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Well at least Russian and Chinese oligarchs are made to disappear by their superiors in the security forces, that's normal and reasonable. US oligarchs get murdered by randoms on the street! Just today Bob Lee got stabbed to death on the streets of San Francisco - the guy made a product worth $40 billion, Cash App. Anyway, my point is that while it would be impressive if drug addicts in the US are treated better than Chinese oligarchs, it's actually that drug addicts are privileged above the American middle and upper class!
The Taliban seemed to do a good job of it in 2000-2001 and they have roughly a thousandth of the resources the US can wield. Is there some secret knowledge hidden in the Koran that gives +10,000% to reducing drug production? Or is the US just very incompetent? I've always maintained that if drug-addled idiots can find a dealer, professionalized, organized bureaucracies can as well. Furthermore, there are open-air drug markets in many US cities, they're clearly not trying to shut down the drug trade.
As for getting rid of drugs at the source - organize military coups and get the locals to do all the work. Back in the Cold War the US faced a far stronger opponent than a few drug cartels, with a much more powerful ideology. The US didn't want to get bogged down in every third-world country, so they arranged for anti-communist coups. They provided arms, funds, legitimacy and training to generals in Indonesia: Sukarno the communist sympathizer went out and Suharto the military dictator was in. 500,000 to a million dead in the purges but it was all Indonesians killing eachother. This is a much better solution than fighting directly. The US propped up dictators in the Phillipines, launched coups all across South America. Just use the media to whitewash everything and decry any dissent as fake news. The US somehow managed to sweep the rampant pedophilia and grotesque corruption in the Afghan army under the rug for decades.
Coups are cheap and easy, wars are hard and expensive. Wars only need to be fought against strong opponents with great power backers (Vietnam had the Soviets and China behind them). But there is no great power backing drugs and no great power capable of intervening in Central or South America.
The same thing could be done today. If Mexico or whatever country isn't sufficiently anti-drug, then it's time for regime change. Find a puppet leader, one who'll be totally reliant on the US for funding and legitimacy and rule through him. Rig the elections, launch coups and then accuse the other side of rigging elections and launching coups. Then have the puppet use their own troops to suppress the drug trade. They take on all the costs and complaints and death toll, while their leaders are paid off by the US.
Bukele is basically doing this right now but he's an enemy of the US, the US has been (ineffectually) trying to suppress and undermine him! The real problem is that the US on the wrong side, they are choosing not to tackle the problem.
Was that really random? He was involved in crypto and the government has clearly been making moves against crypto lately. SFs street crime provides plausible deniability.
This is an extreme claim. I don't think the USGov needs to resort to murder and black-bag tactics to torpedo crypto. Hell, it does that on its own anyways (see the claim that Musk changed Twitter's icon to the Doge meme to cover up him being potentially on the hook for over 200B in a lawsuit over him hawking Dogecoin).
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