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Aswad -> RE: War on Drugs "killing our children" (4/8/2012 3:06:08 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: kdsub
All bad ideas just as yours.
Did you learn nothing from prohibition?
Have you had a look at what groups like Z are up to these days?
Because of dogmatism, they can charge enough money from drug sales to make a habit of killing people in public to enforce their own laws (let's not pretend for a moment that the Mexico government decides what law the population is subject to and must live by; if there is any deterrent value in capital punishment, then the cartels are the law).
If you want to solve the problem, you first need to rein it in a bit, put it back under your own control. And the drug cartels are willing to spend more money on preventing you from doing so by force of arms than you have in your national budget as a whole. Iraq and Afghanistan are pocket change, compared to what you'll need to spend if you want to fight this war with guns. Your enemies already are fighting it with guns (purchased in the USA, which is how it feeds back into your economy, cementing the arrangement that makes the war on drugs so attractive to politicians). Most of all, though, they're fighting it with fear, which works damn well.
Yes, some people want to kill. You have a gun industry to cater to them, police to investigate and arrest them, and courts to prosecute them. There is no incentive to facilitate murder, and so no need to undermine such an incentive, because one doesn't exist.
Yes, some people want to get high. You have cartels to cater to them, police to get out of the cartels' way to avoid having their families tortured to death, and courts to acquit them for the same reason. There is ample incentive for the cartels to facilitate drug use, given the profit margin and their own impoverished living conditions, and so someone will always step up to provide it.
This incentive can be undermined by eliminating the profit margin.
Whatever else you want to do about drugs, that's where you have to start, or else you're in a bidding war that you just can't win, because of the sheer amount of money involved. Every time you cut someone down, you've run their competition's errand, and changed nothing. It justs opens up new markets for the surviving competition. You've given them a monopoly to demand the price that the market will bear, and the market will bear a damn high price.
So long as there is poverty, someone will be willing to take any level of risk for money. It's why there are cartels. Or child labor. Or slave brothels. Or street workers. People choose to do whatever they can to ameliorate a lousy situation, laws be damned. Morals is for those of us that have a roof over our heads and food on our plate. Take away our civilized comforts, and humans revert to animals. And then do whatever it takes to get somewhere.
Are you telling me you're as hungry to shut them down as they are to eat?
As afraid of drugs as they are of being killed with a blowtorch?
That's your enemy, right there. People that have a harder choice than most people in your country will ever know. On the one hand, they can live in a state of abject poverty with their family, up until the cartels decide to skin them alive to warn others who's in charge. On the other hand, they can become well off by joining those cartels, and be assured that any attack on them and theirs will result in retaliation of a discouraging nature.
Whoever you send after them has to be equally motivated, equally pervasive and every bit as hardened. And they have to be equally well funded. This is, of course, assuming you throw all morality out the window yourself in the process. If you don't, expect to top their budgets by an additional digit at the very least. Oh, and remember, replacement of killed troops will have to be virtually free, or else you'll be at a serious disadvantage, since the cartels have a mass of people to draw on that are essentially worth nothing to them and can be bought for pocket change. Might as well bomb a third of the world to the ground to keep the casualties down.
Is that how you want to handle things?
By all means get rid of drugs if you want to, but sponsoring international organized crime without any progress isn't the way to do it. Whatever you're trying to do, your strategy is flawed, and the best option right now is damage control while you try to figure out what you're going to try next. That's what it comes down to.
At the moment, your money pays for torture, rape and murder of men, women and children, with nothing to show for it.
That's a bad investment in my book.
Health,
al-Aswad.
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