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I was talking with some friends and family and they mentioned that full legalization of drugs would stop cartels from existing. Being the a bit contrarian, I am looking for other opinions than those in my personal circle.
What would happen if we legalized every drug out there? The argument is that anyone who would take such drugs, is already taking it despite it being illegal, and that there's nothing so addictive that if you try it once you're hooked for life/ruined your life. So their argument is: anyone who would be addicted already is, and the only effect of keeping the drugs illegal is that criminals are in charge of selling and producing them instead of capitalists/entrepreneurs who are above the law, and that there will be less stuff that is spiked/laced because of regulations. I'm not sure if it is true that all drugs are "safe" to try just once, what if there are drugs that are instantly addictive and ruin your life for having tried them once? Are there?
Also, what if legalizing (due to those imposed regulations) increases the price. Essentially, what if requiring drug producers to not lace their products, etc. makes it prohibitively expensive for the main population that is seeking out these drugs, meaning there will once again be a black market for them. The only benefit I can see to legalizing is that there might be some light/medium psychedelic drugs with mental health or spiritual benefits that middle-class/wealthy people will be able to access without going against the law, but I don't see how legalizing would get rid of cartels specifically? Can someone steelman the anti-legalization stance to me better than I've been trying to do?
I suppose we could also go full libertarian and have no regulations and full legalization. Perhaps that would stop cartels then, because companies can produce shit-quality drugs legally without needing to be criminals and kill people for it? (And perhaps with supply/demand, companies (which have access to better human capital than gangs) will learn to get more efficient with their production so they end up producing good quality drugs cheaply?).
My beliefs are that drugs are just a negative for society, so if we could get rid of them that's just better. If we can't get rid of them, we should minimize the number of people using them. And that legalizing "feels" like it will produce a world with a lot more drug users and that's a bad thing. Is this belief is wrong? I can't really debate people based off the above "vibes"-based reasoning but it feels wrong to legalize something like hard drugs, unless I've been lied to about how dangerous they are?
Weed is decriminalized or legal in several states and yet people still buy weed from non-legal sources.
Online games have problems with RMT (real money trading) and implement official means for it (WoW tokens, EVE plex, OSRS bonds, etc). RMT is still just as much of a problem as it was before.
Normal prescription drugs are fully legal. There is still a black market for them.
Given countless examples like this it seems an extraordinary claim that legalizing drugs would make drug cartels suddenly vanish.
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Standard argument often includes something like "Legalise and tax it" Sin tax on tobacco in Australia is around 300% now. (A$1.50 excise per stick, a pack of 20 costs around $40). The government is committed to continuing raising the tax 5% a year every year forever.
This has lowered smoking rates dramatically (from 24% down to 8% of population over 30 years). But now, things have hit a tipping point - most smokers I know are buying black market stuff from Chinese cartels, including normie law abiding white collar types. (Banning vapes and pushing all vape users black-market did not help.)
Legalisation won't eliminate black market, but there's a tradeoff. You could probably model this with a mathematical function - Legal and cheap means no criminal element but also heavy use. As you increase taxes, usage goes down but criminal element increases. Banning something is equivalent to an infinite% tax (which minimises use but maximises criminal element). Plug in harm caused by use, harm caused by criminal element, solve for equilibrium (which probably looks like "Legalised and taxed more than 0% but less than 300%" for low harm drugs like tobacco, but other drugs may be so harmful that there is no benefit to legalisation at any price).
We're also well on the way to legalising weed (you do need a rubber-stamped medical prescription). Medical is about twice the current price of street, but also higher quality (I'm told about 1.5-2x more potent). Use is apparently up slightly since legalisation (from 9% to 12%). I don't know if I trust the numbers, I wouldn't have guessed it to be 50% more prevalent than tobacco.
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How much of the cartel operating logic is "specifically sell drugs for profit" and how much is "sell contraband and do other criminal stuff for profit"?
Good point, not sure.
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It’s almost all the latter, drugs are just a convenient anchor for their business. They’re big in human trafficking, protection rackets, etc.
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Even after we had cannabis legalization here, my province in particular passed laws capping all cannabis products sold legally in the province by the government-run stores at 30% THC. While this is plenty THC for flower, it pretty much nullifies as a category concentrates (hash, wax, shatter, resin, rosin, THC crystals... as well as THC vapes). For an alcohol comparison, it's like they made alcohol legal only as long it was at most 10% alcohol (20 proof), the alcohol percentage of a strong beer. The result is that, when I was a regular cannabis consumer, I would get those products from the black/gray market, despite legalization.
