[user2459]

Events like this are the main reason why The War on Drugs™ is so dangerous for everybody. It's not the drugs or gangs killing gangs. It's the gangsters that live through it sitting on piles of money who now have the resources to expand into crimes that take more than a gun, friends with guns, and some luck. Because of the prohibition they can now hire hackers to commit crimes for them in any place in the world. It's going to get harder to implicate them in crimes, and yet easier for them to make money off them.

Possibly the worst part is that this happened to us(and is still affecting us) in almost exact detail during the prohibition of the 20s and yet we continue to shrug our shoulders and keep giving them more money.

[vibrunazo]

> we continue to shrug our shoulders and keep giving them more money.

Aren't the ones shrugging their shoulders (who are for the war on drugs), and the ones giving them money (who buy drugs), two completely separate and opposite groups?

Don't look at me, I don't belong to neither. But that sentence sounds like an over-simplification of a complex problem.

[Taft]

The correct lesson to learn here is "markets amass when there's demand," or, more simply put, "people will always buy their drugs."

[lucisferre]

Ironically its your's that is the real oversimplification. Fortunately that wasn't the view taken when they finally ended prohibition.

It's pretty well known that you dont get far treating the symptoms.

[gregbair]

Well, first of all, this article is complete BS with no corroboration or even references.

Secondly, even if there weren't a war on drugs, the gangsters would find something else to peddle, like people. Gangsters existed before prohibition and existed after, they just moved into different rackets.

[JackC]

> Gangsters existed before prohibition and existed after, they just moved into different rackets.

Sure, but it's not like there's a fixed supply of "gangsters", like "continents" or "elements" -- some constant number of people floating around out there spending their time committing crimes. Prohibition is the perfect counter-example -- it turned half of America into gangsters or customers of gangsters for a little while.

On the flip side, if you increase the cost and decrease the benefit of earning money illegally, then a portion of the labor supply will move to legal markets. The war on drugs started with exactly that plan -- increase the cost and decrease the benefits of selling drugs, by locking people up when they do it. It made intuitive sense. But since demand for addictive drugs is inelastic, prices rose proportionally to risk and that plan didn't work. It just increased the revenue available to organized crime.

So I mean, maybe I'm not saying anything too astonishing. It's obvious that changing the incentives to commit crime will change the level of crime. But it's also really important, because when you assume there are a fixed number of gangsters in the world, you're labeling real people as inherent "gangsters" who will always be "gangsters." But that kid slinging crack in the projects because it's less work and more money than his other options, and it's what his friends are doing -- he's not a lifetime gangster. We don't win if we lock him up, stamp "gangster" on his hand, take away his right to vote and let someone else take his place for a little more money. We win if we turn him back into a citizen.

[oinksoft]

Oh, come on. Joe Blow wants to buy weed, blow, crank, and dope because his life sucks, he's bored, or he just likes the stuff. Very few people like that are in the market for a human being. You really can't compare the profitability of an easily produced and smuggled commodity with something like the trafficking of persons.

[gregbair]

I'm not, I was simply saying that if all those things were legal, criminals (the cartels, not the users) would find something else illegal to peddle. These people look for an easy buck, and right now, that happens to be in illicit drugs. Take that profit away, and they'll just find something else.

[lambda]

You are not going to eliminate organized crime, but you can reduce it substantially. Drugs are in incredibly high demand, and are quite easy to hide and trade illicitly. Many people get into organized crime because they see that it's an easy way to make lots of money. Take away one of their biggest moneymakers, and you're not going to eliminate it entirely, but you will cut off quite a lot of their money, making it harder for them to recruit and less powerful.

You can also reduce their profits in other areas. The whole reason they are able to make money is that there is demand for services that cannot be provided legally. Now, some of these services really should be illegal, as they are scams or have very harmful externalities, but for many of the more lucrative ones, you need to ask yourself "is banning this really worth the cost of enforcing it and the costs of the black market generated?"

For instance, human trafficking happens due to demand for labor that isn't being met by local markets, and the illegality of prostitution. Could that demand be better met by making our immigration easier, and making prostitution legal, spending the money saved on programs to help people who may be trapped in bad situations rather than perpetuating the situation by putting them into a permanent criminal class?

I don't pretend to know all of the answers. But I think it's a question that we need to consider seriously, and without resorting to knee-jerk "soft on crime" rhetoric against anyone who suggests that maybe this system is incredibly expensive, damaging to liberty, and producing more harm than good.

[mjallday]

But some easy bucks are easier and less damaging than others. No doubt if drugs are legalized they will move on to something else but the total market they can address will be smaller.

[DanBC]

People trafficking is the second largest organised criminal activity. It's low risk with bigger profit margins than drugs. Data is hard to get, partly because there's little international agreement about what should be measured as well as the difficulty of finding the victims.

Here's a UN document which is reasonably cautious.

(http://www.ungift.org/docs/ungift/pdf/knowledge/ebook.pdf)

Global profits are > $30billion USD.

> the total market they can address will be smaller.

Bigger profits.

[huherto]

Drug trade is a gateway to other crimes. Once they have the money, weapons and the organization it is easy to expand.

[paulhauggis]

unfortunately, legalizing drugs isn't going to solve anything. Gangsters will still have piles of money because they will now have a legal business.

The real problem is police/government corruption. It's the reason they were allowed to get this powerful in the first place.

[z92]

The whole point of legalizing drugs is gangsters won't be able to generate piles of money through a legal business.