, who get elected year after year because they control the big media chain, making the whole circle of corruption and then labeling it democracy and capitalism

[ipaddr]

Big media is controlled by big players in the US as well. People stopped trusting the media. The people seem to be falling for it in your country. Is there anything you can do to educate them? Without a population who questions all is lost.

[ipaddr]

You should work for them. I'll give your trick a try.

[bagacrap]

well according to the Netflix "Rotten" episode about avocados, violent criminals will kidnap and murder for anything of value in Mexico. Therefore I'm not so sure the legality/regulation of the market has anything to do with it. If anything, the issue is the proximity of a poor country to a rich country.

[asdff]

The taxes will have to be low enough where a grey market would not thrive. In LA, I roughly estimate half the dispensaries are illegal. This is because taxes (local, state, and sales) amount to 30%. Grey market is automatically cheaper by a substantial fraction.