Let's be honest, it was never a war on drugs, it was a war on drug addicts - a group that already had enough problems on their plate before they had the full force of a police state hunting them down.
If you want to see what a war on drugs looks like, just look at Singapore.
Since 1975, after the proposal by then Minister for Home Affairs Chua Sian Chin, the death penalty was mandated as the sole punishment for drug trafficking, should the amount of whichever drugs exceed the capital threshold.[106] As a result of this legal reform, 28-year-old Penang-born Malaysian Teh Sin Tong became the first convicted drug trafficker to be hanged at Changi Prison on 28 April 1978, after the High Court found him guilty on 13 October 1976
The majority of executions in Singapore are for drug offences. Since 2010, 23 prisoners have been executed for drug offences, while only five have been executed for other offences, such as murder. Death penalty supporters, such as blogger Benjamin Chang, claim that Singapore has one of the lowest prevalence of drug abuse worldwide. Chang claims, for instance, that over two decades, the number of drug abusers arrested each year has declined by two-thirds, from over 6,000 in the early 1990s to about 2,000 in 2011.
No, ir was a war on political opponents, not necessarily addicts at all. The War on Marijuana and Acid was to go after hippies, and the War on Crack was to go after inner city blacks. The idea being all of these groups would have voted liberal and the Republican base supported punishing these groups. This was all assumed for decades but made explicit as the strategy by one of Nixon’s top lieutenants in recent years.
Drug addicts was a side effect. It was to target, well it's no secret now...
> “You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying?
> We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
> Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Part of the answer is climate and geography. It's just meaningfully different south of the US than north of the US for drug production. And this is not limited to just mexico, a lot of non-mexican-produced drugs also traffic through mexico.
But why don't they produce world-leading levels of illegal synthetic narcotics, purely in search of profit on the American illicit market? If farming isnt viable and drugs are massively profitable, why does Canada not suffer from the allure of American dollars?
> Mexico was already in trouble
I agree, but does that mean Mexico cannot solve its problems without an American Savior intervening?
I have begun to wonder if it's ever possible for a poorer country beset by corruption to be helped in any meaningful way by outsiders, or if change necessarily has to come from within.
>But why don't they produce world-leading levels of illegal synthetic narcotics, purely in search of profit on the American illicit market? If farming isnt viable and drugs are massively profitable, why does Canada not suffer from the allure of American dollars?
There is less production of narcotics in Canada because Canadian law enforcement is more effective at suppressing it than Mexican law enforcement is.
The war on drugs in the 80s was focused on Colombia and disrupting Pablo Escobar's coke empire. That was successful but caused production to move closer to Mexico. Everything was stable until the national army took over policing enforcement in 2006 and now you have many 1000x more murders. Some of the murders that are reported as cartel murders can be national army murders. It's a different situation that resolves itself when demand drops.
Canada was winning best weed strain at shows but was never really supplying the US. The US was supplying Canada with weed/coke from Mexico and premium California bud if Canada was lucky. I'm sure some BC bud flowed south but everything was small operations.
That tells me what happened, but not why? (I appreciate the detail, though)
Why isn't Canada a major narcotics manufacturing center? Why is Colombia?
I think the answer is probably complex and involves poverty (meaning switching from lawful occupation to unlawful occupation is a bigger difference than in, say, Canada) and corruption/lawlessness (which may also be consequently tied to the poverty, if corruption is a way to escape it).
It must surely go much deeper than "it's America's fault", and I think it may also be solvable without American intervention or action (though of course, it would be harder)
Well, just as every country in the world wants to export stuff (clothes, commodities, manufactured goods, all the junk available on aliexpress) to the states and other rich countries, so do the cartels and criminal gangs in poor counties. They export to wherever they can make maximum profits. With respect to Cocaine, coca plants need rain forests, so one is left with Colombia, Peru, etc. Opium poppy is grown in Asia; Mexicans started poppy plantations in Sinaloa, they can make heroine.
Mexico is completely avoided when cocaine is sent to Europe from South America. Albanian mafia, Italians, and others use ships to transport cocaine from South America to ports in Europe. Mexican cartels are hardly involved in this. Same logic: why export to UK and other wealthy EU countries? More profit. If they were to sell cocaine to Iranians or Nigerians, they aren't going to make much money. Nigerians are also involved in Cocaine smuggling, because Nigeria is a transit point for some cocaine shipments from South America to Europe. Nigerian gangs get paid commission in cocaine for their help in transiting cocaine through their ports, so Nigerians sell the cocaine they obtain as helpers. That's why Nigerians use mules to send cocaine to India and other countries.
If Mexico were richer than Canada/USA, yes, people would be exporting drugs to Mexico.
I'm guessing the climate has a lot to do with it, plus the huge amount of land you need to cultivate enough coca to produce cocaine (Canada having historically a stabler rule of law than Bolivia or Peru), plus the availability of extremely cheap (or, effectively, slave) labor for the cultivation.
If this begs the question "why is Canada more stable than Columbia, Peru, or Bolivia", apart from the fact that those are developing countries, it's worth remembering that the United States was aggressively and violently intervening in their politics into the middle of the 20th century. The same can't be said of The Maple Leaf States.
Can we please stop it with the victim blaming? This is the cartel's fault and no one else. I've never seen people as self-hating as liberal Americans. Only the English come close.
I mean, it's great to be introspective and self-aware of what your country is doing, but not to the degree that you put the blame for drug crime on the people trying to eradicate drug usage. The problem with the war on drugs isn't that it exists, it's that it's done limp-wristedly (mainly because of objections by bleeding hearts), instead of being waged ruthlessly.
The end result of social libertarianism results in the same thing as for economic libertarianism: misery for the majority.
Don't "social libertarians" want drugs to just be legalised so they can be produced by local businesses and thus cut off the flow of cash to criminals?
Wanting more Clear and Present Danger-style ruthlessness in the war on drugs (after decades of failures of varying levels of ruthlessness) I guess is an idea if you don't care about body count and collateral damage, but just feels like without legalisation it's going to be a complete waste of time.
You're jumping all over the place here. Walmart? Portugal? Assassination attempts?
I suggest looking into the ways different states and counties in the US manage and regulate the sale of alcohol and marijuana to get a realistic idea of what legalized drug sales could look like.
Portugal decriminalized, not legalized, which is a gargantuan difference. Decriminalization is basically the government saying "we'll stop enforcing drug laws, thereby de facto endorsing violent criminal gangs to handle the sale and manufacture as they see fit". As a result, drugs don't get less contaminated and black markets continue to thrive. I think it's a cowardly half-step.
And if the US legalized drugs, who are the cartels going to assassinate exactly? US Senators? The President? Then there actually might be a US military intervention and I doubt the cartels want that.