The mayor of a Mexican city plagued by drug violence has been murdered less than a week after taking office.
Alejandro Arcos was found dead on Sunday in Chilpancingo, a city of around 280,000 people in the southwestern state of Guerrero. He had been mayor for six days.
Evelyn Salgado, the state governor, said the city was in mourning over a murder that “fills us with indignation”. His death came three days after the city government’s new secretary, Francisco Tapia, was shot dead.
Authorities have not released details of the investigation, or suspects. However, Guerrero is one of the worst-affected states for drug violence and drug cartels have murdered dozens of politicians across the country.
If there wasn’t such a strong black market for illegal drugs in the US, these cartels wouldn’t have this much power/money.
Cartels sell more than drugs these days. They learned in the 90s that diversifying into different products gave them more stability against drug enforcement. Avocados have turned into legal profit. Logging in another business. Neither of these things will be affected by someone quitting drugs. Stop building houses and stop eating avocado now.
They might be only able to do those other things since they are able to pay an army to terrorize, intimidate and bribe local and state government’s into allowing them to exist and set up these protection racquets. It takes a lot of money to be able to be more powerful then a government, I don’t think selling avocados or logging could generate that much
Avocados and logging also don’t need to worry about getting shut down by the law like the cocaine and heroin business does.
Legalize the coke and dope, and the incentive to resort to violence to avoid criminal penalties goes away.
Selling anything necessary can generate a lot of you’re making sure you can’t have competition. That’s the whole trick of the protection racket. It’s what police do here. They’re dressed up more, but do the same.
“The cartels won’t be affected if their major source of income gets cut off.”
Yes, sure, they’ve diversified. But those legal operations aren’t their largest sources od income, not enough to sustain their current operations if it was just the legal ones. Most of the legal ones are used to clean some of the income from drugs.
And besides, I’m pretty sure the cartels are doing this for the money. Sure, it’s not all it’s about, but I’m sure it’s the largest motivator. If drugs we’re legal and the easiest ways for the cartels to keep in business was to do it legitimately, and they were actually allowed to, they could use the legal systems to actually enforce deals and debts, so the enforcement methods they use now would be obsolete and even counterproductive to profits.
People won’t stop using drugs. Just like they didn’t stop drinking during prohibition. But we can take the trade away from the gangsters and put it in legal markets and regulate the product and business to make it safer for users.
Are you telling me they’re doing the same shit as our actual government now? We may as well consider them a country at this rate.
Muh avocado toast!
I think I heard from somewhere that while that might have worked decades ago the cartels have diversified their ‘business’ to the point where drug legalisation wouldn’t kill them. We should still legalise drugs but I doubt they’ll fix the cartel issue.
It wouldn’t end them ENTIRELY, as there were ruthless organizations before drugs, too. What it would do is make it much less profitable. Meaning less to kill someone over.
What were these organisations before drugs were illegal?
So, I don’t disagree, but we legalized weed in the civilized parts of the country and it had little effect, I’m not sure I want to legalize cocaine, it’s much better at killing people.
Little effect in what regard?
I think they’re saying that legalizing weed hasnt done anything to reduce Mexican cartel influence or violence.
Why would it? It’s the bulkiest, smelliest, lowest cost drug there is. Mexican weed sucked ass too. Moving cocaine or especially ultra high strength opiate analogs is significantly more lucrative.
Making things illegal doesn’t work. Not alcohol, not drugs, not abortion. It needs to be addressed by education. The current just say no abstinence approach leaves people ill prepared for when they encounter drugs. Our relationship with drugs is fucked, currently. Altering our state of consciousness with drugs is a fundamental part of being human.
The whole argument for legalizing weed was that it would cripple the cartels.
That doesn’t seem like it’s worked so much.
So again, we have to legalize cocaine before the cartels are weakened?
Then we have to legalize heroin? Fentanyl? Anything else?
I’m in favor of legalizing weed, but this seems a lot like it’s actually not helping.
The whole argument, or the part of the argument that you are able to argue against? In my opinion the “whole argument” is that getting caught with relatively harmless plant matter shouldn’t ruin your entire life.
Happy Cakeday! 🍰🎂
I don’t know anyone who was touting the cartels as a reason to legalize weed… weed is usually being legalized because 1) it’s (relatively) harmless, 2) it has medicinal uses, 3) it was outlawed for racist reasons, and 4) it was causing mass incarceration and devastating black communities due to clearly racist enforcement.
