Unless American politicians and bureaucrats wise up, there will be a second war with Mexico within a generation.
This is not hyperbole. Drug lords are taking over the border areas between the two countries. Killings are spreading into American cities in the southwest. Firefights near the border are becoming common. There have been kidnappings within the United States in which some of the perpetrators are thought to have not only been using military equipment, but may have been moonlighting Mexican police or military men.
Before you begin to vent your rage on Mexico, I would like you to ponder the source of the problem. This is not an ideological battle where the world vision of the enemy is independent of what we think or do. That is what we face in the Middle East. Our actions there may affect Islamist strategy and tactics, but not their dream. We are not the creators of that problem.
The problem in Mexico is an entirely capitalist one. There are goods which are in great demand. Those goods are profitable and over nearly four decades we have caused a vast global giga-billion dollar industry to come into existence where once there were college students smuggling trunks of grass over the border at Spring Break. That is also not hyperbole. One of the floors of a dorm next to mine did exactly that and supplied the entire CMU campus back in the 1969-71 era. Then came Nixon and ‘Operation Intercept’. And what was the great accomplishment of this at the time great expenditure of taxpayer money? Why, by the time I left grad school prices had doubled, tripled or more and nearly all the smuggling was in the hands of organized crime instead of paying the tuition, room and board of a few engineering students. Even so, enforcement at the time was a still a joke, and much laughed at even as it transitioned from “Berkeley to Boston Forty Brick Lost Bag Blues” to Cheech and Chong’s “Up In Smoke”.
So what did the moralizing Statists do? Admit their failure? Apply tax payer money to something useful? Of course not… they did what governments always do with failures. They increased the budget. When that failed utterly they increased it again. And again. And again. Meanwhile, Libertarians correctly predicted disaster after disaster, decade after decade. Drugs are money and all that it buys. We put drug entrepreneurs outside of our then liberal legal framework… so they adapted and operated by the old fashioned rules of Feudalism.
Feudalism is the name we gave to violent gangs far enough in the past that we can romanticize them as Princes, Princesses, Knights and the like. The rules of the Feudal game are simple. You murder your way to the top then you pillage your competitors and steal their land and resources. If you are a mean enough SOB you get to live a life of sybaritic luxury… until someone nastier and smarter and more underhanded comes along and cuts your throat.
Fifteen hundred years ago it came about due to the post-Roman power vacuum. In our era the power vacuum is in a parallel world and economy. It is outside of our laws and nation states, by our own hands, and it exists side by side with us at every point.
Every time we drive up the cost of doing business, the feudal lords of this parallel universe counter predictably. The government of the United States succeeds only in adding to their cost of doing business. You might imagine that would be a big thing… but Statists have probably increased the cost of doing legal business even more over those decades. The more regulation, the more laws, the more taxes, the more individuals will find the ‘other side’ preferable.
Twenty-five years ago US military men stated they wanted nothing to do with the War on Drugs. Getting involved in it would put their institution at risk of bribary and corruption. The moralistic morons in government would have none of it. The military was called upon to run interdictions at sea and in the air to find potential smugglers. They have been countered by minisubs, UAV’s, counter-radar and a whole range of technological counter-measures. Every escalation provides the income necessary for the counter-escalation.
We have arrived at a predictable state of affairs. Feudal lords are now taking over portions of ‘our’ universe in which they hold the balance of power. Border provinces in Mexico are under their control. Military resources are appearing in their hands. Soon their private gangs will morph into real armies. They will bribe American military men and politicians. Where bribery does not work, they will kidnap and kill children and rape wives as object lessons in what happens when you dare to disobey the new royalty.
A time will come when the Mexican National government is absorbed. What do you think is going to happen then? When Mexican Special Forces are carrying out hits against any American who gets in the way of business, things are going to get very, very ugly. There will be calls to invade our southern neighbor and reasonable people will then have to agree there is no other choice. If and when it comes to that, we will have absolutely no one but our leaders to blame. It will be 100% their fault for getting us there.
You can not stop contraband. You can only make smugglers rich and powerful enough to buy you out or kill you.
I seem to remember a similar wail made about the Mafia in the 1970s. Didn’t quite work out that way, though.
No warlord (especially in Mexico) can last long against the U.S. military, as long as we’re serious about it and don’t tie the military’s hands.
In other words, the above scenario is quite possible if the Administration and Congress are controlled by Democrats, who are unable to comprehend the point at which crime becomes warfare (because to them, it’s all a question of law enforcement).
Just watching, and smiling here, Boss.
And not even Bill O’Reilly can blame this state of affairs on the corruption of cowardice of the Mexixcan leadership.
President Calderon is an honest man (as, to be fair, Mr O’Reilly and all others have admitted he is) and he is also a brave one.
And the soldiers he has sent to battle the drug gangs are brave – some have slowly had their heads cut off, and they have died without pleading for mercy (expressing their contempt for their murderers instead).
Yet the policy is not working.
Drug prohibition has given the gangs their chance.
There is also the matter of “gun control”.
Mexicans often say “illegal drugs are exported to you from Mexico, but illegal guns come into Mexico from the United States – this is what gives the cartels their power”.
This is yet more missing the point.
Because of Mexican “gun control” ordinary Mexicans can not defend themselves against cartels that seek not only to sell drugs but to control every aspect of life (taking money from everyone – and often a lot more than money).
It is like the citizens of the Roman Empire.
They were helpless against tyranny because of the ban on private ownership of weapons and traiing with weapons – a ban enforced as far back as the first Emperor (it was the real death of the Republic).
But they were also helpless against the invading barbarians. Centuries of tyranny had made them helpless (apart from in a few out of the way areas of the Empire where the control of weapons had never been solid).
