I wonder how much of this is just a publicity stunt. Last time I dove deep into studying corruption in Latin America at University, Colombia was pretty much captive to the cartels. Hope it has gotten better now but I’m not sure if that’s the case given the massive Colombian diaspora that keeps increasing.
The thought is that things had improved in Columbia, until a recent attempt on a Columbian senator.
Miguel Uribe is in the minority conservative party and was shot three times at campaign event by an underage youth who was hired for this purpose. A number of arrests have taken place.
The leftist president Gustavo Petro has not strongly reacted against this event, and the U.S. recently recalled their ambassador for somewhat confusing reasons (Columbia did the same).
I just came across this podcast in the last week after wondering what ever happened to the FARC and AUC (right wing death squads) after the peace deal. How did things end up playing out relative compared to what was expected and feared at the time.
It’s a pretty batshit story that focuses on what became of the right wing death squads (they run the start of the cocaine supply chain it turns out among many other things) that’s extremely well researched and has amazing access. A strong recommendation from me https://insightcrime.org/audio-from-the-ground-up/the-shadow...
Perhaps because they watched it long enough to know that it is not going to rendezvous with anyone, and if they wait longer it may turn around and they will lose sight of it?
it'd be really silly to have a long distance anything with full starlink bandwidth and not transmit images or video. they would have seen law enforcement catch it and poke at it for sure. and even if it was just telemetry, they'd see it was stationary for some period of time, and maybe even detect it was out of the water for a prolonged period of time
I'm kind of curious how much this matters to Colombia now. For this who haven't been following the drug wars, most of the action, and money, has moved to Mexico. If you only know this stuff through pop culture, Mexico today is what Colombia was in the 80's and 90's: the violence, level of corruption, money flowing through, etc.
Cocaine is still produced overwhelmingly in South America. Yes, it does have to go through Mexico. But the start of the trade route is Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru.
It's important from a supply chain perspective, but not in the getting-rich-off-of-this sense anymore. The analogy I use is Apple in the USA (Mexico) and Foxconn in China (Colombia).
Colombia produces the raw materials, so it is "essential" in that sense, but that is not where the money and power is now (that's Mexico). Kind of like how your iPhone is manufactured in China, but the world's-richest-company status goes to Apple, in the US.
Quoting an AI summary (because I'm looking for a quick answer here):
Mexico has become the primary financial beneficiary of cocaine money today. Mexican cartels now control the most lucrative parts of the supply chain - smuggling into the US market and wholesale distribution. They've essentially become the "middlemen" who buy cocaine from Colombian producers at relatively low prices and then sell it in the US at much higher prices, capturing most of the profit margin.
Colombia remains important as a producer of coca and cocaine, but the economics have changed dramatically. Colombian groups now often function more as suppliers to Mexican cartels rather than controlling the entire supply chain themselves. The raw materials and initial processing generate far less revenue than the final distribution stages.
Cartels are already diversifying, thanks to bullish gold market they are going full tilt on gold. "In Colombia and Peru gangs are now thought to make more money from gold than from the sale of narcotics."[1]
Coffee, avocados, and oil aren't illegal. But I'm pretty sure if you banned coffee it would spawn criminal gangs that made 1920s prohibition look tame.
There's no substitute for the margins you can get in the illegal drug trade. Take away the primary source of funding and you make it much easier to break the gangs. We've already gone through this. Just legalize it already.
They already extortion every single producer. Any coffee and avocado coming from South America has an extortion tax somewhere in the supply chain whether it’s to the farmers, shipping companies, distribution center warehouses at port or whatever you imagine.
The extortion comes as placing gang members as part of security, real threats or just bribes to unlock to keep moving towards the consumer.
Illegal goods have better margins but extortions provide a platform for power and money with less effort.
They could set a 1000% tax on the coffee produced, if they can consolidate control. Latin America is 50% of the world coffee production. What will Starbucks / Nestle do? They will just pay up. They can even go against the families of the execs to make their case about the new price.
They tried this before with fruit. The US companies just sold their interest in production and have plenty of other options for acquisition if they try to tax beyond the relative ease of South America verse anywhere else in the global south.
I would agree that letting black market bs continue will eventually lead to groups that could threaten global control on random other commodities but that's no reason kick the can further down this road.
Part of the reason such a large percentage of coffee is grown there is because it's cheap. The cartels can (and do) make profit on legitimate crops, but they can't magically rewrite the rules of capitalism.
Coffee beans are notoriously picky about their environment. But with modern technology, it wouldn't surprise me if large companies would resort to growing it in artificial greenhouses, or putting more stock in breeding plants that can be grown elsewhere.
>They could set a 1000% tax on the coffee produced.
No they couldn't. That'd just mint another cartel run black market that they don't control and that cartel would tax the black market coffee at substantially less.
You can kind of think of the current drugs situation as a "so big the number doesn't matter, it's a non stater" percent tax.
Exactly. These cartels are basically competing governments. They're in the drugs industry in the same way that there's state oil industries. The only choose crime because that activity has to exist outside the existing government system.
