What Will the Cartels Do After Drugs Are Legal?
Opponents of legalizing drugs often argue that you can’t really eliminate the cartels because they'll just move on to other crimes. Here's the drug czar's version of that argument:
"Some think legalization will reduce the violence," Kerlikowske said. "It will not. If drugs were to become legal, I doubt very seriously that (the criminals) would take up jobs at Microsoft or Intel. Criminals are not going to change." [El Paso Times]
It's an interesting debate in light of today's news that Mexican drug cartels have been tapping into oil pipelines, stealing astronomical amounts of oil, and then selling it to corrupt American businessmen. It's easy enough to assume that many of these diabolical criminal masterminds will look for ways to stay in business even if we take away their drug profits through legalization and regulation. There's some truth to this and it's pretty creepy to think about what these horrible thugs will do when their primary funding source suddenly vanishes. But that's not an argument against legalization.
Making drugs illegal is what created these maniacs in the first place. Selling drugs is what made them greedy and evil. It's how they learned to launder money. It's how they paid for their weapons and armies. It's where they got the capital to fund other criminal enterprises like stealing oil from the Mexican government. All their power comes from selling drugs, and anyone who supports the drug war shares responsibility for what the cartels do next.
Maybe legalization won't crush them overnight, but it will close down the massive criminal college that the drug war has become. It will stop future generations of potential super-criminals from ever becoming indoctrinated into a life of crime, because there will be far fewer jobs in the crime industry. In the meantime, those criminals that remain won't have any more drug money to line the pockets of public servants and pervert justice at every turn.
They can attempt other criminal endeavors, but it will never be the same because selling drugs is the easiest most-profitable crime on the planet and it can never be replaced. More than a few drug war idiots have suggested that the drug lords will simply switch to human trafficking, as though you could just start selling slaves to the people who used to buy marijuana and cocaine. One could write a very long book about how stupid that is, but it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.
What would really happen to the cartels if drugs were legal? There's only one way to find out.
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Comment posted by rita on Fri, 08/14/2009 - 12:01pmwhat the drug cartels will do? What could be worse than what they're doing now? Maybe they'll find other criminal activity; maybe, minus our dirty war, Mexico's government and economy might stabilize enough to allow her people to get real jobs without dying in the Arizona desert. One thing the cartels WON'T do if freedom is legalized -- they won't be selling illegal drugs. I don't care how big and bad you are, you can't force people to buy what they don't want. One of the many false concepts in drugwar mentality is that of the bad ol' "pusher" forcing people to buy and use dangerous addictive drugs. The fact that most illegal drugs aren't dangerous or addictive is beside the point. But then, everything about the drug war is beside the point, isn't it?
Human trafficking
Comment posted by rita on Thu, 08/20/2009 - 11:30am"Drug trafficking" is drugwar-speak for buying and selling drugs, but human trafficking doesn't refer to buying and selling people. Human trafficking used to be called smuggling; those of us with common sense call it "helping people enter the country illegally." What the two terms have in common is being scare tactics. Both are used to make a victimless activity sound more sinster. And both are used to describe direct results of our own government's increasingly oppressive policies.
Mexican drug cartels have been tapping into oil pipelines
Comment posted by LEAP_Speaker on Fri, 08/28/2009 - 10:11am"Mexican drug cartels have been tapping into oil pipelines, stealing astronomical amounts of oil, and then selling it to corrupt American businessmen".
If you think drugs are the only criminal enterprise these "diabolical criminal masterminds" are currently involved in, I think the article it's self proves otherwise. Few things have the enormous profit of drugs.
Drug profits allow the cartels to venture into other criminal activity. Do you think they would have the money to build long hidden pipe lines to steal the oil without the enormous profits from drugs?
Leave the cartels out of it, and look at gangs that sell drugs. Again, without drug profits these guys will be driving a Mazda rather than a Mercedes, and be reduced to selling stolen cars for a few hundred dollars. Car theft is something law enforcement can deal with.
Around 100,000 cars are stolen each month, that's 2,000 cars per state. Surveys, cited by the DEA themselves, say there are about 12,700,000 people who used illegal drugs in the last month. I think law enforcement can deal with 2000 cars per state, much easier than 254,000 drug users per state.
We have over 2,000,000 people in U.S. prisons now. States may be able to deal with 2,000 car thieves, but where are you going to put the 12,700,000 people who used an illegal drug last month? Are we going to close schools, reduce public services including police to lockup all these drug users?
Just how many people do you want to lockup? What are YOU willing to give up to accomplish your goal? It's easy to say we can win the drug war, but the last 30 years of failed U.S. drug policy tell us it not.
It's time for a change, drugs are a medical problem, not a law enforcement problem.....
E. Jay Fleming
LEAP Speaker
LEAPSpeaker@Softhome.net
Mohave Valley, AZ
Anti-Prohibition
Comment posted by Giordano on Thu, 08/13/2009 - 12:05amMaybe the best example of what really happens after prohibitions is what happened after Prohibition.
Many successful alcohol criminals retired. A few invented stock car racing. Many went to work in legit saloons, breweries, distilleries. Organized crime was diversified enough to survive on other sources of illicit income, i.e., drugs. Also legitimate businesses like laundries, juke boxes (that’s how we got the Top-40 song list) and fresh milk delivery services (the mob invented food standards for milk—Grade A… very family oriented group). One rum runner went on to become an ambassador and father a future president.
Kerlikowske’s assumption that criminals don’t change is typical of how law enforcement continually underestimates the capacity of people to adapt to virtually anything. Individuals adapt to prohibitions by going around them or taking advantage of the easy opportunities. But they also adapt to new economics.
Most will prefer a legal, new economic option if it’s available. If not, selling adults a relatively benign and popular forbidden-fruit like weed for recreational purposes is the least harmful, least reprehensible criminal alternative a person can choose in order to make a few kilobucks. These people aren’t so much dangerous criminals as they are opportunists.
Giordano