Politicians constantly talk about stopping the illegal immigrants that are coming from Mexico, but putting a wall has never and will never be a solution since the reason why so many displaced keep coming across the border is mostly to escape the crime, corruption, inequality, and violence of they have to live in their home countries. The worst part is that most of these terrible things is that happen in third world countries are rooted in constant subversion by developed countries, primarily the US. I feel like since we caused this (even if in part) we should help stop it now, even if we didn’t publicly admit guilt to save face.
So, how do we do it? Do we straight up invade Mexico and go on a full out war against the cartels like we did against Osama Bin Laden?
If not, why not? And, is there anything that can be done?
I would like to keep things civil. Please, let’s keep this respectful as I know this is a tough issue and there is anger on both sides of this issue.
Legalize all the drugs. Stop providing them a market.
Including stuff like fentanyl and tranq and allow anybody to buy it?
Yes. The same as alcohol.
No. Regulate and offer known recreational drugs pure.
Very few people take fentanyl on its own or intentionally. Even tranq (which I hadn’t heard of but just looked up) is primarily harmful because it’s often tainted with fentanyl or other potent yet potentially fatal additives. Fentanyl does not need to be legally sold, because there is no real market for it.
Hell, even fucking weed is tainted, primarily with silica-based desccants, in countries where it’s still illegal (*cough* UK *cough*).
However if people could get pure, laboratory tested recreational drugs then these issues could disappear overnight. Heroin is bad when you fall deep into addiction, but most heroin users wouldn’t get into that state if they could take the drug legally without taboo or victimisation of illicit dealers. 100 years ago opium dens were a thing, and there were some people deep in the poppy - but there were also people just as deep in their alcohol suffering worse. Alcohol is less of a problem today, and back in the 90s there was a study funded by DARE (and subsequently unpublished because they didn’t like the results) that determined most heroin users were in fact business men and women earning large salaries with enough income to support their habit with high quality product.
Just like digital piracy is a service problem, drug addiction is a societal mental health problem, and criminalising it only allows the problem to fester to extremes.
Decriminalise possession, keep supply of the most fatally harmful drugs illegal, legitimise and tax known recreational drugs.
But if you legalise all drugs, as you say, no one will want to use shit like fent at all. Fent was legal for decades, it’s older than most opioids. It wasn’t an issue until the crackdown on pills.
I think possession of any drug should be legal. However, the intent behind its use can still be illegal. If you have fentanyl and can demonstrate you only have it for some genuine use, and aren’t looking to cause harm with it, then that shouldn’t be a problem. Supplying fentanyl is much more likely to be a harmful circumstance, and its supply should be controlled.
Imo spending the effort to educate people instead of cracking down on sellers or producers makes much more sense.
In a world with clean accessible morphine, no drug user will seek our fentanyl, no matter how easy it is to find.
I’d argue to legalize everything including the extremes and price the extremes to barely undercut and drive out any illicit market. It is always better to have control over a legitimate market than it is to have a black market. There is no way to regulate demand and creating market choke points is totally ineffective. So use state run capitalism to make the market uncompetitive and drive out any competition to gain full control. The State as the dealer makes more sense than the State playing wack-a-mole in the middle.
I dunno, I think it’s more complicated than that. First off, there are some things that should be prohibited - it’s illegal to privately own nuclear weapons, for the most extreme example. Second, many of these truly harmful drugs have tiny markets, and these markets are in fact propped up by other, more conventional drugs being illegal. If heroin were legal, very few if any people would even consider fentanyl, such that fentanyl could be prohibited entirely without having an out of control illegal market.
In some sense, though, we do already have a controlled legitimate market for these prohibited things. Even cannabis, even during the prohibition, had some legal purchase avenues for the purpose of research. Even nuclear, that’s manufactured by private businesses with permission from the government. That works for the vast majority of drugs, it only fails with popular, relatively low harm recreational drugs where the law just isn’t reasonable against the potential harm.
I don’t support that. I support a FDA regulated opiod pill that has known dosages. It will get you high and if you OD posion control knows exactly what to do. Even forgetting about human dignity for a moment, it will save us all money to do it this way. If someone really wants to spend the next 18 hours of their life on a couch zonked out they should it do safely.