And these barbarians were certainly not liberators.
To be fair to feudalism (not a stange a thing as it sounds)……
Even the Edict of Quierzy in 877 was a restatement of long held belief.
I.E. that Feudal King should NOT just take land from the weak (say a child or a widow) and give it to his favourates. That was one of the great difference between the West and the Islamic world (where, for all their other good elements, it was held that land was the plaything of the ruler).
Of course (especially in the 5th century the collapse of the Roman Empire) that is exactly what often did happen over Western Europe.
But that was not Feudalism (a system of mutal oaths – based on notions of honour and law, different from the Roman ones but not nonexistant) that was invasion.
The barbarians found a population that was already semi slave (it had been forbidden for centuries for peasants to even leave the farms) and where the greatest landowners were forbidden military commands (Senators could not hold commands in the late Empire) and could be put to death on the whims of Emperors (in fact ANY ROMAN LAW could be changed on the whim of an Emperor – a disgusting concept to people with a germanic tribal custom law background).
And the taxation rate was about 50% of the crop.
It was very difficult (perhaps impossible) for the barbarian tribesmen to have any respect for a population like this. They had no fixed law, they did not defend each other or themselves, they were used to being tortured (“putting the question” was a normal thing in the late Empire courts) and everything they did was subject to the whims of the rulers.
The barbarians did not know about the centuries of history that had made the people gradually accept things getting worse and worse.
They just saw a lot of slave like scum – and treated them accordingly.
As to the mafia, I would say the predictable did occur. Meaner and more callous gangs have for the most part taken over. They are everywhere within the US and their existence is fed by the huge flows of money.
Kim is correct in that the US military could ‘get serious’ and go into Mexico and kill the current crop of leaders. But then what? The market is and will always be there. No libertarian supports the prohibition or will assist on that front, nor will a damn large segment of the population of the US that feel the Statists can take their moralistic noses and ram them up their moralistic arses.
You are not going to decrease the market size. You can however, decrease the profit margin and price by bringing this feudal market into the normal markets of civil society.
Until we do that, the power OUTSIDE of civil society will continue to grow. They could not even stop drugs inside the USSR so we are most certainly not going to succeed here, even if we keep going down the police state road we are on. Because in a police state, the police are bought and paid for.
ROFLMAO… you think there is a military solution to this? Holy crap. Like, F-16 strikes in Latino parts of LA? Sorry but this is exactly the sort of thing the US military is hopeless at and for all the right reasons. We do tie our military hands. The only solution is social and political. And that is why we are fucked until the world tilts away from the pricks in charge now.
Janine said it better than I could.
I don’t think that legalization of stuff will make this problem go away. These gangs (or gangs in any country) have a lot of members who are (1) well-armed, (2) able & ready to commit violence, (3) have connections with local law enforcement — they know how to intimidate people well enough that their crimes are not seriously followed up. In short, these gangs have the means, motives & opportunities to commit crimes.
If, all of a sudden, their income from drugs (or profit margin) went to zero, do you honestly think they’d say “oh well, let’s go become productive members of society”? Fat chance. Kidnapping’s already a big business in Mexico. It’d only get worse if drug profits would get worse. Same with “protection” rackets, and all other forms of non-drug profit for gangs w/ the means, motives & opportunities to commit crimes.
Even if you think that reducing drug profit margins is a carrot to break down a gang, history tells us that the best method is a combined application of carrot & stick. Some people are motivated by less $. Some people are motivated by not being six feet under. Gotta do both.
Sorry, I don’t think it was three times better! Not sure how it came to be posted three times.
Nathan: sure you gotta do both. But kidnapping and protection are old problems that have been successfully dealt with before. Sure, there will always be crime to fight, but this fight is different in that it is clearly an unwinnable one.
Laird, actually it was three times better:-) Janine should comment much more often.
The problem with drug gangs is the same problem we’ve had will all manifestations of organized crime. They’re supplying a product people want. It’s no different than booze, hookers, or gambling where these things are illegal. They have the support of some nontrivial segment of the population.
If drugs were legalized they certainly would try to keep kidnapping. But without supplying a product people want, they’d be cut down pretty quickly. The Sicilian and Jewish mafias that rose to prominence during prohibition became a pale shadow of their former glory after repeal, and MS-13 will be no different.
I dont think it is the choice of drugs or kidnapping. We have to do to the drug lords what we do to our own population… incremental reduction of profitability through a process of increasing decriminalization.
Kim,
If you think the Mafia is gone, I have a bridge to sell you. Organized crime may have changed the cast and crew, but the show remains the same. Now, its Russians, Albanians, Chinese, Indians, and many more in addition to the Sicilians.
Drugs are a big part of it, but they are not the only part. Legalization would help, but it is not a panacea. These days, the sex-slave trade is a bigger moneymaker worldwide, just not so much in the US—yet. It is, however, growing.
Unfortunately, legalizing prostitution could actually make that problem worse—because while illegal drugs are more expensive than legal ones would be, sex slaves are much cheaper than honest prostitutes.
So: we need to legalize at least some of the drug trade, but realize that this would only be the start. The criminals need to die.
Along with missing the point, as you correctly observe, this is also largely incorrect. The cartel is partially armed with guns that cross the border going south.[1] However, very little came (directly) from here. The last great gun raid in northern Mexico turned up a bunch of stolen HK rifles of the sort issue to the Mexican army, a few guns bought or stolen in the US, a few of the new FN 5.7×28 carbine[2], and a few M-16 rifles that were lost from US inventory…in Vietnam.[3]
So, the MX government is, to put it most politely, lying through their rutting teeth. Their claims that los yanquis are arming the cartels are not much more true as the Ron Paul claim about who armed Saddam Hussein.
