It’s funny. For the better part of a century we have had the Drug War, useful to politicians, heavily funded, but producing no results. Prices of drugs have remained about the same or gone down. Drugs are one of those things like poverty and climate change that everybody is against but that never change. The question arises of who really wants to end the drug trade.
From a libertarian point of view, Chapo Guzman is a figure to be admired, having started from nothing and built a highly profitable international business despite onerous federal regulation.You know, like Walmart.
The contribution to world employment is large. Peasants in Colombia growing coca, like poppy cultivators in Afghanistan and Mexico, do not want the drug trade ended because they make more money supplying the drug trade than in planting potatoes. This applies to multitudinous growers of marijuana in countless regions, to include Humboldt County in California.
users of drugs very much want their supply continued.
Oxycontin is credited with a hundred thousand overdose deaths in America alone. If that many are dying, a very great many more must be using and surviving. This means that big pharma is making a killing, so tospeak as are the corrupt doctors and pharmacies selling the stuff. Neither they nor their customers want the supply to dry up.
Cough syrup containing ephedrine, used in making methamphamine, was made illegal because so many meth labs popped up in the US. Meth is highly popular in America How do you suppose college students would get through exams without their speed?
The purported war on drugs also provides jobs and federal benefits for armies of agents of the DEA and FBI. These are desirable for the adventurous who do not want to sit all day in offices as raiding narco houses is fun. Police forces get federal grants for pursuing dealers. For Mexican cops on the take, which is to say Mexican cops, bribes are attractive. By many accounts, American cops batten on the same sources of money. The drug trade is so lucrative that bribes can be high.Politicians and governmental officials also often are for sale at all levels. The United States is far from incorruptible.
The drug trade is said to be worth sixty billion dollars a year. I am not sure where the figure comes from or how it is calculated, but it is plausible. The American market is massive. Where to you suppose that sixty billion goes? Not into classy pickups and gold chains for Latin American narcos. That much money needs to be professionally laundered by the big kids, banks, maybe hedge funds, big commercial deals. Intelligence agencies are frequently suspected, being unaccountable, for practical purposes above the law, and having the connections and political pull to get away with it. Those doing his, as for example bank presidents, know they are doing it. To do this, the launderers would need protection at high levels.
So who wants to end the drug trade?
Not the users. Not those in the trade. Not those on salary to pursue narcos: If you make your living by trying to solve a problem, the last thing you want to do is to succeed. And not those reaping billions yearly. Why would they want to dry up the endlessly recurring fortunes?
Let’s face it: Drugs are a stable and valued part of the international commercial landscape, like oil, semiconductors, or wheat. It employs millions, makes billions, keeps blacks under control, supplies and endless flow of hapless lowlifes for America’s commercial prisons. Its income is tax-free and, as America’s financial conditions worsen, demand for drugs will increase.
Can anyone believe that government wants to end the golden flow? The effort to suppress the business, to the extent that there is such an effort, has gone on as a mass market spectacle since at least the Sixties–with no results. The last time I checked, high schools remained awash in teenage drugs, week, crystal, shrooms, acid, nitrous. Universities, equally. Rock in the ghetto, white powder on Capitaol Hill, oxies and fentanyl in Appalachia and the Rust Belt. Prices remain reasonable, as ure lsign that the supply is not being squeezed.
The whole gorgeous antidrug burrito looks to be theater. When some high-level narco gets caught–El Chapo, La Barbie–Washington and the m3eiq shriek about how los narcos have been struck a terrible blow, and we follow the trial until the malfacctor is stuffed for life into durance vile in some max somewhere. Then we have to hear about his girlfriends and, in Chapoo’s case, children (Los Chapitos). Ray Rah DEA.
But of course putting a big guy in slam just creates a promotional opportunity for the number two guy: with the kind of money at stake, there will be plenty of suitors. The beat goes on. And this whether DEA was in cahoots with one cartel to decapitate another.
In a similar theatrical fraud, capture of large shipments of drugs gets played as a dire blow to the narcos: See? The dope warriors are protecting us, or those of us who want to be protected. But the confiscated drugs worth five million withering green dollars on the street cost the narcos a tiny fraction of the street value, so theirloss is not great. But it’s great PR for DEA.
Do we really believe that squashing the trade would be difficult if those at the top wanted to squash it? Fines of a hundred million bucks on transgressing banks and jail time for higher-ups? Small-scale money laundering would be hard to stop, yes: Narco Pedro in Guadalajara pays a hundred thousand dollars for a car in Chicago worth a thousand bucks. The dealership pays taxes on the income and the rest is clean. But a hundred million dollars? If If I make a wire transfer of ten grand to a daughter, it has to be reported to the feds at FinCin. Do we think that the massive federal law-enforcement apparatus cannot detect the transfer of huge sums?
Big laundering operations exist. The whorehouses of Bangkok can accept big amounts of cash from drug profits, tell (corrupt) authorities the girls just had a good week, pay whatever taxes they can’t buy their way out of, take a fifteen percent laundering cut, and the rest goes to the narcos as clean money. But large amounts of moolah have to end up somewhere and in an increasingly electronic and watched world they are hard to hide. Assuming, that is, that there is any reall effort to find it.
It’s all a show.
new column notifications not going out?
Weed was thought harmless.
It isn’t.
It causes up to 30 % of cases of young male schizophrenia
I thought it was harmless.
I was wrong.
Explains why TPTB want it legal.
