Posted on 02/25/2013 5:32:28 AM PST by Kaslin
El Chapo haunts the streets of Chicago. His ghost hoards cash in Los Angeles stash houses. His shadow darkens underground tunnels between Mexico and the U.S. His spirit drives his clan to bloodshed. The world’s most-wanted kingpin may be dead. But the Sinaloa cartel will thrive until America legalizes drugs.
Guatemalan authorities are currently investigating whether Joaquín Guzmán (nicknamed El Chapo) was killed in a gunfight near Mexico’s border in a remote jungle-ranch province known as Peten.
El Chapo is an entrepreneurial criminal. ‘Entrepreneurial’ because he takes risks and acclimates to overcome obstacles. ‘Criminal’ because he does not compete on quality or price; he retains his monopoly with bribes, blackmail, misogyny (dynastic marriage) and violence.
Chapo may be worth $1 billion, but he hardly enjoys the money. Fear and hiding dominate his lifestyle because he did not earn his money justly and openly like a real entrepreneur (think late CEO and co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs). Chapo knows he could lose everything, at any moment. He was already caught and he would still be sitting in Mexico’s fortified Punte Grande prison, but he bribed enough people to escape after serving just five years.
Chapo built a network that will survive him. In a very bloody and unethical way, Chapo developed the Sinaloa cartel into such a powerful, violent and ruthless monopoly that nothing short of losing its biggest customer (the U.S.) will kill Chapo’s ghost (or legacy).
If we are serious about winning the war on drugs, we need to legalize and regulate drugs. Doing so would be the equivalent of Donald Trump bellowing: “You’re fired!” to the drug cartels.
There are huge benefits to forcing the drug market above ground by legalizing drugs:
Promote equality
I encourage you to learn the history of prohibition in America; you will quickly discover that most regulations banning alcohol and drugs were instituted to slyly enforce racism—not to promote health or justice.
The federal government’s prosecution of consumable substances is rooted in “racial considerations,” Senior judicial analyst for FOX News, Judge Andrew Napolitano, explains in his book Theodore and Woodrow. He explains how the “xenophobic” Anti-Saloon League lobbied for alcohol prohibition as a way to hurt Irish and Italian Catholic immigrants who had a “culture of alcohol consumption” and to bully German immigrants who produced beer and spirits.
Napolitano also tells how the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914 targeted Chinese and Filipino immigrants who had cultural practices of consuming controlled opium. And, federal regulations against marijuana helped “give white law enforcement a pretext to arrest darker-skinned Mexicans” since “the crop originated in Mexico, and its use was common among Mexican immigrants.”
Increase revenues
Drug cartels such as the Sinaloa likely pay more than most legitimate businesses pay in taxes in cash bribes to buy off Mexican authorities, Mexican citizens and American law enforcement, reports The New York Times.
Obama signed the Budget Control Act of 2011, which included a sequester mechanism. Now, Obama says he does not like the sequester mechanism because it will mean “meat cleaver” cuts to the budget.
As CNBC host Larry Kudlow tweeted: “$44 billion spending cut is only one quarter of one percent of GDP. 1.25% of the $3.6 trillion budget. But worth doing. Small potatoes.”
As you can see, this is more like a “paper cut approach” to cutting spending. But if President Obama truly thinks cutting $44 billion is a “meat cleaver approach,” then he could propose a “relaxed approach” to raising revenues: legalizing and regulating drugs.
The Justice Department estimates that Americans pump up to $39 billion into Columbian and Mexican cartels annually. Why not kill two birds with one stone by legalizing drugs, which would keep $39 billion in the U.S. while stopping the border violence?
Napolitano writes how the Anti-Saloon League succeeded in getting Congress to pass the Sixteenth Amendment, which legalized the income tax. “…prior to the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913, the alcohol excise tax accounted for 40 percent of the federal government’s revenue.” So, prior to the prohibition, Americans did not pay income tax because alcohol was legal and regulated.
Likewise, I feel like we could eliminate or drastically lower taxes that hurt entrepreneurship by legalizing and taxing drugs like marijuana. If you don’t want to do drugs, you won’t pay a tax. And you will also not be “punished” with exorbitant taxes if you decide to start a business.
Healthier society
Per the Constitution, you have the right to put whatever you want into your own body; only states can ban drugs. Freedom means you have the right to decide whether to live a healthy lifestyle or to destroy your body with a habit like binge drinking. The founders understood that federal laws against drugs would violate natural law and thereby damage the psyche.
Banning the consumption of alcohol or drugs also encourages people to be physically unhealthy. The federal government is not a reliable authority when it comes to health. For example, marijuana is verifiably more effective at eliminating pain than pharmaceutical drugs. Many people in chronic pain could benefit from medicinal marijuana. But drug companies do not want to lose their monopoly, so they lobby Congress to continue fighting a futile war on drugs.