As to the matter of bribery…I only knew one cop who’d take fifty bucks over a speeding ticket. He was given up by his peers, decertified and prosecuted and good riddance to that slimy little fuck and I hope he was raped in jail. The amount of money involved in the case at hand, though, thanks to the War on Drugs…a department with poor selection practices in a city with institutionalized corruption already, like a large city near my childhood home, is going to have a few folks go very, very rogue.[4]
Some places have a culture that corruption will not be tolerated. I was very, very blessed to end up in a place like that. In others, the culture is one where nickel and dime sleaze will be allowed to slide, which makes things friendlier to the larger-scale dirt.
[1] The obvious answer: locking down the border, seems to have completely passed the Mexican government by.
[2] IMHO, it’s an expensive and curious toy. But it’s designed around an armor-piercing round that’s specifically made for penetrating woven armor like the stuff I wear daily. The ammunition is not sold to individuals. By FN’s (and their distributors’) rule, (and possibly existing Federal law as well) even I, in my official capacity and ordering on department letterhead, can’t lay hands on the stuff. Meaning it didn’t come from the US.
[3] Supplied in socialist fraternity by the Hanoi regime to one of the various red insurgent groups?
[4] I know a few people will guess the city and the exact scandal. I’d take it as a personal kindness if you’d keep it off-line.
Glad you dropped in Sunfish. I agree that in most places, right now, most cops are fairly honest. The problem is what happens with large amounts of money over time… and when the option becomes not of whether you take the money, but whether you instead get your little girl’s ear in the mail.
Oh, and the person who is going to send you the ear is doing so because his little girl is being held ransom or he has been told precisely what will happen if he doesn’t do what he is told.
And you’ve just described the last 30-40 years of Colombian history. The Spanish term is ‘plato o plomo.’ ‘Silver or Lead.’
Also known as “making an offer you can’t refuse,” with the distinction being that mafiosi were supposedly relatively civilized about leaving innocent family members alone, compared to the modern narcotraficantes.
If there’s any good news to be had for Mexico being told “You are today what Colombia was in 1985,” it’s that Colombia’s a lot better of than they were. And Mexico also doesn’t have an ideological insurgency a la FARC (at least not on the same scale) to go along with a gangster takeover of half of the country.
So there’s light at the end of the tunnel, but it’s a long, long tunnel.
(And for the guy who thinks that deflating the profit margin won’t help much: ever notice that Vladimir Putin and his sock puppet Medvedev behave a lot better when oil’s at $40/bbl as opposed to $130?)
You heard it here first: wait until the narco’s discover what dollars can buy in the former Soviet Union – I am frankly surprised they have not yet, or if they have, why they are not using it. I suppose Chavez has not taken delivery yet. For $20 mln, you can have delivered pretty much anywhere a Russian gunship that surely will not stand up to the US Airforce, but can wipe out a Mexican army battalion without reloading – and I do not think anyone is under any delusion as to the availability of $20 million for the cartels. Mugabe in Zimbabwe is obliterating villages with flyable second-hand helicopters (pilot, gunner, machine gun, and ammo) that can be had for $500K.
Unless you kill the profits from drugs, the war on drugs is lost before it was even started (channeling Sun-Tzu).
You’re only thinking of the bad side!
War would be good for the economy- especially with all this talk of depression and unemployment!
Presuming you win, you could incorporate mexico into the USA! No more border hassles!
And the effect on political longevity would be great- the masses will rally around the flag for a war, keeping pollies in power for years!
Win, win, win!
Yes, the Constitution would be even more trampled, and it would be a bad day for liberty, but you’re just looking at the dead trees and not seeing the dead forest!
You may have a point, I don’t know, but I have a question: why is there no slave trade in cheap housekeepers or cheap dishwashers? Or is there?
You may have a point, I don’t know, but I have a question: why is there no slave trade in cheap housekeepers or cheap dishwashers? Or is there?
[Posted by Alisa at March 13, 2009 09:07 AM]
I suppose because, while the military might be lethal and justice might be determined, the IRS is ruthless and they love the paperwork.
They are not able to stop drug smuggling and use in Iran (largest % of addicts population in the world) and Saudi Arabia; and no one can say they are not able to be stern or have not enough tolls and will.
Even if the US military go in Mexico and kill all the drug lords (and I think this is more difficult than going in Iraq and killing all of the Jihadists), then what they will do?
Stay there or come back?
If they stay there, they will be corrupted. If they return home, someone else will start the traffic anew.
Afghanistan is an interesting example.
Then there is the problem of [innocent] civilians killing; the “collateral damages”. Mexicans (and others Latinos) in US will not sympathize with this and could side with the gangs.
The smuggler in Mexico have no ideological problems to try to corrupt the US personnel and the US personnel have not the same ideological problems to accept a bribe from them.
And we are not touched the fact that, with advanced and cheap tech (but not so advanced) the smugglers will be able to produce directly the drugs, if they are forced to do so. They surely have the money to pay for the pharmacology and chemistry workers.
Let’s just jump into fantasy land for a moment, and assume you get your wish: All drugs are decriminalized and prostitution is brought into the mainstream (and we’ll set aside any impacts that might have on crimes against women and drug use).
Then what? Do you think these drug lords will retire from criminal activities? Do you think they’ll allow government to regulate their industry, pay import taxes, and become upstanding, law-abiding citizens?
What part of “criminals” and their behavior do you not understand?
This is the same flawed logic that makes people think that making gun ownership a crime will result in a decrease of gun crimes. Criminals don’t care what is legal. That’s why we call them criminals.
