[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.