re: Why Legalizing drugs won't stop cartels

I doubt it. Hope they have good lawyers.

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It's far harder to traffic humans than narcotics

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That's probably true, but it doesn't mean they won't turn to it as a source of revenue. Human trafficking is actually a more profitable business.

LINK

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OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Oklahoma’s top narcotics enforcer told members of a legislative panel Wednesday that more drug dealers are becoming involved in the commercial sexual exploitation of young people because human trafficking has become more profitable than drug trafficking in the state. The Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics & Dangerous Drugs Control started monitoring human trafficking activity in the state several years ago, Director Darrell Weaver told members of the House Public Safety Committee. Since then, narcotics investigators have rescued 26 trafficking victims, about 80 percent of whom had been involved in some way in the drug trade, Weaver said. “If we save one, it will be worth it,” Weaver said. Weaver was among several speakers who appeared before the panel as it develops recommendations for possible legislation for lawmakers to consider next year. The panel considered human trafficking broadly, including labor trafficking, but most of the discussion focused on how to keep children out of the sex trade. Among the recommendations were increased training about human trafficking for law enforcement officers, child welfare workers and public education officials and the creation of a special court fee that would be paid by offenders for services for human trafficking victims.

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Not have a shite hole corrupt country. Then once people commit crimes they go to jail.

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That's what I've been thinking. You'd have to get rid of corruption, and create an economy in Mexico that provides opportunity for people. But how to achieve that is the big question. Economy and opportunity is a long game. It would take years.

Here's another article about the ingenuity of Cartels.

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Mexican cartels are often compared to corporations. And in some ways they are. Like any international business, they are constantly innovating and adapting to compete in one of the fiercest capitalist markets of all: the transnational drug trade.

Legalization advocates argue that Mexican cartels are taking a hit from the gradual legalization of marijuana in the United States, which has allowed U.S. consumers in a handful of states to purchase domestically grown weed. While some analysts remain skeptical about the impact legalization is having on the overall cartel business, there are indications that these criminal organizations are adjusting to shifts in the marketplace by targeting domestic consumption, diversifying their product offering, and tapping unexploited areas of criminal opportunity.
“Approximately 30 percent of cartels' drug export revenues come from marijuana,” Mexican security analyst Alejandro Hope told Fusion. “In the long term, Mexican marijuana could be displaced by legal production in the United States.”

Hope says there's still a market niche for Mexico's lower-end drug trade weed, since legal marijuana in states like Washington and Colorado is more expensive. "Complete substitution has not gone into effect,” he said, “The market is definitely changing, but cartel adaptation will happen in years not months.”

There are other signs of market disruption. In some instances, the entire flow of the drug trade has changed course. DEA spokesman Lawrence Payne told NPR last year that “Sinaloa operatives in the United States are reportedly buying high-potency American marijuana in Colorado and smuggling it back into Mexico for sale to high-paying customers.”

Mexico is still a limited market. Overall, Mexicans are nowhere near American consumption levels. But according to a 2014 study published by Mexican research university CIDE, the latest government reports “suggest that the number of consumers in Mexico is considerable.” The study says that a 2010-2011 national poll reported 1.2 million drug users.

Mexican cartels are also diversifying the types of drugs they smuggle. The 2014 UN World Drug Report found a “large increase” in the number of methamphetamine laboratories seized in Mexico and the United States. In 2012 “Mexico dismantled 259 methamphetamine laboratories, up from a few dozen a few years earlier, and it reported the world’s largest aggregate amount of seizures of methamphetamine for the period 2010-2012,” the report found.

The increased availability of methamphetamine drugs in the U.S. is "directly related to high levels of methamphetamine production in Mexico,” according to the DEA and U.S. Department of Justice 2014 National Drug Threat Assessment Summary. The report notes that meth and heroin seizures have increased dramatically along the border while marijuana busts remained stable from 2010 to 2013.

“Between 2013 and 2014, U.S. Customs and Border Protection saw an increase in seizures of heroin, up 5.2 percent, and methamphetamine, up 9.8 percent,” U.S. Customs and Border Protection media spokesman Carlos Lazo told Fusion. “During the same time, CBP saw a decrease in seizures of 20.9 percent in marijuana, a decrease of 3 percent in cocaine, and a decrease of 87.7 percent in ecstasy.”

If those trends are accurate, it would mark the beginning of an important market shift, according to Javier Osorio, a professor and criminal violence researcher at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

“Assuming that marijuana is legalized entirely in the United States, the quality of American pot could displace Mexican pot … between 16 and 20 percent of Mexican drug trafficking income could be affected,” Osorio told Fusion.
The problem, he warned, is that cartels don't play by normal business rules.

Legalization advocates remain hopeful that legalizing marijuana will weaken the cartels. “The competitive advantage of criminal organizations stems from their proficiency in violence, intimidation and smuggling, none of which are essential to compete in legal markets,” Ethan Nadelmann, director of the Drug Policy Alliance, told Fusion. “One would expect the more sophisticated drug-trafficking organizations to try to adapt to marijuana legalization in the US, but in the long run they will not be able to compete with a legal industry, just as Al Capone and his ilk ultimately lost out to a legally regulated alcohol industry.”

Indeed, the cartels, which have the manpower and resources, are already involved in other illicit business ventures, including extortion, kidnapping, oil trafficking, and trafficking of persons, to name a few. And some analysts think that's a natural progression that's not necessarily related to the legalization of marijuana in states like Colorado and Washington. “These groups diversified before legalization took place,” said Georgetown University professor and security expert John Bailey. Ultimately, he said, the fate of Mexican black-market weed could be determined by price points established in legal U.S. markets. “In the early marijuana legalization phase local governments need to decide what price to set on marijuana,” Bailey told Fusion. If the price is not too high, cartels could be snubbed out of the biggest marijuana market in the world.

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But they could turn to other means like sex trafficking, or kidnapping which could just as easily take place on this side of the border.

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If you don't think taking away billions of dollars of profit from criminal organizations won't affect them, then I don't know what to tell you. Of course, they will turn to other crimes to supplement the lost income. But wouldn't it be easier to police one crime instead of two? If someone wants to be a criminal instead of a legitimate businessman, there will always be a way. Making drugs legal would make it much harder, though.

The argument of "making drugs legal won't stop criminals from being criminals" as a reason to not legalize drugs is stupid. I would much rather legitimate companies make billions of dollars than criminal cartels. How often do employees of Phizer decapitate employees of Glaxosmithkline?

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I honestly just can't see the logistics of it beyond pot.

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It's exactly the same despite what the product is.

Part of what I'm trying to say is that with the current state of things, we have a major criminal enterprise that is operating at our doorstep. With Cartels comes violence, and that violence often spills over into our country because the powerful cartels are located in Mexico.

Sure, eliminating one crime means it's easier to police others. But there are so many forms of criminal activity they can take on. And if drugs were to become legal, and Cartels had to switch business models, they could switch to an even more violent form of criminal activity. Do you not think things will be worse if their product shifts from drugs to humans?

Cartels are able to adapt to change more quickly than people would think. Almost every method that's been used to stop them has failed.

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I think you're missing a major point from your own statement. Did the mafia end when prohibition ended?

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That's not part of my point. Did it end after prohibition? No. But why continue something that brings such a dangerous element to power?

Prohibition is stupid. And doesn't work.

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So, who's going to produce and market "legal" heroin?

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We kind went thru this with the manufacturered psychedelics and extasy knock offs.

The originals like 2c-e were clean and fairly harmless from a experience stand point. Obviously not enough science was ever done to know what it does to your body but it was put on schedule one anyway.

Then they slowly got worse and worse until bath salts came around to