First I’ve heard of this, and I’d consider myself a pretty big follower of drugs and drug culture. Who thought weed was lucrative for cartels? The plant you can easily grow, and is challenging to transport?
Calling it the “whole argument” is very disingenuous. People have the right to get high.
Yeah, all of it. You can legally buy chemical analogs of just about any class of drugs because the laws simply can’t keep up. Prohibition isn’t working, and it hasn’t ever. What you’re seeing today is a result of prohibition (and prescription painkillers in the 00s, I’d argue).
The problem won’t be fixed by making things illegal. What, are you going to make opiates more illegal or something? Education and learning how to have a proper relationship with mind altering substances is the way forward, IMO.
Shoutout to erowid.org.
Hey hey hey.
You’re a smart feller. I only wish I knew people like you in real life. I’ve held these opinions for more than ten years, and during that time, a whole fucking bunch of my “friends” have stripped being in contact after I’ve talked to them about my views about prohibition.
Which is ironic, because their actions (or inaction, rather) and aversion to talking about the prohibition is what is actually holding up the prohibition, which is what enables most of drug abuse. So they thought I was defending drug abuse, while it’s their position which literally supports it’s existence.
I came up with a slogan some 15 years ago.
“Legalise, educate, tax and regulate.”
Respect
Lol no it wasn’t.
Oh definitely. All drugs, actually, I’d say.
Here’s a question for you. Is the reason you don’t shoot up opiate that they’re illegal? If you could legally get them, you’d shoot up? (And please, don’t answer with “well I wouldn’t, but like others…”)
Have you read any science about legalising, decriminalising, etc?
Because it all shows it’s worth it.
Honestly, I’d absolutely do coke if it were legal, and it would almost surely fuck me up.
I might not do opiates, but honestly, if I had back pain or surgery and they gave me opiates, I probably would take it up after.
Because that’s how a LOT of people take up drugs.
Drugs aren’t good, you just like them, they’re nasty because they break assumptions evolution made, and we’re not quite ready for that yet.
If nukes were legal, do you think everyone could be trusted with them? Because most people have self-control, but not all, and before you say “Drugs don’t hurt other people!”, yes, they absolutely do, you just don’t give a shit about them.
So you assume that because you have addictive tendencies you wouldn’t be able to control, no-one else could do that either?
I’m a pretty extroverted and confident person. I’ve done cocaine more than a dozen times. I understand that for some it’s incredibly attractive, but for me, I just don’t need the extra energy or confidence, so it doesn’t do much for me, which is why I don’t see it as being worth it.
I’ve driven a taxi for years in Finland. Most of those people were less responsible with a more debilitating substance than this one person who I visited whole in the Netherlands. A family of four my friend knew. We spent the evening with them, lovely kids. They put them to bed after a few hours. We smoked some weed with a friend, drank beer. The wife drank a glass of wine, no more, the husband none. Once the kids were put to bed, they got a bag of coke, we did a few lines, talked for a few hours, and then they went to bed before 1am and we left to continue our evening.
My point being it isn’t the substance which magically makes someone irresponsible. People with a debilitating alcohol addiction aren’t much less irritating or less dangerous than people seriously addicted to say, opiates, crack or meth. They’re usually annoying in different ways, but there’s not much more difference.
So again, you recognise there is a need for painkillers, they’re really important afterwards orthopedic surgery (I broke my arm last year, didn’t want to do any opiates but they’re explained why taking them for the first few days was actually beneficial), but you’d… like for there not to be prescription meds?
Or perhaps you should seek help for addiction? (It’s a psychological disorder, different from dependence to a substance. Medically different. Different diagnosis.)
A lot of people in the US got dependent on opiates because of the massive overprescribing by doctors. The whole Sackler thing? https://www.congress.gov/event/116th-congress/house-event/LC65831/text
They basically abused the prohibition and the legal systems to push one of the most dependence causing substances while actively lying about it being dependence causing.
These are the exact type of issues legalising and being able to regulate would help with. Check this system : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bratt_System
That instead of doctors pushing Oxy prescriptions of several weeks for light sprains, and youre much better off.
I don’t. I hate drug abuse, which is why I’m so passionately advocating for the only fucking thing that would help with it. I don’t do “harder” substances. I don’t really or have ever really liked getting drunk. I like to get a bit lubricated, but I hate drinking so much as most people do. (I’m Finnish, we have a heavyweight drinking culture.) I had several friends abuse alcohol as young people, but got over it never really went that bad. I’d say the only reason they “recovered”, and never went overboard in the first places is that alcohol is heavily regulated. If it weren’t, I’d say several of them would have drunk themselves to death several times over with shitty moonshine.