The pill will be in certain stores, on the outskirts of town. It will be taxed. You will have to sit through a video on exactly how you are to use it safely. You can camp out in a safe usage site and have a locker for your keys. At least in my ideal version of it.
As expensive as this all is it is nothing compared to what we have now.
They would rather the addicts all die from Fentanyl laced bullshit than do that. They make way too much money with it being illegal
Maybe instead of invading the US should stop arming cartels? https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/02/stopping-toxic-flow-of-gun-traffic-from-u-s-to-mexico/
Maybe the US and their DEA should stop funding and working with cartels https://world.time.com/2014/01/14/dea-boosted-mexican-drug-cartel/
https://jacobin.com/2023/03/us-mexico-war-on-drugs-garcia-luna-calderon
Maybe the US should stop israel from selling tools like pegasus which are used to hack and attack journalists https://web.archive.org/web/20240116033152/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/18/world/americas/pegasus-spyware-mexico.html
Or maybe the US should stop doing coups across latin america and putting dictators in power (too many to link)
But but but muh free market
“Hey, I’d like to buy some drugs”
“NO! NO FREE MARKET FOR YOU!!”
This is a very simple take that fails to capture any of the nuance or depth that these stories require for context. It’s rage bait.
First link: contains the allegation by Mexico that the US is largely responsible for flow of illegal guns across the border. Case dismissed by federal court.
Second link: cited an investigation by a local Mexican newspaper that appears to have deleted the story. No other coverage of this claim except from Business Insider that copy and pasted this article. Each one has broken links to the original newspaper story. My understanding of thr allegations are that the US policy preferred one large cartel instead of numerous medium sized ones, so the DEA backed off Sinaloa to successfully focus on the smaller cartels, and then turned their attention back to Sinaloa.
A. Consume less cartel produced drugs.
B. Stop giving the cartels guns
Honestly, we shouldn’t consume drugs at all, but to each their one I always say.
However, I completely agree that the ATF should change their policy and prohibit ALL gun sales without a US identification and simple background check at least.
You’re gonna have a hard time defining “drug” in a way that all people agree with.
Presumably you don’t mean prescription medications, though of course many of them are abused. Does caffeine count? Coffee is linked to many measurable health benefits. What about alcohol? No health benefit and a clear risk of abuse, but there’s also thousands of years of social history, and I think plenty of people would say that, at least sometimes, the benefits of a great night out with friends or meeting new people and developing new relationships is more than worth the cost.
Then you have things like hallucinogens, which generally have only minor health concerns and were mostly criminalized for political reasons. Marijuana is literally a plant, and while the health profile is mixed, at least for some people, it’s without a doubt a net positive. In comparison, and especially relevant to Mexico, there’s heroin, which is incredibly addictive and dangerous while also funneling tons of money into the cartels.
I’m not trying to be pedantic here, but more to make the case that any kind of policy or position on “drugs” as a whole is way too widely scoped. There are too many different substances with drastically different social and medical costs and benefits. Probably no one should ever consume heroin or meth. People with a risk of schizophrenia should absolutely not touch LSD, but people with PTSD may genuinely benefit from MDMA. Alcoholics should never touch alcohol, but your average person having a few drinks on a Friday night out with some friends probably isn’t making a bad decision.
As an aside, and having nothing to do with your thoughts or arguments, I’d like to take a moment to communicate that the common talking points of “it’s a plant” and “it’s natural” regarding marijuana should come with massive asterisks, for a variety of reasons. Not least of which is that cocaine and heroin come from plants too. And that there are synthetic THC-related products which aren’t generally distinguished from the actual plant products in such discussions. There are also highly concentrated THC products, such as oils, which are pretty inarguably incomparable to using the plant as it occurs in nature.
So, we can nitpick about maybe banning concentrates and delta-8 and whatnot and maybe only legalize the plant in it’s natural form, right? Well, that brings us to another point: modern marijuana strains have been bred to have a THC content dozens of times higher than what occurs in nature, as well as a dramatically lower relative ratio of CBD (CBD counteracts some of the bad of the THC, by my limited understanding, but that’s outside the scope of this discussion), so calling it “natural” now is more than a bit misleading. It IS a plant, but so are poppies (opium/heroin), coca (cocaine), and belladonna (deadly nightshade), and, well, nobody here is arguing that those are safe to consume on the basis of their being or deriving from plants.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
The only thing that matters is that (in adults) it’s very clearly demonstrated by abundant research to be perfectly harmless.