They'll probably move onto mass producing weaponry, which, depending on the sophistication and scale, could be big issues for the rest of the world. They already partner with terrorist groups and other unsavory orgs as-is. Any group worth mentioning these days interfaces with the cartels
I don’t think weapon production is in their wheelhouse. Arms dealing maybe but not manufacturing. Facilities like those are permanent locations. Permanent locations tend to get raided and attacked.
I think controlling municipalities like they are is working fine for them. No need to mass produce weapons when you can just buy them.
They do have expertise in manufacturing and managing manufacturing facilities and logistics though. Likely the production equipment is not very sophisticated/ hard to reproduce if destroyed. I don’t expect them to produce state of the art F35s anyway.
Ehh, im not sure I agree that arms production is that difficult. Yes you need machine shop equipment, but machine equipment from any time in the last 75 years would be more than capable and there is plenty of unused equipment sitting around and new cheap chinese equipment you can buy that would be workable even if it isn't great. Even the US where guns are about as legal as they get, there are illegal gun manufacturing shops busted basically every week. Half of them are probably just making trash that is super easy to do like giggle switches and mostly publicized as pure propaganda for police departments, but that still leaves a significant number of people producing working illegal arms even in a market where guns are dirt cheap.
And now you got an entire online community dedicated to 3d printing firearms and sharing models and designs, and it is REALLY easy to go from 3d printer design into sintered or casted metal parts that require little to no actual machining to operate.
In my opinion, 99% of the barrier to obtaining firearms in this era is purely a lack of desire and them already being so cheap to get. It doesn't require a craftsman of 20 years to produce working fierarms nor even specialized or unusual equipment or materials. But even if someone did order more specialized machinery from China to produce say cold hammered barrels at a factory scale, a chinese tool making company isn't going to think twice about shipping it and taking the money, and if the producers can run it for just a few months it would have paid for itself.
There’s making a gun and making weapons. I’m sure they are capable of making AR style rifles. Can they manufacture mortars? RPGs? IEDs and Landmines and drones are about as sophisticated as they can get.
Building a couple of small boats isn't the same as mass producing weapons. I can build cars in my garage, but I'd need a machine shop full of extremely heavy equipment and tons of metal stock to build guns.
Not really, the competition with the existing governments will significantly limit the amount of replacement cash they can demand, so they won't be able to sustain the same scale of man/firepower
Applies to corporations as well but they do it legally and we consider part of our 'economy'. Heck we even subsidize them and give them the power to lobby and legally be a 'person'.
- Problem? What Problem? I don't see no stinkin' Problem!
That would be the humane and sensible thing to do, so obviously we are not going to do that. Let’s double down on enforcement so violence, corruption and profits increase.
We really did not learn anything from the alcohol prohibition.
It's not a choice between legalization of all drugs or violence and corruption. Sure, the way the US cracked down on drugs did more harm than good. But that doesn't mean there should be no regulation for drugs whatsoever.
Take the opioid epidemic for example. It claimed the lives of hundreds of people per day. Do you think "humane and sensible" people were responsible for that?
No. The drug warriors are neither humane nor sensible. Opioids are actually not all that dangerous, but the range between high and dead is not all that great. When you know what you're getting (chronic pain patients) the problem rate is low.
But with the street you get varying purity. And the drug war has caused the manufacturers to move to more concentrated products to make smuggling easier. And fentanyl has a very nasty property: the tendency to clump. This is no problem for the pharmaceutical industry, but when you have a dealer mixing stuff it's easy for a lethal clump to remain in the product. You get that, you better hope somebody nearby has Narcan.
You don't see it killing the pain patients like it kill the people on the street--this is a dose problem, not something inherent to the drugs.
And why is that a reason, anyway? There is no question as to the most deadly recreational drug: tobacco. Yet it's legal. Protecting the user is clearly not the motivation. (The data isn't so clear on the second because the data is so contaminated, but it looks like it is alcohol.)
Also, the majority of crime traces back to drugs. Remove the drug market, you cut the crime rate in half overnight. And there's no question the drug war causes a lot more harm than the drugs.
I can see no reasonable justification for the low-addictive stuff not to be legal. The highly addictive stuff you can make an argument for it being legal with a prescription, addiction is a valid reason for a prescription. It has been handled that way in the past in England and worked well. In in ideal world I would favor this approach, but I have a sufficient distrust of the politicians to trust this wouldn't become full of obstacles.
Amsterdam's experience with legalization says that it doesn't increase use, but advertising does.
Thus, what I would like to see:
General promotional stuff is limited to simple item-price listings. Nothing more can be presented unless the customer has already demonstrated interest, either by entering a website (and the insides of the website can't be bookmarked, you must enter the gate each visit), or by entering a portion of a store devoted to that drug. Externally there must be a minimum of information needed to identify what the business is.
The selecting your stuff part can never be mixed, you want two different types and you must visit both places even if they have a common checkout.
The same rules apply to all recreational drugs, including tobacco and alcohol.
> No. The drug warriors are neither humane nor sensible.
