> Legalise the drugs and allow legal production - and the cartels will have to find an honest way to make a living like the rest of us have to do.
This is magical thinking. Organized crime can make money in other ways. This story is about kidnapping, for example. Organized crime exists in many places where it’s not funded by drug trade.
If there isn’t enough money, it only ends up making gangs more ruthless as they now have to compete for a smaller share of money with other gangs.
They end up extorting even more money from the local populace, and try and extend their fangs into other activities.
I’m not saying that legalizing drugs won’t help at all. But it’s unlikely it will help in places that already have gangs without other actions in addition.
What I'm about to say is a broad generalization, but an important one:
Gangs exist as the most promising form of employment for people without other options. If you destroy the gang's single largest source of revenue, then it reduces their relative attracting as an employer. There are alternative to drugs like human trafficking, arms dealing and the wildlife trade but they have much much smaller markets. Perhaps in the short term violence would increase as gangs try to find a replacment for drugs, but even in the medium term I strongly believe that recruitment would plummet and attrition would rise as the money ran out.
You serious think that taking away the stream of income that has put trillions of usd in the hands of cartels / organized crime won't have a huge impact?
I think it is necessary — even if not sufficient — to end the war on drugs. The only exception I’m willing to make is proper labeling and safe storage conditions. It should ought to remain unlawful to distribute drugs without proper labeling. We will need to come up with labeling standards.
Wouldn't they be more likely to just enter the market as legal participants? Cartels kill and do heinous things to their competitors because they can't take them to court and sue them and get an injunction to stop bad behavior.
That's not what happened with Prohibition. Crime syndicates providing black-market alcohol didn't just set up as legitimate alcohol vendors, they moved into unrelated markets like controlling labor unions.
Note that labor unions were a legitimate type of enterprise, but organized crime ran them illegitimately anyway. The willingness to break the law is their competitive advantage; it would make no sense to give it up.
> Organized crime exists in many places where it’s not funded by drug trade.
Organized crime will likely never truly go away, but it has flourished because of the war on drugs (just as it did in America during the prohibition era).
There's also a difference in the way organized crime manifests itself. Kidnapping schemes can't really exist for organized crime in the developed countries. The state security forces would stomp them out too quickly.
But if organized crime didn't have the resources to buy off the government, military, and police wholesale the magnitude of the problem would be much smaller.
Organized crime can make money in other ways, but fundamentally it profits from regulatory and legal arbitrage: the difference between what is in demand and what is legal to supply. Decriminalization directly attacks the fundamentals of that arbitrage, whether it's drugs or prostitution, or more prosaic like fuel taxes or tobacco duty (smuggling both has been a source of funding for IRA in Northern Ireland, historically).
Kidnapping is more of a capital arbitrage situation. I don't think it scales like drugs. For it to be really worthwhile, it relies on people with a lot of capital coming into the area. If you scale up kidnapping, people simply don't come, or invest a lot more in security.
None of these has the absurd profit spans of drugs, though. You need about ~600-800 US$ worth of raw coca leafs to produce 1kg base cocaine (https://www.businessinsider.com/from-colombia-to-new-york-ci...) - and make ~25-27k US$ once it's on US streets. A vertical cartel that controls everything from the leaves to the sellers can capture all that 41.000% profit margin for themselves!
When the biggest markets US and EU "dry up" for illegal sales of cocaine, the gangs literally don't have anyone any more to extort for money - the population of South America is dirt poor. And also, they can't afford running militia that are more capable than some nations' armies or bribing the utter majority of the political class any more once these tasty US dollars vanish.
Given that, according to your profile, you're an appellate lawyer, and the more crime there is, the more work there is for lawyers generally (though maybe not for you personally) that seems like an instance of
>“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Searching for their profile on their employers website, and you'll find not a single criminal case. As was to be expected, considering the vast majority of lawsuits are civil law matters.
Sugar and opioids are also legal, legality doesn't solve everything, it's also up to the consumers and the regulator to work on better ways to consume those products.
You would need to regulate doses, make sure it's not coupled with other substances to reduce ill effects on consumers, which isn't easy. It's obviously better than letting cartels thrive, of course, but legalizing drugs isn't a silver bullet, it's also a lot of work.
Remember how prohibition went into action: women were tired of their drunk husbands.
But isn't aren't drugs de-facto legal in Mexico anyway? The cartels are thought to control the police, judges and politicians enough that they do not fear the rule of law much. If drugs were legalized in Mexico, wouldn't the cartels do what cartels do anyway and prevent everyone else from producing?
Or do you mean make it legal at the destination - the US?
The issue is deeper. War on drugs has created many little cartels, many of them don't make much money off of transporting drugs to USA. These local criminal gangs are there to extort money from businesses, kidnapping, selling drugs locally.
When PRI was in power, politicians and plaza bosses had mutual understanding: "you can transport drugs, but don't mess with locals who have no connection with drugs". Whenever USA tries to get rid of a kingpin, it will create more splinter factions, whose only way to fund themselves by kidnapping, ransoms, extortions, etc.
The solution is to use the Rico law to prosecute everyone involved all at once as a gang instead of one person at a time. It worked successfully on the 5 mob families of New York.
Legalise the drugs and allow legal production - and the cartels will have to find an honest way to make a living like the rest of us have to do.