Price was, though, comparable between the government-run stores and the black/gray market for flowers.
Interesting. So perhaps legalization + deregulation is the way to go if you're going to legalize at all, otherwise don't legalize.
I think you mostly have to make sure your regulations actually align with your stated goals and don't become at odds with themselves. Our provincial government chose to legalize only through government-run stores mostly because they wanted the public has a safe product sold in a responsible environment. If your regulations push them back to the black market, then that's a fail in that respect.
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That’s actually what happened almost immediately after Prohibition, yeah. Some areas allowed the sale of 3% beer.
Today there are still Byzantine regulations on which stores can sell what percentages.
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You can go further than merely psychoactive drugs. Robin Hanson & Bryan Caplan had a thought experiment about letting people buy (in his reification, at an unmarked physical store) anything that would otherwise have banned: poison, snake oil, chainsaws with no safeties, electronics that frequently shock the user or catch fire. One could even imagine a requirement that each customer recites on video (before being allowed entry) "I understand that everything in here would have been banned and is dangerous".
I bring this up particularly because psychoactive drugs are just one example of dangerous good. People have weirdly specific intuition about those drugs that often doesn't really track how they feel about the larger class. It also seems to track the culture war: legalization is a darling of the left, which is otherwise gung-ho to regulate everything else.
The "weirdly specific intuition" people have on drugs is not merely because they are dangerous, its because they are also addictive. Dangerous + addictive is bad in a way exponentially worse than dangerous or addictive alone. Hence the intuition.
Chainsaws with no safeties are not killing 100k+ americans a year.
Very fast motorcycles are perhaps a better analogy; an unnecessary danger, but pleasurable and alluring.
It's still imperfect, because the hazard of drugs isn't just that they can kill you, but that they can ruin your life and the lives of people around you long before you die.
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Dum vivimus vivamus
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A pretty extreme version of the position, maybe. It doesn't have to be the "only" effect to be worth it. Just the biggest one. Every dollar siphoned from the cartels reduces their capacity. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, as they say.
I think the strongest counterarguments start by observing that people don't handle legal drugs that well. There are something like 15 million alcohol addicts in the States. Not drinkers, addicts. Would legal fentanyl really be less harmful? Or consider tobacco culture. Kids get ahold of this stuff and try it as an edgy symbol of rebellion. Some of them develop the habit. Is that dynamic going to be improved in any way by harder drugs?
I'm immediately reminded of this bit from a news story about the overdose death of a 4-year-old girl in Syracuse, NY:
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The most harmful drugs are tobacco and alcohol. Tobacco and alcohol are not particularly potent, they are simply very widely consumed.
If drugs are legalized and the effects are bad, it will be difficult to recriminalize them again since there will be lobby groups and tax revenue at risk.
Drugs are usually much more potent than alcohol and tobacco, THC content in marijuana has been rising massively over time. New ones are discovered all the time - Fentanyl for instance which might be the optimal drug in cost-effective highs... but also very dangerous.
Drugs also have a risk of big systematic problems, like how Russia got extremely drunk on vodka or how the Qing empire got extremely addicted on opium. If we're entering an era of mass unemployment due to AI do we really want widely accessible drugs?
Addiction isn't just for poor losers, it can be for anyone who makes a bad decision, has the wrong friends, is just overburdened by circumstances and needs something to take the edge off and then lacks the willpower to keep it under control.
My more controversial conclusion: I think that the drug dealers should be systematically rooted out and destroyed. Find a drug dealer (if drug addicts can do this, so can police with drones, cameras, wiretapping, troops). Point a gun at him until he tells you where he got his drugs from. Go to them, point guns at them... repeat until you've gotten all the drug dealers and all domestic suppliers/importers. If they refuse to tell you, blow their heads off. If they're turning people into fentanyl zombies, they should be treated like necromancers in an RPG, inherent enemies of society. There should be a gradation of responses, the dumbass blonde girl dealing coke to upper middle class users isn't turning people into fentanyl zombies and shouldn't have her head blown off but if she doesn't reveal her supplier then keep ramping up punishment until she does. You could have creative responses like tattooing 'drug dealer' on her forehead, caning... The legal system we have isn't well-adapted to deal with large criminal gangs with large revenues and strong coercive capabilities. These are small, borderless state actors that deserve a more militarized response.