The reality of what would happen is closer to the reverse. Kidnapping will become one of the few remaining illegal activities they’ll still have available. Unless you’re proposing we make kidnapping legal, too.
These are all examples good-intentioned rides down the slippery slope. When prohibition ended, organized crime switched to drugs, numbers rackets, pornography, prostitution, and extortion. They didn’t fold up shop and take jobs as Boy Scout leaders and Wal-Mart greeters. When Denmark legalized pornography, the type of pornography created by organized crime had to become darker (that which hadn’t been decriminalized). You quickly get to the point where there are few things left to decriminalize. Child and snuff porn, kidnapping, extortion, etc. are all they have left.
Criminals will always exist. That’s a fact. The only thing that changes is what is defined as criminal. If you legalize recreational drugs for adults, what market remains for criminals selling recreational drugs? If you think targeting drugs for children will be beyond reproach for these folks, you’re still not getting what the term “criminal” means.
If you believe that recreational drugs should be decriminalized, that’s all fine and dandy–everyone is entitled to have an opinion on the subject. But tying it to a crime reduction argument is just nuts. Only the offense will change.
Of course there’s a military solution. Once the “drug lords” assume all the propensities of lordships — fiefdoms, castles, properties — they become vulnerable to targeted strikes. All that’s required, as I said earlier, is the political will to do so.
Tom Clancy’s “Clear and Present Danger” looked at the issue, but made it the action of a rogue President. But if the President had not only popular support, but also support from the other country’s government (as would be the case if the Mexican cartels get too big for comfort), the Air Force would be issuing target coordinates in a few minutes*.
I know, I know… some are going to call this a militaristic pipe-dream.
It’s as valid a pipe-dream, however, as the libertarian one that decriminalizing drugs will just make all the bad guys disappear (as The Mrs. pointed out above).
*assuming that the President were not Obama or similar.
I agree. This is also a big reason why Afghanistan is turning out to be a bigger problem than Iraq. Once you kill enough of a paricular breed of ideological nutcases, their ideas are discredited and it will take a long time to brainwash enough children and raise them to an age at which they can be fired at the infidel. When you mix in pure capitalism, the story is wholly different. Money has no ideology. If you offer a poor farmer double price for planting what you want, you will find lots of farmers to take the risk. If you offer $20K for one smuggling run into Europe or the US, you will have no shortage of takers, even if someone’s army just wiped out your competitor’s organization to the last man, woman and child.
Deadly beliefs can be defeated by killing enough of the carriers. That’s why Nazism isn’t much of a bother to us today. But when a market exists, a business will pop up again to serve it, no matter how many of the employees you kill.
Let me fix that for you:
There is no magic solution. You cannot stop contraband. You can only change the definition of what is contraband. You cannot eliminate crime, or rid the world of criminals. You can only change the focus of their activities. They’ll be with us, always.
Mrs. du Toit, no one disputes that criminals will be with us, always. That’s a given, so move on. The fact remains that we created the (modern US-style) Mafia via Prohibition, and we created the Mexican and Columbian drug cartels via drug prohibition and, specifically, the War on Drugs. So now they have their billions and their organizations, and that’s not going to change. But at least we can stop funding the growth of those enterprises. We can stop making the problem worse. Legalization (not mere “decriminalization”) will accomplish this. And yes, the criminals will undoubtedly turn their attention to other areas (other criminal activities, undoubtedly, but also possibly [gasp] some perfectly legal ones, too, as the Mafia has done). But whatever those activities they probably won’t be as profitable as the drug trade, and in any event that’s tomorrow’s problem. Refusing to fix a policy which is completely and demonstrably flawed (on numerous levels) simply because it won’t also fix another problem is completely irrational.
What Sunfish, Janine and Laird said.
Maybe it has escaped notice, but the US military and its proxies have been heavily involved in trying to suppress the South American drug trade for decades now.
It.
Doesn’t.
Work.
It’s the same thinking that says that the Somali pirates can be sent packing with a couple of 30-calibers on the bridge wings, that’ll show those dusky brigands who’s boss, what, what?
The US military – any military of a civilized Western power – is essentially an arm of national diplomacy that’s especially hard on the furniture. When you send them against people who, for reasons of ideology or financial greed, don’t play by any rules, they will have a long, hard way to go with a very small chance of success.
Is the US – are YOU – prepared to make being caught dealing drugs a fate so unappealling that it cancels out the lure of vast profits? People are already prepared to risk the most ghastly fates to try and get a piece of the action – what have YOU got to dissuade them?
When doing the wrong thing in the drug trade will earn you a Colombian necktie (do NOT Google this) from your business competitors, the threat of a warm cell with cable TV and 3 squares a day at Camp X-Ray or similar means – nothing. Even the electric chair means – nothing.
I don’t know what the answers are. I just know that our current policy is making it worse – a lot worse. And whenever you’re in a deep hole, digging more is never a good idea.
As to the suggestion that criminals denied the vast profits of the drug trade will turn to other crime to make up their income – maybe so. But what crime could they turn to that would have a worse effect than what they do now? Remember – they are economic criminals. Blood is a big expense, as Sollozzo said – the Mafia knew full-well that violence against civilians and running gun battles in the streets is bad for business. These folks is greedy, and they is amoral. What they isn’t is stupid.
The suggestion that they replace their drug income with kidnapping is far-fetched. They make their drug profits like salami – a lot of little slices. There simply arent enough kidnapping targets that could return them even a millionth part of their current income. It’s like the idea that you can balance the budget by taxing only the rich – there aren’t enough rich people to provide the income.
llater,
llamas
The first step of legalising drugs will in the short term make a lot of things much worse as Mrs Du Toit says. There will be many drug organisations who want to retain their power money and influence and they will of course move on to other things. Just like the alcohol runners moved on to other things.