Some other friends on the other hand, developed amphetamine or other substance abuse issues. And despite trying our damndest to intervene, even calling their parents and trying to talk about it, there was nothing we could do. Calling the cops on them would have been counterproductive.
I advocate for a system that would be able to help those, and afford responsible users the freedom to not be ostracised for choosing to get slightly inebriated with something else than alcohol.
I only smoke weed, occasionally have a drink (up to like four), but it’s been years since I did anything else. I did experiment with lots of substance. Never shot up anything. Opiates only in the hospital, but I know the effects. My favourite ones are definitely mild psychedelics, ecstasy and laughing gas. All very harmless when compares to other substances. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/06/25/what-is-the-most-dangerous-drug
And those are all substances you can get addicted to, but, not really dependent on them. Serotonergic substances (lsd, shrooms, ecstasy) don’t really work after two days of using them. You have to have a break of several days. There are obviously people who go clubbing everywhere weekend, but if they only do ecstasy and don’t drink, they’re really aren’t that much worse for wear, unless they do like a dozen e’s. When I went to events with mostly ecstasy users, it was incredible. No-one ever fought or was mad, everyone was friends and trusting, but not like in a stupidly trusting way. Just every kind and chill and honest people for the most part. Because of the ecstasy, ofc, and that’d wear off the next day, but made some of my best friends from those gigs, and still never done “drugs” outside of those events, and a large part of the honesty and directness remained in those relationships.
So I really do think society would benefit from (young) people being able to spend their weekend dancing and actually socialising with mild and good quality MDMA (and having milder pills you would know the exact mg amount on would help a ton with that).
The evidence of MDMA and psychedelic assisted therapy is pretty amazing.
https://maps.org/mdma/
You need to understand the distinction between really easily abusable drugs from those though. Such as coke, opiates, meth, alcohol, etc.
They don’t actually, and I could write a several page thesis for you why it’s actually the opposite of that.
Lol this is completely different; affecting yourself with some substance, something humanity has done for as long as we can imagine (there’s evidence of opium, weed, beer for thousands of years) or weapons of mass destruction which can wipe out the planet and make it I habitable for centuries? Have you ever heard of what a strawman fallacy is?
Fuck you. You pretend to care about them, but don’t, and I bet my left testicle that I’ve done a while bunch more for substance abuse issues and substance abusers than you ever will.
If you actually cared, you’d consider what I’m saying, realise I’m advocating for the things you pretend to be for, because you don’t realise your attitude has been so vastly manipulated by drug war propaganda that you haven’t bothered to educate yourself on the issue. Read some of these links I’ve left, truly, and give it at least a day for your brain to mull it over, then hopefully realise I’m earnestly fighting against the prohibition, because I realise just how much getting rid of the war on drugs would help globally.
https://www.globalcommissionondrugs.org/world-leaders-call-for-legalisation-of-drugs
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3202501/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_entheogenic_drugs
https://psychedelics.berkeley.edu/resources/entheogens-a-brief-history-of-their-spiritual-use/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_TV4GuXFoA&t=717 the entirety video is good, but with that timestamp is the author of “Good Cop, Bad War” stating their position on the drug war. And he’s been fighting with the police against drugs in special agencies and finally had enough.
You could listen to his entire audiobook even.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKoNuDWsd9Y
There’s honestly zero reasons to support the prohibition except for benefitting from illegally drug markets. I’m not saying you’re completely wrong, I honestly used to think exactly like you on the matter. But then I read, and read, and read. Took up this position because it was the only one which actually makes sense. The opposition doesn’t have any arguments we can’t already show that lifting prohibition and setting up legalised regulated system wouldn’t help with.
Please. I know that’s a lot of links, and because of my attitude and the some of the insults, you don’t want to check them. But I didn’t write them. Just don’t reply to me instantly. Give a bit of a browse to them. Maybe reply tomorrow, when both of us are less wound up and you be slept after having browsed some of the info.
Please?
edit wrote this on my phone, so many ducking auto cock rekts
It’s harsh, but El Salvador did what was necessary to fix their problem. They saved countless men, women, and children both inside and outside their country from monsters walking in human skin.
What???
They jailed 1% of the population and devastated an entire generation at the very least, often for nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time
https://apnews.com/article/el-salvador-bukele-central-america-crime-gangs-60c3a34c571dfdbdf0a203deb85abf71
And yet vast majority of their population had him at over 90% approval and thought everything he did was necessary to maintain order.