Sticking criminals in prison is not a sufficient deterrent to the gangsters 'if you snitch, we will kill you and make an example of your mutilated corpse'. Often they just end up running their gangs from prison, executing drug deals from prison, intimidating other gangs from prison. If you go to prison, you can't be so easily killed by a rival gang and you can brutalize/rape members of rival gangs who get imprisoned in prisons you control! You can exchange tricks with other career criminals and abuse prisoners who aren't career criminals or part of a gang.
None of this is working properly, it's a legalist fantasy, just going through the motions. It's a parallel to the 'let out the retarded, violent criminal after his 14th crime (he's too retarded to be held responsible) wait until after he murders some random person to crack down on him' equilibrium. No 15th chances. If he's clearly a bad guy, blow him away. Killing bad guys is actively good, not a last resort. The present bad equilibrium needs to be smashed with a major effort, then we can all enjoy a superior equilibrium.
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Other people have discussed the drugs aspect, but would it work even if drugs were so freely available and untaxed that cartels had no competitive advantage? Or would they just move into the next-most profitable criminal enterprise without it making a drastic difference to the harm they inflict? A quick search finds this pair of statistics:
Fortune: Mexico’s cartels are taking a $1.3 billion bite out of the economy through extortion—and they’re getting hungrier
Fact check: Do Mexican drug cartels make $500 billion a year?
Now I am no expert of the subject and these are literally just the first results that came up, but it sounds like extortion is already a significant fraction of their income. Even if the drug income vanished (and remember they don't have to exclusively sell to the U.S. and Mexico either), how much would they be able to ramp up protection rackets if they were devoting their efforts to them instead? Sure it would cost them money, but would it really weaken them so much as to (for example) allow the Mexican government to wipe them out?
The Mexican government does not want to wipe out the cartels, as Mexico is a corrupt oligarchy in which the cartels are major stakeholders.
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Why would they wait till legalization to ramp up their extortion racket? If it were possible to expand it in a profitable way, then they (meaning existing or new cartels) would do so.
I don't think that cartels can benefit from capitalism nearly as much as normal corporations can, and that limits their ability to exploit profitable opportunities. It's not like they can just issue bonds to spend money before they make it. Same with the stock market, investors, and everything else. They also face a more challenging labor market, and have important internal constraints on their decisions.
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Because the amount of work cartel members can do is limited. It takes time and effort to figure out how much to demand, punish those who refuse, enforce your claim against rivals, etc. They're workers who primarily make money off of "willingness to commit serious crimes", skills specific to drugs are secondary. Right now the best-paying job for that advantage is the drug trade but if that goes away then there's other stuff like extortion or illegal logging.
Now, obviously there's feedback loops involved: if the available illegal jobs pay worse and can't scale to affording as many workers then that potentially makes law-enforcement easier which makes them even less desirable. The goal would be to have them spiral down until they're almost always less desirable than legal jobs, leaving them to idiots making bad choices and making large-scale organized crime virtually impossible. But you can't just base that on assuming the composition of criminal activity will remain the same but with the "drug" part vanishing, all those criminals in the drug industry will need new jobs and the main thing they have to sell is still "willing to commit serious crimes". It would certainly be a pity to accept serious society-wide consequences from drug legalization in the name of beating the cartels and then see the cartels just shift to something less profitable without collapsing.
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We've done the experiment; Prohibition, banning the most popular drug. Organized crime got supersized. They didn't go away when Prohibition did, but they didn't cause nearly the problems. So I would suspect the cartels, too, would get much smaller with drug legalization. There's always a niche for organized crime -- if anything's taxed or contraband, there's smuggling, and if not there's always protection rackets and burglary rings and that sort of thing -- but it can change drastically in size.
The mafia was broken by the FBI, not the end of prohibition. It remained at its zenith post repeal of prohibition for quite a while, through extortion, illegal gambling, tax evasion, etc. The end came about when the FBI took primary responsibility rather than corrupt local law enforcement.
The Mafia did not remain at its zenith, though it is true (like I said) that the end of Prohibition didn't break it. It's not completely broken now, for that matter -- they've gotten a lot more low key as they've learned that keeping crime less flashy (or perhaps have been selected for leaders who keep crime less flashy) means they stay out of jail longer.
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Meth might become necessary to compete. Adderall is already very popular as a study drug; making meth generally available would almost certainly make it far worse.
Without wading into my opinions on ADHD, this is almost certainly bad. The drugs do have some side effects; universal stimulant use becoming an artifact of molochian competition is a bad thing.
Now, coke, MDMA, etc would also likely become popular as party drugs, and these come with their own bad effects.