Even if you use marijuana recreationally, a 20-year study published last January in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that moderate consumption (about a joint a week) does not damage the lungs.
The study also shows that the chemical in marijuana that gives you a high (tetrathydrocanabinol or THC) fights inflammation. So, smoking marijuana once a week is sort of like sprinkling basil on your spaghetti? Why is it illegal again?
End violence
El Chapo’s main competition is the Zetas cartel. Zetas is an example of how the underground market for one product (in this case, drugs) replaces free-market innovation with violence. Unscrupulous people start to realize that they can use violence (not innovation) to make money with all sorts of “commodities,” not just drugs. For example, the Zetas cartel uses violence to cash in on humans via kidnapping and human trafficking.
If the market controlled the price of drugs, the price would drop because the markup on the street is largely to compensate people who risk their lives to sell their product. The cartels would no longer risk wholesaling their product in the U.S. because they could not get a price to commensurate with the risk associated with trafficking. In addition, the monopoly they have would crumble.
So, legalize drugs. And scare away the ghost of El Chapo forever.
Boy, if only El Chapo had made it to Washington District of Corruption he would be $hitting in tall cotton today.
Given a little time there, he could have at least 50 Senators and 200+ Representatives in his pocket and then the sky would been his only limit.
Well, no. Cartels and their leaders come and go. It's a very Darwinian business.
But somebody will indeed be in that business as long as drugs are illegal and therefore have huge profit margins.
There are ways to end an illegal drug market. The Chicoms did it after their conquest of China, when opium was much more widespread than illegal drugs are in America today.
But these methods would be illegal and unconstitutional. Americans would not accept them.
So it is possible to end illegal drug use. It's just not politically feasible.
Wasn’t “El Chapo” a Mexican TV sitcom?
It’s possible to end illegal drug use by making all drug use legal. It’s possible to end murder by making all personal killing legal. It’s possible to end theft by declaring that all property is communally owned.
All the world’s crime problems fixed from my home computer.
Don’t ask me, I wouldn’t know
HEhehehe Brilliant. not bad for this early on a monday morning. :)
Yup.
In one of the scariest scenarios I’ve read, Congress passes a law making all politically-motivated murders and violence a federal crime. Arguably a constitutional law and one that it is entirely possible to envision passing.
Then the president pardons anyone who kills his political enemies. Which would be perfectly constitutional, since there are no restrictions at all on the presidential power of pardon.
So the president was essentially able to issue legal execution orders at his whim. Very scary.
There are 4 currencies in the world. US dollars, oil, weapons and drugs. I was speaking with someone that would know that said... they will never legalize drugs for the reason that there is too much money owed by 3 rd world countries to international banks. The drug money flows through those banks to pay those debts. The price is set at that level to continue its value. If legalization happens it will lower the prices to the point that those banks will not be paid off. er go no legalization.
Legalize drugs?
Hmmmmm, tough question.
On the one hand, “recreational drugs” can and do ruin the lives of users and the non-users around them, including the folks hit by a car driven by a spaced out user.
On the other hand, the vast amounts of money generated just because they ARE illegal brings criminal violence into the equation, plus sustains scumbags in office due to bribery.
All of the evils & ills created by alcohol are well known. Also well known is that Prohibition did not work with alcohol. It also has not worked with recreational drugs. The FDA has had a bit more success with pharmaceuticals. This, too, has had negative side effects, like my email inbox being flooded with Viagra ads.
Most of my life I have been adamantly FOR keeping recreation drugs illegal. However, on a trip to Kenya in the 1990’s, I noticed the “street boys” in Nairobi with tin cans suspended from their necks by a piece of string. I learned that the cans contained gasoline and the boys were “huffing” the gasoline fumes to get high.
I remembered the earlier efforts to limit or ban the sale of model airplane glue or spray paint to kids. A real pain in the old rump to people with a legitimate need for those products. Did it solve the problem? Who knows?
However, it is simply NOT POSSIBLE to control the availability of gasoline in order to prevent “huffing”. I have a friend whose 20+ son died from huffing fumes from the family car gas tank.
The use of recreational drugs is amplified by the “coolness” factor and by the element of rebellion. “No one is going to tell ME what not to do!”
If drugs were suddenly legalized and promoted as a vast, Darwinian project by the STATE to eliminate all those unable or unfit to function as responsible adults, what would happen to consumption? Naturally, children, say those under 21, would have to be off limits.
So, if you are over 21, take all the drugs you want. However, if you harm someone or commit a property crime while high (drugs, alcohol or Twinkies) you go to prison, a users prison. We used to pay vast amounts of subsidies to dairy farmers NOT to produce milk. Convert these surplus dairy barns to housing to the poor idiots who have fried their brains on drugs. Give them clean straw to sleep in once a week.