I never once advocated for the war on drugs approach, and I made that crystal clear in my comment. Proper policy != war on drugs. It means making sure that drugs get properly certified and its distribution controlled. It means focusing on treatment rather than aggressively punishing those who get addicted. It means addressing the underlying social issues that pushes people towards drugs rather than pouring all money into militarizing the police.
> Opioids are actually not all that dangerous
Victims of the epidemic would beg to differ. The epidemic highlighted the need for proper control of drugs through certification and prescription. It showed how far the pharmaceutical industry will go if left unregulated.
> But with the street you get varying purity.
I never advocated for this either. It should be illegal to sell drugs without a license.
> There is no question as to the most deadly recreational drug: tobacco. Yet it's legal.
Which is why regulation has increased for tobacco all around the world. We could do more to limit the exploitation of people by tobacco companies.
> I can see no reasonable justification for the low-addictive stuff not to be legal.
Yes, the specifics of regulation should vary depending on the dangers of each drug. I'm against all drugs being unilaterally legalized.
I mostly agree with your viewpoints, but why would you leave some drugs unregulated and could you provide some examples of such drugs?
Opioids are only dangerous due to variance in purity (overdoses) and availability (withdrawal-motivated crime).
Of course addiction and dependence can be exploited for profit, but how is opioid dependence different in that respect from alcohol dependence, gambling addiction, sex addiction or even TikTok?
We already know what causes compulsive behaviors linked to addictions and also how to undo them. Amphetamines, cocaine, opioids, gambling and sex have a common denominator, namely overexpression of Delta-FosB protein in the orbitofrontal cortex. Those changes can be eradicated overnight with histone deacetylase inhibitors, but this treatment is not generally available.
You can slowly quit alcohol and tobacco addiction with your own willpower alone, but not opioid addiction. Imagine if it were an saas where signing up for a subscription is super easy but quitting on your own is almost impossible, of course regulators would step in.
The thing is cold turkey doesn't work. The reactions are bad and can be deadly.
But if you have access to accurately known doses that can be stepped down in small amounts you avoid all the bad things.
Remember, there's a big problem with inadequate pain control. Drug doesn't work exactly as the doctor expects, they assume drug seeking--and now you have people driven to the street to make life bearable. You're not going to "cure" an "addict" that actually needs the pain control.
Cut out all the nonsense, with addiction a valid reason there would be no drug seeking and doctors would be able to work with the patients much better.
It doesn’t need to be entirely willpower. Opioid dependency can be dealt with by doing what they would do in rehab: slowly taper down the daily dose over many weeks.
Of course, that only works if you have access to a standardized, regulated supply of opioids. You can’t do it with street drugs of unknown purity.
Going cold turkey off potent opioids is a recipe for relapse, or at worst, death.
Still, the likelihood of dying from withdrawal is much, much lower than with benzos or alcohol: both of those can cause seizures in withdrawal.
The opioid epidemic is not a great example, as it began by overprescription of legal, regulated medicinal drugs. The problem blew up when authorities started cracking down on those prescriptions, and the newly dependent started seeking drugs from illegal sources. Those sources included clandestinely produced heroin and fentanyl, leading to massive numbers of overdose deaths.
In other words, it was the enforcement of prohibition that ultimately caused more societal and health issues than the quasi-legal sales of hard drugs. It definitely wasn’t the doing of ”humane and sensible” policies!
So you see, it is actually a choice between legalization of all drugs or violence and corruption.
The system can only regulate drugs when they are legal.
Illegal drugs combined with enforcement of prohibition pits producers, traffickers, dealers and users against the police and ultimately the army, which are usually the only groups of people who have a state-sanctioned mandate to use violence against other people.
How could violence not result, when it is an integral part of the alleged ”solution”?
Just add pervasive income inequality, throw in some general lack of future prospects mixed with widely publicized lies about the billionaire class being entirely self-made through hard work, and baby, you got a stew going, and the people getting thrown in the hot water are already boiling over.
The drug at the center of this was listed as working for 12 hours. In many patients it did not. And the docs do not listen--it's supposed to be every X hours, it's every X hours. Fortunately I've had very little need of pain stuff because I know every single drug that I have ever been able to discern wearing off does so in less than the specified time. Blood pressure by the book of 1/day swings both too high and too low. Same total dose split into morning/evening provides very good control.
That's quite some wall of one insane libertarian take after another that it's impossible to keep up. Regulating drugs isn't the same thing as turning into a police state.
> The opioid epidemic is not a great example
You think the issue of regulating heroin and fentanyl is comparable to alcohol prohibition, but not the opioid epidemic?
> The problem blew up when authorities started cracking down on those prescriptions
The problem blew up when pharmaceutical companies deceitfully advertised addictive pain killers as safe and aggressively prescribed them to even those who didn't need it. It would've been prevented if the government adequately stepped in before it happened. It was already too late when authorities started cracking down, and to frame that time as the starting point of the problem is blatantly disingenuous.
> It definitely wasn’t the doing of ”humane and sensible” policies!
It's you who's framing the deregulation of OxyContin, heroin, and fentanyl as "humane and sensible," not me.
> So you see, it is actually a choice between legalization of all drugs or violence and corruption.
