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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?
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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