But these people exist to the extent that they do only because drugs are illegal. It would have been far better if they were never illegal in the first place. One would have hoped that lessens would have been learned from prohibition.
Allowing drugs tobe legally produced, traded and used will weaken the cartels, make their life more difficult and change the motivations of those who work for them or who might consider working for them. The war on drugs has created problems which have to be dealt with. Assuming that because the only effective long term solution to dealing with them will create huge short term problems is a receipe for stagnation and acceptance of criminality.
Who remembers Buster Edwards?
Ronald ‘Buster’ Edwards was one of the front crew of the Great Train Robbery. In August 1963, this motley band of brigands used the most laughable techniques to stop a mail train in the English countryside, and more by luck than by judgement waltzed off into the night with £2.6 million in used currency. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about £50 million in today’s money.
Buster spent 3 years on the run and another 9 years inside for his part in this caper. He got out in 1975. He was a ‘hard’ man, a boxer and a bouncer and no stranger to violence.
When he got out, what did he do?
He opened a flower stall on Waterloo Station. Back in the day, YHS occasionally bought a bunch of daffs or similar from Buster, on his way to see his dear old Mum.
Buster was purely an economic criminal. When that didn’t work for him anymore, even though he’d known wealth unfathomable to others – and indeed, to himself – he found something else to do.
The same thing will happen here. The drug trade consists of a very few ‘kingpins’ at the top, supported by an army of workers trying to claw their way to the top. As Levitt and Dubner have written, if the drug business is so lucrative, why do most dealers live with their mothers, or in the most degraded fleabag dumps imaginable?
Legalize dope, cut the head off the snake, and as long as you make it so that the people who are growing and handling the product can make a decent living at it, most of the criminal activity will melt away. A decent living is more than most of them are making today anyway.
But cutting the head off the snake is going to involve some activities that are going to be kind-of tough to swallow.
llatyer,
llamas
RE: Posted by Kim du Toit at March 13, 2009 02:49 PM.
I think you are missing the point about the embedded, parallel nature of these feudal lords. You can probably ‘cure’ a cancerous tumor with a well-placed round from a .357, the problem is the embedded nature of cancer makes that a suicidal option.
Like Janine said, are you really going to call in air strikes on public housing? Are you going to capture an entire neighborhood with an infantry division, line the people all up and drug test them? And if so, then what?
Military deals with turf, police deal with people. Whenever they attempt the other’s function things get very bad. I am originally from a part of Chicago that was at that time controlled by the Latin Kings with some disputing of that by the Vice Lords. These gangs are nothing compared to what gangs are now nationwide. I lived just a couple of blocks from the Shakespeare police station mentioned in this article.
Those Latin Kings (who’s world headquarters is less than a mile from where I lived) have expanded.
These gang members have been moving into positions of political power for many years. As tempting as it is to call in air strikes on Chicago politicians and their staff, I hope you don’t mind my joining in the laughter when you suggest a military solution to these parallel feudal states that are controlled by drug gangs.
Fighting them with an army would be harder than grabbing hold of smoke. This is not a turf war of the type the US military can fight. It is not one that police can win. It is not one that personal liberty can survive.
Llamas,
The plural of anecdote is not data.
The existing criminal population commits the majority of crimes. Within 3 years, 67.5% of those released from prison are back in. That 67.5% stat represents those who were caught committing crimes in the three years after release. It doesn’t include those who haven’t been caught (yet).
While your story left me feeling all warm and fuzzy, it isn’t the way to bet. The majority of criminals who get out of prison immediately return to a life of crime… that is why locking them up for even petty offenses (the sitting on egg crates complaints) has the result of a lowering all crimes.
You’re just changing the text on the dockets.
Again, make the case that there is an inherent benefit in decriminalizing recreational drugs, but tying it to myths that criminals will simply go away or reform is not one of them.
Connie, if I understand you correctly, you are saying that there are people who are “wired by nature” to be criminals, and that they will tend to engage in criminal activities no matter what the rest of us does. If so, I absolutely agree. Thing is, the majority of people in the world who are engaged in the illegal drug business do not belong to this group. The majority are more or less “regular” people who for various reasons respond to the financial incentive associated withe this business. And so while it is true that upon release from prison they are very likely to return to this business, the main reason for this is that same financial incentive. Take that away, and a lot will change, at least some of it for the better. Make no mistake, I am under no illusion that legalizing drugs will create some kind of panacea, and there will be no more crime, and the wolf shall dwell with the lamb. But like llamas says, the current policy only makes a bad situation worse. It has been tried for long enough for that to be obvious, it’s time to try something else.
Mrs du Toit – it was just an amusing anecdote. Nothing more to it than that. Just peg me as a raconteur.
I did not say that there was an inherent benefit in decriminalizing recreational drugs. Nor did I say that criminal will simply ‘go away or reform’.
However, you must agree that a large number of the ‘criminals’ jailed (in the US at least) for drugs-related offences are primarily users, not dealers.
A further large number are those who are jailed for economic crimes tied to the drug trade – in other words, they stole, or robbed, or burgled, or mugged, or dealt in drugs, to support their own use. The economic level of their crimes is high because drugs are illegal, and thus expensive, and the violence of their crimes may likewise be high because the drug trade is illegal and violence is the only way to protect your business.
MJ could be cheaper than tobacco – it is, after all, a weed – and by the time the agronomists at Monsanto were done with it, cocaine could certainly have a price equivalent to or less than good single-malt Scotch.