No, you haven't presented a single supporting argument that stands the test of logic and common sense.
> The system can only regulate drugs when they are legal.
What kind of logic is that? The only way to regulate something is to not regulate? What kind of mind games are you playing here?
> Illegal drugs combined with enforcement of prohibition pits producers, traffickers, dealers and users against the police and ultimately the army, which are usually the only groups of people who have a state-sanctioned mandate to use violence against other people.
Just because the US tries to solve every social issue with over-policing, police militarization, and mass incarceration doesn't mean that it's the only solution.
> Just add pervasive income inequality, throw in some general lack of future prospects mixed with widely publicized lies about the billionaire class being entirely self-made through hard work, and baby, you got a stew going, and the people getting thrown in the hot water are already boiling over.
Yes, and you think having more would-be Sacklers selling highly addictive drugs without anyone to stop them is a solution to that? Give us a break. Libertarianism doesn't stop billionaires and their exploitation of everyone else.
Thank you for the strawmen. I will burn them at Christmas.
Do you really think ”legal” means unregulated? That, if something, is a libertarian viewpoint.
Think about how many regulations you need to fulfill to be able to legally build a house, or employ a person. Are those things completely unregulated? How about the fuel you purchase at a gas station? Ever get only water or nitromethane instead of unleaded gas? Of course you haven’t, because you are buying a legal, regulated product.
Making drugs legal would make it possible to enforce standards of quality, labeling, age limits, et cetera before the products ever got to market.
By making drugs illegal, the society has abandoned all those controls and replaced them with the threat of violence: enforcement of behavior instead of enforcement of regulations.
That does not sound like freedom to me.
(Please don’t start arguing that murder also needs to be legalized, we both know that is not what I’m arguing for.)
> Take the opioid epidemic for example. It claimed the lives of hundreds of people per day. Do you think "humane and sensible" people were responsible for that?
If an opiate addict could get their daily heroin legally for $10/day, there would be no black market filled with poorly dosed fentanyl pills that kill people.
The amount of overdose deaths is caused by enforcement forcing the market to select an inferior product, fentanyl
I’m not advocating for making opiates legal, for what it’s worth. I’ve been addicted to heroin, suboxone got me clean.
I would say yes, but I would 100x more say yes to cocaine. Cocaine usage is statistically less deadly than alcohol usage, and the vast majority of cocaine deaths are due to mixing depressive drugs with cocaine to keep them awake and able to take more depressive drugs until the cocaine wears off and they die from the heroic doses of pills or heroin or alcohol they consumed. And a lot of that problem can be mitigated with education, knowledge, and clean source material that doesn't have other cheaper drugs mixed in already.
Despite the strong effects cocaine has on users, it isn't really especially dangerous or damaging except to people with heart problems who would have similar issues with other stimulants like caffeine. The most dangerous thing about cocaine might just be how obtaining it involves interacting with such serious and expensive criminal markets and the legal problems of getting caught with it. The War on Drugs has propagandized it seem to like some super-drug of the most dangerous order that drives people mad and turn into cannibals or some outlandish shit, but it is a huge mischaracterization; basically the same kind of thing they tried to do to marijuana in making people think it turns you into a rapist or makes you a drooling idiot.
Of course, "the powers that be" can want things to change, but not want to pay the cost required to truly change it.
As hyperbole, you can stop all court cases, assume everyone is guilty if they're arrested, and give everyone capital punishment. That would most likely end cartel issues rather quickly, but it would absolutely mess with society to a dangerous level. El Salvador took a (less hyperbolic) extreme approach, and it dramatically reduced crime, but it's not clear that citizens are actually happy with this outcome as.
Of course, it could be possible that leaders are corrupt, but it could simply be that the cost to fixing things is very high.
We don't do that precisely because that's how you end up with this situation. We wonder how history repeats itself, but we can't be bothered to know history from over 40 years ago.
60 years actually but for the recent criminality you need to look to Venezuela’s attempt of revolution in the late 10’s which generated the expansion of the Tren de Aragua which evolved extortion from random events to an enterprise level kind of thing.
Cocaine, I could maybe see the argument. But the article also said there was another submarine seized with 4.5BN worth of meth aboard. And I really hope you aren't suggesting legalising meth. I could see the argument that if other amphetamines were legal no one would use meth, but.....I don't think that's necessarily true. All the illegal meth would have to do to keep existing is to be cheaper than legal speed.
Everyone agrees that no-one should do meth. But the solutions presented so far by prohibition are not just conceptually flawed - they demonstrably don’t work. We literally have 50+ years of data that shows it.
We need to
a) legalize drugs,
b) provide proper treatment to addicts, and
c) get unsafe drugs off the streets.
I’m speaking as someone who lost a close family member to an overdose. What we’re doing now is not working.
I know we have data that shows just how harmful the war on drugs has been, but I'm curious if we have data showing that legalization in a modern society, with global supply chains and marketing campaigns, does not result in a bunch of people who previously wouldn't have done drugs - for fear of legal consequences, or just because they're hard to obtain - suddenly doing drugs. I'm genuinely interested to know, this isn't something I've made up my mind about.