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The cartels have a significant leg up on would-be legal operators; the cartels don't have to pay capital costs to create new production infrastructure. The cartels already have extant and significant distribution networks that new operations have to create from scratch. The cartels don't have to comply with the significant regulatory and tax burdens that legal operations have to comply with. This isn't to say that legal operations can't ever compete, just that it's not the lol capitalismzorz curbstomp that the legalization argument presumes.
Also, cartels already deal in legal products (just with a side of violence). Diesel fuel and avocados, are two significant examples. In fact, cartels need legitimate businesses in order to launder their drug proceeds and provide cover for the movement of product and purchase of materials for drug production/cultivation/processing.
TIL
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The cartels could be dealt with, a lot more violently if the US had the balls. Imagine an unending wave of cruise missiles and drone strike assassinations. What would be the point of being rich if you had to hide in squalor unable to enjoy your pools and villas.
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At the same time, the cartels' distribution networks are ... not super cost efficient. I expect they are paying (either directly, through inefficiency or through outright theft) at least 20-100x what WalMart is paying :-)
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Don't cartels also do a flourishing trade in pirated media, as well? The mafia did a flourishing business in selling untaxed cigarettes and gas in its heydey, too.
How much revenue or what percent of revenue = flourishing?
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I keep seeing people bring up Portugal when talking about policies like this. I admit I don't know anything about Portugal. But I will say that I am fairly unconvinced by these proposals that legalizing something will not affect uptake at all.
A lot of gun rights supporters say "An armed society is a polite society." I think the more obvious "legalizing thing makes thing more common" is trivially true. Guns are legal in America. This has led to lots of people buying guns. This has also led to gun violence statistics going insanely high compared to countries where there are no guns. It's led to increased gun suicides, it's led to increased gun thefts, it's led to increased negligent discharges, and (on a more positive note) it's led to more self-defense with guns. But I would have to see a lot of evidence to tell me that there is less violence in America than there would be if there were no guns.
Ditto for weed. A lot of people already smoked weed before it was legalized. In my state, it's legal now, and no surprises, weed seems a lot more common. I can't tell you any statistics, but there are a lot of people really open about smoking weed and outright tell me they smoke up every day after work. I don't think it's controversial to say that the lifting of punishment for doing a thing leads to more uptake of doing the thing. You've just removed one of the reasons some people never took up the thing.
We also see the same dynamic working in reverse with tobacco, I think. I get the idea that a lot of people my age who smoke started when they were like, 12. There will always be cases like that, probably. But smoking uptake has decreased quite a bit among the youth now that everyone around them looks down on cigarettes for smelling bad and being bad for you. Bans on selling nicotine to under 21 helped with that. Putting all kinds of restrictions on cigarette companies, forcing them to display warnings everywhere, helped with that. Taxing the living shit out of nicotine helped with that. Being hostile to this drug helps reduce uptake.
Legalizing something is the opposite of being hostile. You might be right, uptake might not increase by that much. But it will almost certainly increase, and it will HURT to lose relatives to this shit and think to yourself "gee, the government WANTS people to get addicted to drugs that make them rob their families and kill themselves. They made it legal and started taxing it." I worked in a gas station once and witnessed this 60 year old grandma on oxygen buy two bottles of vodka every time I saw her, her hands shaking, more and more, every time I saw her. Totally legal, and I had no choice but to sell her the stuff that was killing her. I hated her for making me do it to her, and for being so weak that she let it be done to herself.
I don't think Americans should be sacrificed to help people who aren't in America.
Where do you live that you can buy vodka in the gas station?
I live in rural Illinois. I think the owner just has to get a liquor license. The owner used to own the grocery store and the gas station both, but let go of the grocery store because it didn't make hardly any money at all. Apparently the liquor license stays with the person, not the business. I think you can buy vodka at Casey's, too.
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Making things easier to do has huge effects on the addiction rate. "Anyone who would be addicted already is" turned out not to be true of Internet-based gambling.
Interesting, this is the type of relevant scenario I was after, thanks
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I used to think this but have realized it's only if you legalize it to the extent that the market economy can compete even after the cost of licenses/legal compliance. Afaik there's still no center pivots of weed growing selling weed by the bale. There's no capital markets that allow massive economies of scale so Walmart can crush prices on distribution and sale.
There's still a little room for illegal moonshine to compete on cost but for 99% of the market, Diageo or one of their competitors is preferred. That's not true for weed markets because there's no way for weed economy to be in the bank system and the liscenses and taxes leave too much room for illegal distribution.
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