In and of itself, the lack of harm makes it impossible for you to be a redeemable human being if you want to tell a consenting adult that they can’t have it.
That’s ignoring all the evidence supporting benefits.
Perfectly harmless is overstating the case. It is undoubtedly much less harmful than alcohol, but there are still some detrimental effects.
Of course, there are also significant, much more so, detrimental effects to soda and to sitting down. There’s a level of risk for which society has solidly decided that the choice is up to the individual, and marijuana undoubtedly should be in that category, but we shouldn’t pretend that there are literally zero negative effects.
It’s not. There’s no evidence for any harm of any kind from THC or the other psychoactive ingredients in adults.
Smoking, specifically, yes, but there are many, many other ways to ingest it, and smoking is most common in large part because of the backwards ass laws.
It’s not like alcohol, where the desired altered state is exchanged for fucking up your liver, kidneys, etc. It doesn’t do any of that, even with extremely heavy use.
The relevant ones are the ones cartels make money trafficking or producing: opiates, cocaine and meth.
Stop taking drugs?
Smart, effective gun control in the US?
So, we theoretically could stop cartels, but never, ever will.
Decriminalize the use of currently illegal drugs, and increase penalties for the dealing of illegal drugs. Then increase funding for the medical treatment of addiction. And homelessness. And food insecurity. Too bad none of that will ever happen, since our stupid government prefers to solve all of its problems with cruise missiles.
Snort less coke, mainly.
Demand will never wane. It is human nature. It’s like yelling really loud “stop being hungry humans!” (well kinda, hunger is not a good analogy but the opinion is that drugs are a fundamental flaw with our human design. Just asking to stop does not work. Also, jailing those who do doesn’t help any either.
The attack has to be financial. Outsell them. Legalize, tax and monitor. Make it a health concern not a law breaking issue. If it is no longer profitable to export, cartels will hurt and weaken and that is how this very powerful organizations are taken down. Take their money away.
I remember Mexico pleading for US to legalize marijuana. Mexico did but cartels still had the massive American market.
The obvious answer: Start producing locally
So, how do we do it? Do we straight up invade Mexico and go on a full out war against the cartels like we did against Osama Bin Laden?
That sure went well, huh? Afghanistan sure is a better place now! Oh, wait…
From what I understand, the US is actively investing in the Mexican economy right now in order to both shift our manufacturing reliability away from China and also to provide economic stability in Mexico to shift power away from the cartels. Please take this with a grain of salt as I do not remember where I read this and cannot provide a source. But from what I recall, the long term plan is to setup manufacturing in Mexico for the above reasons with the bonus of reducing shipping costs, time, and shipment vulnerability. I really hope it works, because if you think about it, it just makes sense all around. If we make Mexico our biggest trade partner, we both benefit in big ways. And the more options people have in Mexico for jobs, the less they have to rely on the cartel.
Aside from that, I used to agree that legalizing drugs would take the market away from the cartels, but then you have to remember that the cartels have since diversified. So stop eating Haas avocados??? I don’t know, I’m just a graphic designer ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That’s exactly true, I can only imagine it isn’t widely published because the GOP would rather rant and rave about TEH IMMAGRINTS!! and take any opportunity to say the government isn’t making things better. Meanwhile, a Republican President (you know which one) would rather sell even more production to China with no checks whatsover in exchange for a very cheap bribe.
I think what kick-started this was all the tariffs that were implemented under the Trump administration. It led corporations to move their manufacturing to other countries and in the process, it was generally discovered to work best to move manufacturing to Mexico. Now under Biden, they are trying to actively encourage moving things from China to Mexico.
BUT THE WALL!!
Cartels don’t care about drugs, they care about making money.
Universal healthcare in the US if breaking bad is right.