To solve any problem, much less the drug problem, the mass of voters would need logic skills which they lack. If the average adult in America is confronted with two logical propositions, “X causes Z,” and “Y causes Z,” they will be incapable of determining what causes Z. At an average IQ of 100, logic barely exists, so the average adult can’t make inferences. They simply can’t grasp the concepts of sufficient and necessary conditions. Without logic, they see the propositions as opinions, with one good and the other bad. Two opposing political philosophies coalesce around which of the two is good and which is bad. It’s quite juvenile.
The drug problem is complex. Yet, “public” thought, express an an aggregate of voters, can’t solve even basic logic problems.
Yes, yes, they are all dumb compared to you, but the question that smart logical folks like your self need to answer is this: If all those people were as smart as you, what could they do about the problems? Vote on the Dominion machines? Write to their parasitic “representative”? What are you going to do given all that logic?
The road goes on forever and the pretend never ends.
You should have mentioned the military use of drug war increase budget. Whenever peace tries to break out, there is always the drug war and children to protect to justify troops and equipment.
It’s Orwell’s ‘1984’ with drugs instead of gin. So many people have such horrible lives, often due to governmental interference, that they just check out. Far easier to shove in the clutch and coast to the finish line. This is how America fails and is overrun by the seething masses, yearning to be free. Those people are in for a nasty surprise. Me? I’m opd and tired. I am doing my best to sidestep the mainstream. Out of sight, out of mind and patiently waiting for the inevitable collapse.
Good luck to us all.
Sex, drugs, abortion and war. The businesses that are now considered, “Grade A, Government Inspected, Made in America” businesses. The United States is in the business of death. No wonder Putin is stated to have said that the United States is a godless country. Not very far from the truth.
America is not godless at all. Most Americans believe deeply in self-sacrifice, taking things on faith, and looking forward to death when they can sit on god’s lap and chat about deep stuff.
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Which university is your degree from?
Chapo Guzman, face of the non-aggression principle?! : /
Where there is no will, there is no way. Singapore, China and a few other jurisdictions have no drug ‘problem’ to speak of. They have the will to execute the law to its logical extent. Not to be misunderstood, I am by no means a fan of capital punishment, but resolute follow through in the pursuit of a criminal element can be successful. As a resident of the former great state of Oregon, I can testify as to the long and delirious downward spiral and this. coming from a reforming libertarian. I fear we will not have a triumph of the will in the West anytime soon.
Government has only one product to sell. Power.
Like anyone with a product, they are always looking for new markets and trying to get rid of competition. When you have tools like legislation, regulation, a monopoly on lawfare and legal violence it’s a growth industry… so STFU and do as you are told… OR ELSE.
It leaves one wondering if, perhaps, after all, a nuclear war isnt the answer. Too much of stupid humanity, lazy humanity, barely at predator animal level of mind humanity, all working together to ruin everything of value.
Well, something will get rid of them of that I am sure. Study Chaos and Complexity, and history and biology. Populations of everything, from couch grass to humanity overgrows, goes mad, gets too big, something comes along to correct the balance. Happens every time. Thing is, we have the chance to correct it in a way comfortable and good for us all. But we wont recognise that, wont take it. Humanity never does. So – wait for the whatever Armageddon. I’m picking a Black Swan, like an unprecedented, sudden Ice Age.
One way or another, from Soddam and Gomorrah to now, it gets fixed.
Fred, you did it again, revealing your Libertarian tendencies. Business is business and drug business is BIG business; beats the hell out of developing a down line for Amway!
[…] Drugs, a Misunderstood Industry, by Fred Reed […]
Greetings Fred
Your explanation of the “Drug Business” sounds a lot better than it is made out to be e.g., many jobs for poor people are provided and more. I wonder at what level within the drug business it becomes negative causing more damage than good. Corruption, gangs, murder, gobs of cash, ruined lives and more?
In the past some politicians have recommended making all drugs legal – they say legalization will solve the “drug” problem by taking the money away from the illegal dealer. People who believe that must live in trees.
I read that people are screaming in Oregon about the ramifications of marijuana legalization and in Colorado black market pot farms are causing big problems. And marijuana is not considered a “hard drug”.
Being honest, just like prostitution drugs will never go away but they must be controlled. Too much of anything is not good. I submit that illegal drugs have reached the “too much” point.
Can the illegal drug business regulate itself to bring it under control and more acceptable? I think not because of the creepy element and greed that takes over the supply chain regardless how many jobs are provided for poor people. Illegal drugs must be kept below the level of acceptance by society and away from the youth of the world (if that is possible).
I don’t have the answer but continuing to fight the problem of illegal drugs and stopping entry into the US is a good start. I wonder if Fred has a good answer to the problem? For starters, I would recommend the US military wiping out the growing nests of dealers on the southern border without deep incursions into Mexico. Such a plan could be worked out with Mexico. Yes, the cartels may retaliate but I would bet the US military would win such a contest.
My final thought. We hear continuing rumors of the US doing away with the paper dollar and digitizing our money. I certainly don’t want that to happen but I would bet a digital dollar would cause a world of trouble for the illegal drug business.
Joe Pesci in Lethal Weapon.
“You take a tax deduction on interest payment you don’t even make.”
Jack. Making drugs legal will take away the huge profits. Without that, the money for bribes, paying hit men, turf wars, motivation for addicts to commit crimes will dial down. The drug game is fundamentally no different than prohibition decades ago.
You can take all the profit out of drug trafficking but these same people in the business will still want their Lambos and pet tigers. As is now happening throughout Mexico, they will just start stealing from their neighbors, charging protection, sales taxes, ransom, whatever. It’s not the drugs that are the problem so much as the mañas themselves. They are simply sociopaths. We need to deal with them directly, in the US as well as Mexico. They don’t just go back to laying bricks and picking limes just because they stop profiting from drugs.