Decriminalize it, and all those people who are in jail simply because it was illegal to buy, sell or use the stuff – would no longer be in jail. And those who have a compunction to continue to use the stuff – can buy it legally, for a tolerable price, and will no longer have to steal 5Cs a day to feed their jones. They will only have to steal 5Xs a day. Drug dealers will no longer shoot up neighborhoods in battles over ‘turf’ – there is no ‘turf’, you buy it from the Gummint store.
There’s your benefit. Drug-related crime losses go down (they will never be eradicated), violent crime reduces, and society’s useless expenditures spent on incarcerating drug criminals will be reduced.
It’s exactly what happened when Prohibition ended.
You are perfectly correct in saying that most criminals are hopeless recidivists – this is nowhere more true than in the area of drug crimes. So why is it so hard to believe that crime will reduce if we stop calling what these people do, a crime, and if we reduce the cost of doing it so that if they do turn to property crime to do it – they’ll steal less? Property crime will always be with us – surely reducing it is a benefit?
To suggest otherwise is to suggest that a heroin addict who steals $500 a day to buy heroin, will always steal $500 a day to buy heroin – no matter what it actually costs him.
Or her.
llater,
llamas
The du Toits have convinced me. Legalization is wrong. We need to butch up and get serious about winning.
We need a highway interdiction plan with teeth. Allowing warrantless searches of cars upon probable cause is okay, since the car’s own mobility is itself exigent circumstances. But that leaves nothing for when we know that the car has stuff inside but the probable cause isn’t available. We need to legalize stops and dog sniffs, and the detentions to make people wait for the dogs, even without particularized suspicion.
We need to shut down grow operations. We need to know exactly who is running indoor gardens. We need to know their power consumption. We need thermal images of their houses to find the grow lights. We need to be able to enter and search the houses without having to wait for them to flush the stuff or smuggle it out.
We need to deprive the dopers of the means of profiting from their crimes. We need to seize everything that might possibly be fruit or instrumentality. Find Cannabis sativa plants on a farm? We need to take the farm away from that farmer so that he can’t grow pot there anymore. Oh, he didn’t plant it? A likely story. He should have kept better control over that property.
We need to prevent diversion of controlled prescription medication. We need police to be able to have rapid access to medical records to determine if a given oxycodone prescription is legitimate. We need to compel quantitative drug testing of the approved users of prescription drugs so that we can be sure that they’re not selling every third tablet. We need to be able to seize their doctor’s records.
We need to know who’s actually using the drugs. There’s only one way to do this: drug testing of the general public on an unprecedented scale. Step right up, Mr. and Mrs. America, and fill these sample bottles. This one says you pissed hot for heroin. Turn around, put your hands behind your head, interlace your fingers. You say you ate a poppyseed bagel? A likely story.
We need sentencing with teeth. We need an effective death penalty. We need sentences to be carried out in a timely fashion. Some people may claim that an appeals process is needed to ensure that evidence used at trial is collected in accordance with constitutional norms, or to grant new trials to people who had public defenders who weren’t trained for capital cases or who slept during the proceedings. We say, the criminal should have made better choices and he wouldn’t have had to even stand trial.
We need to allow anonymous complaints to be admitted into evidence. Everybody knows that drug dealers kill witnesses. If we don’t keep the witness identities completely out of the record and prevent the defense from ever seeing or confronting these witnesses, then the witnesses will be assassinated and no other witnesses will come forward.
So how many people are you willing to kill in order to make a show of having the biggest dick in the Western Hemisphere?
Wow, Sunfish. You used up all the available straw for that straw man! What will DU be using for theirs?
You could try character assassination next. Oops. You included that, too! A two-fer!
No, actually the sex-slave trade is supported by prohibition. Illegal prostitutes cannot go to the police for protection. And, there is no evidence that “sex-slave” prostitutes are any cheaper, except when they come from third-world or poor countries. So with a more open immigration policy, they wouldn’t have to be sex-slaves to immigrate to or work in the U.S. Further, if prostitution is legalized, there would be enough local prostitutes to fulfill demand, keeping prices lower, without giving foreign gangs incentive to import prostitutes.
But that political will won’t be there, because drug prohibition is morally wrong, and I and millions like me will oppose any false-righteous war. It’ll become another Vietnam but worse, and cause real political instability in the U.S., as millions of patriotic U.S. citizens oppose U.S. efforts.
Ultimately, the traitorous, false-righteous drug warriors will fail, or revolution will spread to the U.S.
Do you want to win, or not? The current (lack of) strategy is not working. In the roughly a decade that I’ve been a drug warrior, the price of MJ has dropped. The retail price of meth hasn’t kept pace with inflation. Put on your economist hat: what do stable-to-slightly-falling prices tell you about supply relative to demand?
And I hate to break it to you, but in various forms half of the crap I posted is already here.
If you thought that was a character assassination, then you’re too thin-skinned to play in this (or any) sandbox.
Mrs. du Toit, there is a difference between a “straw man” argument and hyperbole. The latter is a literary device used to make a point, and Sunfish has employed it quite effectively here. A tour de force, one might say.
And I saw no evidence in his post of character assassination. [Of course, that’s not to discount the possibility of character suicide in your own. 🙂 ]
Laird – the trouble is – it wasn’t hyperbole.
Every measure described in Sunfish’s post – is in effect now, in at least some part of the US. The only part that even skirts the edges of hyperbole is his comment about the death penalty.
And it still doesn’t make a damned bit of difference. Hence his parting comment – just how far are you prepared to go in destroying liberty and enslaving the population to make sure that no-one ever tokes down or shoots up, ever again?
The Mexican drug lords are bringing their drug wars to the streets of the border states. Innocent people are getting killed and injured in the crossfire. How much innocent blood are you prepared to see spilled so that we can all puff out our chests and declare that we’re ‘tough on drugs’?