While it’s true that the U.S. is the most convenient market for Mexican cartels, it’s worth knowing that it’s far from the only one. Mexican drug cartels have major connections to markets across the globe. and that Mexico specifically is the de facto administrator of drug trade in the western world. For example, a drug bust in India found fentanyl that had been purchased in Mexico from China. . That’s not the sort of arrangement that the US can ever hope to do away with through domestic legislation without undermining the autonomy of dozens of states around the globe.
While removing the cartels’ access to the American market via decriminalization would certainly take away a lot of funds, let’s not act like black market operations don’t exist in legal markets anyway.
In this hypothetical situation where the US is responsible for Mexico’s drug cartel problem (which I disagree with), I don’t think the road to success ends at the US legalizing drugs.
The US is the key source from war on drugs legislation and still a major fighter against efforts to decriminalize and legalize drugs. If it would change its attitude, it would open up political space for other countries that typically follow suit to the US. Also it would serve as evidence that legalisation with good regulation is better than criminalisation.
This is true, another example is Ecuador who is fighting an incredible surge in gang violence because the Mexican cartels are now operating in the south American country.
When there’s a clean supply of drugs green-lit by a superpower like the US, wouldn’t it naturally be exported to other countries? Sure, the cartel would still exist, but for the drug trade specifically, better availability of safe, quality drugs internationally would reduce international demand for cartel drugs, no? Wouldn’t other countries start manufacturing said drugs to import into the US as well, making it easier to fill the black market with regulated products?
“do we straight up invade… like we did…” Do you know the mess that actually comes from there? And How much it had enforced extremist behaviour in other countries.
“What US needs to do?” Start by taking care of your own issues like guns, they will inevitably end up in dark market serving cartels and others, it would also stop massive killing happening in your own country at the same time… Priorities to education and healthcare, Stop invading countries (can’t remember last US invasion which was actually useful…), start supporting smart guys instead of bad/extremist guys so they don’t get more powerful (exemple: Masoud instead of Bin Laden in Afghanistan against Russia).
Had to scroll way to long to find this. Funny to see how Americans think imperialism is a solution.
« Best way to help Mexico ?» stop capitalism and switch to a social system.
There are definitely some good ideas in this thread, I would like to know, however, where I can go to escape the crime, violence, inequality, and corruption in the United States?
Canada? IDK
I guess we keep going up right? /jk
But seriously, it’s very concerning how much worse the corruption in the US is getting
Definitely. It’s built right into the system. Fucking lobbying. How does any rational person let that continue? We need the zombie of Teddy Roosevelt to run in ‘24.
(Is there a high demand for process managers with decent AI skills in Canada?)
Legalize drugs, stop the war on drugs from Nixon era. It should be treated as a health problem, not a criminal one, and once they’re at least decriminalized the cartel’s profits would PLUMMET.
Ofc USA has probably the strongest propaganda system and has incentive for the cartels to continue existing, so I don’t see that happening unless some change that’s major and unexpected happens.
I would also add “Repeal Section 1” to this list. Let Philip Morris, Phizer, and their ilk deal with the problem. The cartels think they have power, they have no idea.
Wtf is Section 1??? That’s not specific enough.
Ah, my bad. Feeling like crap today. Schedule 1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK538457/
No worries.
I think you’re referring to the Controlled Substances Act, which details all the shit.
Fun fact, all the links I found at the top of a search about this law seem to have “DEA” in the URL, rather than any regular link to actual legislation. It’s almost as if they’re monitoring them. Most of them were broken lmao.
The thing is, a law needs to exist, it just needs to be written by people who don’t chew crayons. I’m not talking about those tasty ones the Marines gnaw on, but the dodgy import ones that the DEA think make them look classy.
In all seriousness, we don’t need to remove the law (which has a pretty solid name) we just need to reclassify all the drugs and change the penalties to be appropriate for the good of society. Possession of anything in general should not be a crime, except for possession of a significant amount of a potentially fatal drug, as such possession could only reasonably point to intent to supply. Supply of fatal drugs (eg fentanyl, maybe certain bath salts or whatever) should remain illegal. Beyond that, recreational drugs would be better legitimised such that any issues with them can be faced in daylight, instead of dark alleyways. Even the worst of the major recreational drugs wouldn’t be all that harmful if people had support around them - certainly no more harmful than alcohol.
However drug policing is literally the DEA’s bread and butter, they’re not going to give up their job for the greater good.