I finally managed to quit vaping a year ago after starting as a teen. To be honest, if I could get a dime bag at the corner store, I'm not certain that I would be able to resist the temptation to do so for the first time or umpteenth time. Speaking only for myself, I suspect I would be a happier and more productive member of society if it continued to be the case that these chemicals were inaccessible to me. I'm interested to know if there's data suggesting that I'm mistaken or just an outlier.
Just given what I know about the issue (which, admittedly, isn't a lot), I feel decriminalizing possession and keeping distribution illegal would be my first choice. I want people to be able to test their drugs for fentanyl without fear of legal consequences, but I'm reluctant to trust corporations or individuals not to push addictive poison into the hands of the vulnerable when there are profit incentives and no legal boundaries.
Most places that focus on treatment rather than punishment see drops in all the relevant stats for deaths, crime, health issues, etc. related to drugs usage. And even drops in drug abuse itself. The one thing that has never really worked and continues to create endless amounts of misery is the war on drugs and all the collateral damage it causes.
I totally believe that treatment should be the focus for drug users; the only focus, even. What I'm having trouble believing is that convenient access to drugs would not result in net-harms that are worse than those inflicted by (imperfect attempts at) holding people accountable for selling these chemicals to the vulnerable, irrespective of whether or not those people are pharmaceutical companies or cartels.
I would like to see evidence that jurisdictions in the developed world that stop prosecuting dealers for freely selling what I'd call "hard drugs", e.g. opiates and amphetamines, see their population's well-being improve, on the whole - if there has ever been such a jurisdiction.
Drug trade is so lucrative that most drugs are now readily available to those that want them. If you have the cash, getting what you want is very easy and convenient. It's proven extremely hard to make it inconvenient.
So, I think you are over estimating the effects of decriminalizing drug usage. And you are underestimating the effects of getting it out in the open where it can be monitored and be made subject to legislation. And of course there have been plenty of countries that have experimented with this and have gotten good results. And there have of course been plenty of countries that have gotten decent results with decriminalizing drug usage.
The legalization of weed in the US is a good recent example. Before legalization lots of people would get in trouble for smoking or selling weed. And these days the same activity is fine. Do lots more people smoke weed now? Probably to some extent. But it's mostly the same people that were interested in doing that sort of thing anyway. I come from a country where weed smoking and sales were decriminalized decades ago. The system kind of works. Dutch drug usage stats aren't very different from surrounding countries.
I've lived in Scandinavian countries like Sweden and Finland that have a complicated relationship with alcohol. And of course technically, alcohol should be considered a drug. I've seen more alcohol abuse there than in countries where it's perfectly normal to have a drink. You have alcoholics everywhere. But it seems people not getting exposed to a normal set of behaviors around alcohol have a lot of people that overcompensate when it's suddenly made available cheaply. You see this when you meet Scandinavians on vacation elsewhere in Europe.
I currently live in a city (Berlin) where it is considered normal to have a beer on the street, in parks, or public transport. Not just normal. But completely socially acceptable. Nobody frowns at you. Nobody tells you off. And mostly people just stick to a sensible amount. Beer consumption is actually dropping in Germany. People are switching to non alcoholic beverages. That's happening in a lot of places.
I have the feeling they are easier to obtain than if they were only sold at dedicated stores and teenagers had to show an ID, or similar to casinos addict trying to get out could ask to be put on ban list.
Having said that, legalizing would not get rid of cartels, who are very diversified and also operate illegally on legal products by taxing producers and controlling transport and distribution. It would merely allow us to spend the same amount of money on health care and prevention so that less people get addicted and those who are have more chances of rehab.
If war on drug worked, you would see addicts accross the country in the news complaining that their dealers are all in jail and they can't find a new one. Or saying that their dealers do not have any stock so they have to travel to get their fix. Has this ever happened?
At least in my circles I'd have a much harder time getting access to meth or heroin than I would a product that can be bought from a special store. I imagine there are many individuals like me, but I'm not sure, which is why I ask for data.
There's no doubt in my mind that addicts know how to find dealers, and don't have trouble finding new dealers when their former dealer gets arrested. What I'm worried about and asking for data about is the possibility of legalization creating a new cohort of addicts who would start to use hard drugs if they were to be as conveniently-obtained as liquor.
I'm not advocating for the war on drugs, to be clear, I'm dubious about treating hard drugs like alcohol, tobacco, or weed (in some states). I still lean towards decriminalization of possession and harm-reduction as being better policy, but I recognize it doesn't solve all the issues.
Most people have the common sense to avoid using the stuff without very good reason. Availability isn't going to be a big factor.
And decriminalization of possession doesn't really do much. Cops don't focus on possession in the first place. It lets people be more open about possessing (which is a good thing for opiate users--much more likely to get Narcan if needed) but does nothing about the quality problems from the supply chain.
And if you get rid of the drug war you get rid of the insanity around prescribing controlled substances.