Are you prepeared to see military patrols in the streets of Juarez and Phoenix and San Diego and DFW, stopping-and-searching without PC and engaging in gun battles with smugglers who won’t come quietly?
Heck, you only need to read radley Balko’s blog (ww.theagitator.com) and even if you discount half of what he reports, you’ll see where innocent civilians and honets street coppersd are being killed and maimed virtually every day to secure trivial amounts of trivial drugs. Some areas of drug enforcement have been hopelessly corrupted – not by the drug dealers, but by the incentives that encourage them to engage in armed assaults and intimidation, but seldom punish them when (as increasingly happens) they assault the wrong place and shoot the wrong person.
And someone wants more of this? More heavily-armed paramilitary assaults that seem so often to end in tragedy, more erosion of the rights of citizens that so-seldom finds real drug dealers but so-often ruins the lives of trivial offenders and their families, more asset-forfeiture that always seems to become a funding mechanism – we want more? How badly does the country have to be wrecked before we cry ‘enough’ and realize that this problem – which in many cases is not really a problem at all – simply doesn’t respond to these kinds of solutions?
llater,
llamas
A wee bit too much hyberbole about the whole “northern Mexico is going to hell in a handbasket and bieng taken over by narcos” thing.. I live in Mexico much of the year, and Im not talking about bieng enclosed in some walled gringo colony on the shores of lake Ajijic. I speak fluent spanish and travel throughout the country, including the northern states. These places are not devastated war zones. Going there you would hardly notice anything visibly wrong (aside form a somewhat larger number of police in the cities) life goes on in these states, civil services still function, most people don’t lose family members daily to drug trafficking butchers etc… Yes there are problems, and lot of dead (vast majorit of them either traffickers or soldiers and police), but lets not get cart ahead of the mule and claim the region anarchic! haha.
Yes, I lived here in Belfast during the last five years of the troubles. Other than the soldiers patrolling with military gear and cops in armored Landrovers you would not have known what was going on. When this kind of war goes on you do not see it as a visitor. It is invisible (other than in the news) for years until suddenly a horrible day arrives and you are in the wrong place at the wrong time. I never was. People who were are dead.
People imagine warfare like they see it in the old movies. Much of modern day fighting is not like that at all. You could be moving through a busy market on a sunny day, kids and dogs could be running around just like any other day… and suddenly all hell breaks loose. It is my understanding that at least 3000 people were killed in that area of Mexico within the last year.
So get the “advancing through Europe” picture out of your head. Instead think of the sounds of distant gunfire and of the occasional person disappearing in the night … only to be found in bits a few days later after being tortured. The real deal torture, not loud music and damp rags. Think of a constant, underlying sense of fear that permeates your life. Think of a lively bar scene because the best way to deal with it all is to stay drunk.
Then you will begin to understand what a war zone really is.
When people say “the government could do this or that” I think they underestimate just how like the late Roman Empire (or the Byzantine Empire that came after it in the East) the modern United States (and many other countries) is. The late Roman Empire (and the Byzantine Empire) were still capable of impressive military victories from time to time – but they could not keep things up, they could not get normal things done (the government tried to do everything – so ended up not capable of doing anything).
Gone are the days when a President could issue an order (say “remove the illegal immigrants” as Ike did) and reasonably expect the plan to put into effective action.
The United States can no longer control its borders (any more than most European countries can).
“But it could if it did X, Y, Z”.
But it can not – any more than Rome could follow X, Y, Z tactics (suggested by many people at the time) to control fairly small numbers of invaders who were doing various things (and they were fairly small numbers of people).
The administration had so tied itself up in knots that it could not really do anything (other than plunder and abuse unarmed citizens of course).
Presently in L.A. the council is demanding that Homebase produce reports on what it will do for the illegal immigrants that stand on its property.
Not just build centers (with showers and so on) for the trespassers, but produce lot of admin papers as well.
And of course the counter proposal of “we will ask these trespassers to leave our property (as they are not customers) and if they refuse to go we will shoot them” would not go down very well.
Of course the ACORN Trainer In Chief who sits in Washington D.C. is no different from the L.A. council (actually he is worse) – and even he was not so bad the modern adminstrative and legal structure of the United States would prevent effective action, on this or any other matter.
So “we will go into Mexico and sort the place out” is absurd (whatever may be true on paper – if one looks at the available armed forces and so on). The American government (Federal, State and local) can not even keep a firm grip on the cities.
The government could try repealing laws it plainly can not enforce (such as the laws against drugs), but even this seems to be poltically impossible.
As the terrible notion has taken root (as it did in the late Roman Empire) that anything the government does not forbid it approves of.
“Compusory or forbidden” is the modern conception of things.
So legalizing drugs (to the modern mind) is saying “drugs good” – and that is not politically acceptable.
The whole system needs a vast roll back – or it will collapse into chaos.
And chaos is not liberty.
The best comment on the war on drugs was made by an American (I forget who).
“America can either be free, or drug-free, but not both”
Okay…
There was not a lot of hyperbole in there. When it comes to rhetorical flourishes, I usually prefer drunken profanity over hyperbole.
But…go ahead and discount any two-thirds of Radley Balko says. I do all the time. Llamas will tell you, I’m no admirer of his.
The thermal imager and utility bills thing: presently requires a search warrant. It’s incredibly difficult to conduct a legal search of a residence based upon probable cause but under exigent circumstances[1]. But not always impossible.
The drug testing of the general public: if it’s here, it’s here through the service entrance. Apart from government employment and contractors and DUID enforcement I’ve not heard of a whole lot of effort to force general drug testing.
