Excellent stuff. I just wanted to fix the hyperlink for you.
Also, I agree insofar as to say the effort to end prohibition will require patience, PSAs, the creation of new clinics to help people who need it, and the addressing of retroactivity as it pertains to prisoners serving time for drug crimes (among other things). It's not an insignificant undertaking, that last part. Transitioning tens or hundreds of thousand of inmates suddenly released would overwhelm the system and local communities who would come up short on half-way house space. But yeah, let's decriminalize, legalize, and control drugs. I'm all for it as long as it's done right.
When you look at how criminal drug operations function on a smaller scale like in countries in South America,
Smaller scale? The transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) in South and Central America are anything but small scale. I agree with what you're saying as it echoes what I've been saying for many years now, but South American TCOs and the incorrectly titled "Cartels" are huge, multi-million dollar operations.
some local governments officials pay off cartels to not create violence or heavily disrupt the social order.
I've never heard that. It's usually the official who is getting paid off, not the other way around. Goddamn, what would they be paying the cartels with? Where would that money come from? Taxes? Are you sure you didn't write that backwards accidentally?
It's the "black market tax." In exchange the black market continue dealing and holds the monopoly.
I thought you said in exchange the cartels don't "create violence or disrupt the social order"? That does not seem to be the case anyway…
I mean, the CIA was able to use drugs to ruin black communities,
Idk about ruin, but yeah I take your meaning. There's that whole New Jack City thing. Killer Mike summarizes everything nicely in his track Reagan:
so... they obviously have their finger on the pulse of the drug trade.
Well Christ, they should given all the incarceration and the billions of dollars spent "fighting the drug war"…
Tl;dr the government is actually in on it and benefits from the ongoing black market.
No, only certain people, factions, and agencies (read: law enforcement, prison personnel, and district attorneys' offices) benefit from drug prohibition in the form of what they consider "job security". Those podunk towns with populations of 5,000 to 10,000 people sure do love it when a new prison is built nearby and it hires 800 people from the town, in addition to the construction contracts that go out locally… Ends up becoming the economic backbone of the area, and those folks do not want to see that endl. So they vote Republican and support measures that promote Draconian drug sentencing… But otherwise all that incarceration is expensive with it costing something like $25K/year per inmate. Now consider how there's nearly 2 million inmates in the country, and the tax payer ends up footing that bill. But that L.E. budget could be better spent elsewhere or left with the tax payers… there's the real conservative move, but no one thinks this way on the right any longer. It's all spend, spend, spend with both the right and the left.
The war on drugs is a bait and switch to distract people from how it has always been: cartels and governments in a business relationship.
It's a bit more complex than that, but essentially, yes, it's a scam to control masses of people.
Ending the war on drugs means destroying their power.
Yes, which is a part of why it's so important to do. Ending the drug war requires changing public perception of drugs and drug culture, just like it did with gay rights. Thirty years ago, being gay was still viewed as being a sick perversion, and in many people's minds, it was synonymous with being a child molester. That is for real how society, at large and overall, viewed it. I'm speaking in generalities, of course; there was dissent even back then. But it took celebrities and respected individuals in the public eye to muster up the courage to come out at a time when it was much more dangerous to do so. And in this way, gay rights activists were able to demonstrate to the public how far off their misperception of gay people was.