> Most people have the common sense to avoid using the stuff without very good reason
I agree that most (not all) people have the common sense to avoid the stuff most of the time. I think things would get dangerous if these substances were to be available at all times to just about anyone; that would mean them being available to people who are at their lowest or least-rational, as well as the intersection of people with an innate lack of self-preservation and those who previously lacked ready-access to drugs. If someone just lost a loved one or had a few too many drinks I think they're a lot more likely to make reckless decisions - I think policy should protect our most vulnerable.
> And decriminalization of possession doesn't really do much. Cops don't focus on possession in the first place. It lets people be more open about possessing (which is a good thing for opiate users--much more likely to get Narcan if needed) but does nothing about the quality problems from the supply chain.
If I were to believe these claims I'd need to see some evidence, it doesn't align with my intuition. My sense is that drug users would be more likely to test their drugs if they didn't have to fear the law and I haven't seen any reason to believe otherwise - of course the government ought want to ensure that drug-testing solutions were more readily available before decriminalization policy went into effect.
I think decriminalizing the sale of all drugs, without a great deal of research supporting the conclusion that it wouldn't catastrophically increase the rate of drug abuse, would be highly reckless from a policy perspective. Decriminalizing possession seems like a good first step to precede more research, I think we agree about the harms and immoral motives behind the war on drugs - I don't yet have reason to believe that the war on drugs is a loose Jenga piece that we can freely remove.
Within your circles it may be hard. But if tasked to get some hard drugs today in a big city you could easily get it done. Find the tweakers who are very public in most cities and ask if they’d sell you drugs.
I have absolutely no idea where I'd find a "tweaker"(maybe that's a statement on where I live more than anything? and I would never have the courage to go up to them and ask to buy drugs. I imagine best case they'd laugh and ask if you're a cop, worst case they'd sell you god knows what or rob you. It's just completely incomparable to going to a store to buy a product.
In most countries alcohol and tobacco are legal and widely available. They are both highly addictive and hazardous to health. And yet society mostly carries on, though we do lose some quantity of people to both of them.
I have a few reasons I might more willingly accept the legality of alcohol, I believe they're also the reasons prohibition didn't work:
1. Alcohol is deeply embedded in human culture, to get a significant portion of society to stop using it would be like trying to get people to stop eating bread or to stop having sex. It would be expensive and unproductive to enforce.
2. Alcohol is easy, though more dangerous, to make. To prohibit it would be to turn people towards more-dangerous moonshine.
3. Relatively speaking, alcohol's health effects aren't that bad; it's poison, but it's only very mild poison. Overindulging on alcohol once mostly leads to a hangover, it's difficult to drink enough alcohol to kill yourself and it starts to get unpleasant before you reach that point. The real dangers of alcohol seem to come with chronic use.
4. Alcohol is not extremely addictive. It seems most people can somewhat regularly partake without becoming alcoholics. In my understanding most addictive drugs won't get you hooked the very first time you try them, but trying them a few times is usually all it takes. Anecdotally, having used both, sometimes in excess, I find it much easier to resist a drink than nicotine.
If you pair these with the other harms and expenses of general drug prohibition (organized crime, disproportionate criminalization of minorities, etc) it becomes very hard to justify the prohibition of alcohol, in my mind.
Some of those things apply to tobacco too but to a lesser degree, so the case for illegalizing it might have some legs, although I suspect it's not worth it either. I might argue that burning tobacco products, specifically, should be illegalized due to the fact that there are several known, practical, and less destructive nicotine delivery methods. Lozenges, patches, and vapes work, and so far seem to be much less catastrophic for one's health. It's not clear to me that you'd get murderous tobacco cartels who lace their product with fentanyl.
When weed was illegal, buying weedeant calling a guy who also dealt in opiates and meth. When they didn't have weed, they'd try to upsell you on harder stuff.
Now that I can get weed at a legit store, I have no clue where to get the harder stuff. My dozens of hookups have all left the field.
On the other hand I'd love to try weed but I'm terrified of both the potential legal consequences where I live as well as just interacting with drug dealers is not something I need in my life. The potential payoff doesn't seem worth the risk. But I can promise you that the day is becomes legal where I live I'm going to buy some to finally give try it.
making drugs legal doesn’t mean it will be available at your local corner store. I’m all for keeping certain volumes of distribution illegal but no good has come from the war on drugs.
Yep I misunderstood "legal" to mean "regulated like alcohol/tobacco" or "unscheduled" in this context and "decriminalized" to be the colloquial term meaning "legal to own and use but illegal to sell." My mistake!
> To be honest, if I could get a dime bag at the corner store, I'm not certain that I would be able to resist the temptation to do so for the first time
When people discuss "legalizing drugs" in the context of ending the war on drugs, they don't necessarily mean it should be sold at corner stores. Generally the exception to this is Cannabis which has its own legalization movement, but not hard drugs.
> I feel decriminalizing possession and keeping distribution illegal would be my first choice
This is usually what legalization means in most practical policy discussions. They want to make possession legal or "de-criminalized", not distribution. Because they want addicts to feel safe seeking help.