Give McDonald’s, etc a tax discount for sending their left-overs (steamed for hygiene, of course) to feed the inmates. Anyone caught making drugs available to anyone under 21 will be sentenced to time spent feeding the whacked out inhabitants of the stalls and changing their straw.
Schools will take students in the 5th grade, 9th grade and 12th grade to visit these barns, telling them, “Boys & girls, when you are 21, you, too, can use all the drugs you want.”
Make the individual responsible for his actions!
“Guns/Drugs/SUVs don’t kill people, PEOPLE (with their abuse of these things) kill people!”
Murder and theft, unlike drug "crimes," violate the rights of unwilling victims - and laws against them don't generate tens of billions of dollars in profit for criminals.
I don’t care to get into the weeds of drug legalization, but I’m sure you’re aware that the abuse of the drugs themselves (or most of them) have highly negative impacts on the users and on those around them. Legalizing drugs is not a cost-free option.
One can, however, make a very good case that the costs of the War on Drugs are greater than the cost of legalization, certainly for the less dangerous ones such as weed.
A prudent approach would compare the relative costs to society of war vs. legalization, but instead both sides tend to just talk absolutes.
As do chronic drinking, undersleep, or junk food consumption. Self-inflicted harms are not the proper business of government.
and on those around them.
Those harms are with very few exceptions either the result of doing something else (e.g., driving) while impaired - and are thus no more a harm due to impairment than a harm due to the "something else" - or are not the proper business of government (e.g., family dysfunction).
This is in stark contrast to the costs of the War on Drugs, which are if not directly government-imposed then very much the business of government - such as drug-profit-fueled criminal violence.
But, there are also quite a few that are simply out of control, and their impact on families and taxpayers is too often understated.
I understand the impact on our personal freedoms, so I don't think drug laws are the answer, but it's an issue with a great deal more complexity.
Is the answer to those impacts a drug ban? Boozers have an impact on their families - is an alcohol ban the answer?
and taxpayers is too often understated.
Taxpayers choose through their elected representatives to be impacted by drug abusers; they should make a different choice.
And all this is relevant to the question of legalization only to the extent that legalization would increase use. Is illegality YOUR primary reason to not use drugs?
That’s a very interesting proposition. Scary.
Or, the government could launch a project to introduce massive amounts of drugs into the underground economy, only poison them.
Users would never know whether their next rush would be their last.
Those who kept using would eventually die, and those who still have a few functioning brain cells would quit first.
I suspect the demand would drop quickly.
Or, short trial followed by public execution of anyone caught in possession or under the influence of illegal drugs.
As I said in my first post, we won’d do any of these things. They are politically and constitutionally impossible, not physically impossible.
And all this is relevant to the question of legalization only to the extent that legalization would increase use. Is illegality YOUR primary reason to not use drugs?
Based on the recent track record of the voters, I don't expect them to make responsible choices in their elected representatives; and that problem is going to be more difficult to fix than the drug problem.
So, I don't think drugs should be either illegal or easy to get. High prices and excessive taxation are methods to make them hard to attain, but that doesn't really solve the black market issue all that much.
In a perfect world, people could freely choose to partake of whatever they choose, and do so responsibly, or completely deal with the consequences. But it is not a perfect world, and people commit acts of random violence while impaired; they abandon their families, which leaves the state to intervene, and they have considerable health problems which spreads costs to private insurance or public health care.
My view is that there are no easy, cheap answers. Perhaps abandoning the drug war is the best solution, but don't expect that it will save money or lives. There is a price, no matter what.
And all this is relevant to the question of legalization only to the extent that legalization would increase use. Is illegality YOUR primary reason to not use drugs?
Based on the recent track record of the voters, I don't expect them to make responsible choices in their elected representatives; and that problem is going to be more difficult to fix than the drug problem.
The issue is not whether better choices can be expected, but whether the impact on taxpayers of out-of-control drug users is a sound reason to ban drugs. Since taxpayers brought most of that impact on themselves through their elected representatives, the answer is no.
people commit acts of random violence while impaired; they abandon their families, which leaves the state to intervene, and they have considerable health problems which spreads costs to private insurance or public health care.
Again, that's relevant to the question of legalization only to the extent that legalization would increase use. Is illegality YOUR primary reason to not use drugs?
My view is that there are no easy, cheap answers.
I agree - there is only the least bad answer: legalization.
Perhaps abandoning the drug war is the best solution, but don't expect that it will save money or lives.
I expect both, since only under the War on Drugs is violent sociopathy rewarded (with a bigger cut of drug-war-inflated profits).
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.