The medical records: it’s here. DEA can go poring through the records of any doctor with a license to prescribe controlled substances, in order to look for diversion.
The forfeiture: that describes what is presently legal for forfeitures undertaken under Federal law, and in at least a few states as well. Not in Colorado, but we’re a special case. (And the fine human beings at CACP and CSOC are trying to ‘fix’ it.) Some states may have rules, like forbidding an agency from using forfeited goods to fund payroll and forbidding agency employees from buying forfeited goods, or requiring that the owner actually have done something wrong (CO does all three) but not every state can manage even that least little bit.
Vehicle searches: not too far a stretch from where we are now. Remember what I said about exigent circumstances providing an alternative to a search warrant? Under current (and fairly un-controversial) case law, a vehicle IS an exigency.
And what llamas said about putting a boot to the wrong door. I’m personally a huge fan of military weapons and body armor being in every squad car in the US and of regular training in storming houses and schools. We’re expected to roll on things that didn’t really happen ten years ago. However, every time time a door is kicked, there is a non-zero chance that someone innocent will die. While the odds are tiny, IMHO ‘tiny’ is still too large, compared to whatever benefit society hopes to get from protecting people dumb enough to smoke crack from being able to buy it.
[1] In layman’s terms: you have enough evidence to get a warrant but the evidence you hope to seize or the life you hope to save will be lost if you take the time.
Llamas, you started off your post addressing it to me. I presume that your only purpose for that was to tell me specifically that, in your opinion, Sunfish’s post wasn’t hypoerbole, and that it wasn’t your intent that the rest of your comments be also addressed to me. Because your post is liberally sprinkled with “you”s, and seems to imply that I support increased militarization in the War on Drugs. If I misread it I apologize, but please know that nothing could be farther from the truth, as I think my earlier post (as well as others on this site over the years) amply demonstrates.
I didn’t read it that way. I don’t think anyone on this list would believe you would think that way. So kiss and make up guys. You’re both on the side of the angels.
Laird – no offence meant. You were just the jumping-off point, and you’ll note that once I hit my stride (on those damned chiclet laptop keys) I shifted to ‘we’ and ‘our’. Once again, no offence meant, I thibnk I have a rough idea of where you’re coming from.
Sunfish wrote:
‘Apart from government employment and contractors and DUID enforcement I’ve not heard of a whole lot of effort to force general drug testing.’
and things may be different in his neck of the woods. But here, we see drug-testing of high-school athletes (don’t tell me it’s just for steroids and HGH), drug testing of public-housing occupants, drug-testing of parolees and folks on probation (even if their offences had nothing to do with drugs), and of course drug-testing for virtually any employment application. I realize this last is a non-state activity – but how long will that be the case? Data will out.
On the thermal-imaging and utility-bill thing – I liken this to the banking rules. Used to be that if bank records were desired, a warrant was required. Now, the banks are required to report any transaction over $10K to the Feds, and there are other reporting requirements as well, under the general rubric of ‘Know Your Customer’. It’s only a matter of time before the utility companies are required to install algorithms in their billing utilities which flag increased or ‘disproportionate’ use of energy for ‘further investigation’. And you cannot persuade me that those police helicopters cruising over major metropolitan areas fitted with FLIR technology – are not using it. I know coppers, and you’ll have a hard time to persuade me that it isn’t used for ‘informal’ investigations and/or ‘intelligence-gathering’.
llater,
llamas
Please note that the March 7th/13th edition of the UK magazine ‘The Economist’, which has only just arrived at casa llamas, contains an excellent leading article plus 6 pages of background and briefers on this very topic. The leading article is unabashedly in favour of levels of legalization of both production and consumption, and the supporting data seems (to me) to make a very compelling case. I commend it to your attention – most public libraries seem to carry the magazine.
llater,
llamas
Bank records: Everything over $10K is submitted to the Treasury Department’s El Paso Intelligence Center. The banks are pretty up-front about this. There’s been talk of raising the limit because $10K is a used non-leaking Harley (AKA a set of hen’s teeth) that’s only been ridden to the bar and back (AKA almost all of them) on Craigslist. But it hasn’t actually happened.
“Suspicious” transactions of ANY amount are also reported to EPIC in a Suspicious Activity Report. However, the bank is not allowed to tell the transactor that they’re squealing. They’re allowed to provide it to the local police, but the locals aren’t allowed to disclose the existence of a SAR. If I were to see one, I would not be allowed to even mention it in a sealed warrant affidavit. With the current security theater over terrorists laundering money, I don’t see that changing any time soon. (This, BTW, is what bit Elliot Spitzer in the ass. None of his withdrawls hit the $10K limit, but the pattern looked suspicious. I have at-best mixed feelings about this program and don’t like vice laws, but it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.)
Re: FLIR on helicopters: I don’t know if there’s a single one even flying in Colorado right now. Denver and Jefferson County both grounded their programs for budget reasons some time ago (JeffCo before I even moved here.) And even if they find something, they still need to somehow turn it into a search warrant affidavit that will survive a suppression hearing. So, this threat is IMHO mostly hypothetical unless the judge is worthless…okay, forget I said anything.
Re: drug testing: My high school (not in Colorado) wanted to test students in every single extracurricular activity. Even though they’d have lost the entire theater program and the only people left in the band would be, well, probably nobody. (It strangely disappeared when some student -I don’t think it was me- asked the school board to compel drug testing of teachers and administrators. Funny, that.)
We don’t have drug testing for public housing here, but then my city also doesn’t have publicly-OWNED housing. We’ve got the Section 8 rental assistance program, but there’s no way they test the recipients. That program would never write a check if they did.