Portugal had a big "legalization" push around 2000 which saw a huge uptick in rehab and addiction treatment cases, and it's often the program advocates point to. Oregon tried this in 2020, but didn't couple it with strong social support (recovery programs) and rolled it back a few years later. Oregon is often what detractors point to.
Decriminalising without legalising manufacturing and distribution is a pretty shitty compromise, because it leaves lack of control of the safety of the drugs, and the violence and other criminality through the entire chain.
I see. I understood "legalization" to mean the same thing in this context that it means for cannabis, e.g. legal to distribute/purchase for recreational use. I should have clarified, thank you.
If amphetamines were legal we could get a lot of people to switch away from black market meth into cleaner and safer amphetamines in better controlled doses though. With most amphetamines being illegal and the fewer medical amphetamines being highly controlled and restricted to limit supply, you guarantee people are going to be taking black market street meth of unknown quality and type. There is a reason prescribed adderall has 4 different amphetamine salts in it and not just one random one, and is a large reason why problems with adderall abuse are so less common and severe than problems with unregulated meth abuse.
If your goal it to have zero bad effects from people using drugs, and you think you can achieve atleast close to that, then prohibition does seem like an ideal policy. But if you believe a decent number of people will find or produce and consume drugs regardless of the law or enforcement capabilities, as evident by the last 60+ years of failed strong illegal drug policies, prohibition drug policies for any drug is silly and leaves you almost no room to educate people about drug usage or how to minimize harm and addiction and limites their choices in being able to pick the safest versions of a drug.
Addicts need help, if we want to reduce drug use we can do it through education and support. That's how tobacco use has dropped in western countries, not by banning it and using violence.
And understand that use of heavy drugs is often driven by seeking to escape some aspect of life. Fix that and people can often quit on their own by slowly tapering. Don't fix that and they're very prone to falling off the wagon.
We already have legal meth, it's branded Adderall® and we regularly prescribe it to children, grad students, and hedge fund managers. You just have to be rich enough to afford the 'scrip.
Isn't Dexedrine just slow release dextroamphetamine?
There isn't really a whole lot of difference between amphetamine and methamphetamine. Meth is, weight for weight, stronger due to the methyl- group enabling the molecule to pass through cell membranes / the blood-brain barrier easier, and at the effect-equivalent dose most people wouldn't notice any difference.
I do think Adderall should be available OTC to everybody. It's an open secret that rich kids with no legitimate mental issues buy prescriptions for adderall to boost their school and job performance. The popular talk of "ADHD brains" for which Adderall works differently is pseudoscience tacitly endorsed by the medical community to make people feel okay about using these drugs. They don't just boost the school performance of people who have ADHD, they do that for everybody. It's a relatively harmless drug in the vein of caffeine, almost everybody would benifit from using it, not just the people with diagnosed attention disorders. Broad legalization would level the playing field.
Meth is different, even though it's basically the same if you look at it reductively. Meth hits you fast, it's not slow release. It gives you mind melting sex and gives you psychosis if you use it a lot. In a world where Adderall is easily and legally accessible to everybody, meth will remain desirable and ruinous.
Disagree--it's not that it works differently, but whether the effect is desirable.
There's always a balance between focusing on the task and dealing with the world. Adderall always turns up the focus. It's just that's a beneficial effect for those who didn't have enough focus, often an undesirable effect for those who already had enough.
Saying it works differently on ADHD brains is like saying the furnace works differently on winter weather than on summer weather.
I wouldn’t say it is relatively harmless like caffeine. You hardly notice an effect from caffeine. You take adderall you are noticeably stimming on the other hand. You feel quite high and it is in no way subtle.
Caffeine isn't an amphetamine so there are differences, but caffeine hardly having a noticeable effect isn't one of them. Dose is everything. If you stick to coffee or cola that limits you, but pick up a bottle of OTC caffeine pills and you can really start to get wired and hurt yourself.
This has been a failed experiment. When you legalize drugs, it comes at increased cost due to taxes and regulations.
The black market can easily compete because they can sell a cheaper product without either of these things (and now that it's legal, it makes it easier to bring shipments into the country under the guise of a legal business) and it eventually drives the legitimate companies out of business.
This has now been seen in both Colorado and California.
Violence still drives the business and it only makes the cartels richer. I'm also tired of all the pot smoke you can smell everyone now in every US city where it's legalized.
The people like me, that didn't want drugs legalized, predicted all this would happen a decade or so ago.
Wrong antenna choice—should've used Starlink Mini to avoid motor damage from oscillation and salt exposure. Some suggest fiber optics instead of satellite comms, but these aren't submarines—they're boats, and autopilot technology is already reliable. Not sure why real-time communication is necessary; a "fire and forget" approach would suffice to reach the intended target.
I'm sure it's very rewarding, but I'm also sure it's a one-way street. So either enjoy your single life while it lasts, and/or use crypto to channel your income to people you care, without being able to enjoy it _with_ them for their own safety.
Why not make a solar-electric narcosub? That way you don't need fuel, and you're not relying on an IC engine with a bunch of moving parts, and that has a heat signature. The sun is shining in the ocean that these cartels are sailing in anyway, so there should be power.
Steer with GPS, that way you are only listening.