There’s already far more trauma, and even more to be inflicted if he didn’t go all out against gangs. If you aren’t from that area or other similarly dangerous country you wouldn’t really get how desperate it gets. He 100% was necessary.
They’re no longer the murder capital of the world and safer than even Canada. Women can actually walk outside and children can play.
Portugal set the standard years ago. Legalize it and divert all the money that would go to incarceration to inpatient and outpatient rehabilitation for drug addiction.
Minor clarification -Technically it was decriminalized, not legalized. Distribution will send you to jail and, after 2 or more possession offenses, you’re forced into a treatment program.
And sadly, things have started to get worse again in Portugal. Lately they’ve been sending fewer people to treatment, and surprise surprise, usage and deaths have gone up.
I believe Switzerland was the first country to establish centers where drug addicts would receive a controlled dosage for “free.” Of course paid for by taxes. The Suisse found out crime decreased, the parks were cleaner and emergency rooms saw fewer overdose patients. Basically a win across the board.
That happens when much of citizenry can be characterized as “rich blokes who will take coke at some point with no shadow of doubt”. When everyone involved knows that, including the voters, it’s an easy decision.
However, in many other countries the general population mostly forms their opinion on drugs, weapons and even political freedoms based on fear of what will happen.
They don’t look at all this critically, thus don’t understand that the worst things happening because of the current state of things they don’t know anything about, because information is not and will never be as available as their thought process requires.
That involves said current state of things funding things like cartels, criminal groups in governments involved in drug trade (it’s much more profitable when you ban all the competition), creating a vector of control over addicted people. These all have ugly consequences - violence abroad, strong (and rich) mafia groups in governments.
The correct thought process would be comparing abstract mechanisms. In abstract no consumable substance should be illegal, provided the buyer knows its contents and effects.
BTW, in abstract the right policy about weapons ownership would be opt out, not opt in, - mandatory mental examination of every adult citizen, but also mandatory weapons ownership for those who pass it! Perhaps except felons. With other exceptions being a process involving some justification being filed - as in pacifist views, religious reasons, bad atmosphere in family thus inability to keep it secure, something like that. It’s not about “good guy with a gun”, it’s about distributing real power. People who should own weapons are not the same people who want to own weapons generally. Thus mandatory.
I think legalizing weed didn’t make that much of a difference because the whole claim that buying random weed from a random dealer put money in cartel or terrorist pockets was a lie.
Not that there weren’t any large weed organizations, they just weren’t murdering people at the scale the cartels are or doing it to fund violence.
They’d also rely a lot on temporary workers since trimming was really the only labour intensive step, and then it would be sent out into a distribution network that wasn’t so much an organization as it was a collection of independent or small scale distributors. Which in some locations might have been gangs, but I’d guess was mostly normal people looking to make some extra money.
We don’t need to legalize. If we decriminalized, then took the money for jailing and funded mandatory treatment, we could do what Portugal did in the early 00’s.
I’m actually fine with decriminalizing consumption so long as distribution (real distribution, not piddly shit) stays illegal, at least without proper licensing, etc.
I’m not thrilled about it but I’m open so long as cocaine and heroin aren’t fully legalized.
I am sure. Legalize all of it. Legalize it, regulate it, tax it, use half of the new income for prevention and education, one quarter for medical support for addicts and the rest fills the coffers. You take away the power from the criminal gangs, while at the same time increasing your tax revenue, adding new legal avenues of business and minimizing the health impact considerably.
Still waiting for legal grass.
Assuming you’re in the US:
It’s called THCa and is the same weed you’ve been smoking your whole life. You can get ounces to your door in the mail 100% legally thanks to a poorly written Farm Bill.
The farm bill only states a certain % of THC is illegal. Well, THC isn’t on the plants in large quantities - that only exists once you heat the cannabis to isomerize it from THCa to THC. It’s not delta 8 or some weird synthetic cannabinoid, weed has always been THCa before it’s heated.
There are dispensaries all over Texas these days selling great weed with this loophole. Texas, of all places.
Good to know. I moved out over a year ago. Going back EOM for a family visit. Hate landing anywhere dry, so I’ll probably check these out.
California announced they’ll be opening cannabis cafes
Come do some smoking tourism in BC!
As I said, the civilized parts of the country.
Exactly.
All of the most common drugs have to be legalised. It’s the only way to get rid of the black markets, which can not be regulated.
Just like with alcohol, prohibition simply does not work.