I wouldn't rely on Starlink, it seems like something that could be discovered easily. Any authority that had a map of where legit ships are could filter down to the mysterious Starlinks that are in the middle of the water, but near a remote coast, having traveled from Colombia, not on a known vessel.
Maybe if you need the comms, you rely on radio. Whatever the ham radio people use could perhaps be made into something. You don't need a lot of bandwidth anyway.
I guess the question is economics, then. How many trips could you get on a little boat that has a solar panel, electric engine, a battery, GPS, and a radio? And what would that cost?
a narco sub could easily be 50x the weight, needs to move significantly faster (RCTF boat is going like 5mph tops), and is fighting against extremely strong currents and waves (RCTF is on extremely still calm water).
But I'm thinking of a sub that is mostly just a solar panel. You don't need to be able to put a person in it? Don't you get a few hundred watts from a square meter?
It's not a submarine and I wish news outlets would stop saying "narco sub". It's a surface vessel designed to have only a very small part above water. Building an actual submarine capable of submerged travel for lengthy periods is quite difficult.
Semi-submersible wild be a more accurate description. Most of the boat is under water, usually only an inch or so down so it’s hard to see from a boat.
That’s some level of confidence on the part of the Colombian military. I thought it was still customary to declare at least half otherwise nobody would believe you.
I am wondering why they used the link so much that it was able to be used against them. Submersible loses benefits if it requires an external service.
Launch. Submerge. Drunkenly move in the direction of the destination. If N days since last check-in and/or uncertainty in location, ping mothership. Repeat. Only lean on communication channel for final handoff stage.
To that end I suspect that tracking starlink used in an unmanned narco sub would be trivial for an insider at the company. My first thought was “I wonder if the movement and activity pattern would be unique. Yes probably. If unique could a script be run to pinpoint them? Yes probably.” If law enforcement has tasked someone with doing this (likely and legal) there’s high likelihood that any future narcosub using starlink will be intercepted.
So to anyone on either side of this arms race: “you’re welcome”
This strikes me as not a very good technique. With minimal help from starlink law enforcement could find every sub out there. Anyhow, what does this buy you that an offline gps connected controller does not?
If you have direct control you need far less automation and can potentially solve more problems at sea or change destination as needed or retrieve it faster if it breaks down by telling you exactly what is wrong, and it requires less skills to build all the hardware. Your entire radio communications setup is as close to plug-and-play as it gets and it both looks like "legitimate" radio signals and is far less likely to detected on the ground as a remote control link since it is using phased array antennas pointed at the sky rather than at the horizon.
You also have to remember its not like they are building tons of identical subs and moved an entire fleet over to starlink. They could have a dozen very different setups running with just a few guys tinkering around with whatever devices are easy to obtain under the radar, and it prevents single design vulnerabilities from collapsing your entire sub delivery supply line at once. Even if it only evades enforcement a single time by being novel, the cocaine it delivers out values whatever hardware and work it took to setup in the first place.
Because the cargo is high value and illegal, real time connectivity is needed. If it was on autopilot, how could they verify delivery? What if a third party was tipped by an insider and intercepted the shipment? What if it simply sank along the route?
I just imagine being a techie working for the cartel. In case you do not receive the ping, would you want to tell this to your violence prone boss: “Hey boss! Sooo. According to my calculations the significant investment you made in my idea should have pinged back by now. Maybe it is there, just there is something wrong with the SIM, or the antenna, or the network. Or maybe it is a few miles left or right on the coast and not getting cell signal. Or maybe the snorkel got swamped out on the sea and it stalled the engine and it is drifting somewhere. Or maybe our rivals nabbed it. Or maybe a random ship colided with it and it sunk. I hope this uncertainty is fine with you and won’t affect adversely our relationship, or how you treat my family.”
Don't ask me how a criminal operation holds together without either someone defecting and getting everyone killed, or someone killing someone else because they thought they were defecting. Presuming that it does, in fact, somehow maintain cohesion, I think they're all aware the submarine stuff is risky.
They're earning however many tens of millions of dollars per successful shipment and it's way higher than what it actually cost them to produce. And I'd guess they send perhaps ten to fifty shipments per year. Having 50% shrinkage is balanced by a 9999% profit margin.
This one, if it truly had no drugs in it, might have been a test run (risk-reducing).
> I think they're all aware the submarine stuff is risky.
Yeah, but that only works if you get feedback back. The problem is not that the submersible sometimes breaks down. The problem is if you only have a gsm modem on it which only sends data back at the end of the run you won’t be able to tell what went wrong, therefore you can’t improve on it.
“Boss, a big wave broke the snorkel and the craft stalled 36% of the way there. Richardo is welding a stronger snorkle on the next one as we speak.” Is what you want to tell your boss. This is the reason why they have telemetry.
The problem with launching the craft into the dark with just a gps sifnal is that it is too binary of a signal. You get one bit of information out of it: made it / didn’t made it. With that your ship can be 99% perfect and still only see the “did not make it” signal because of the last 1% of things not working.
This seems difficult. Even with two Starlinks: one to control it in Colombia, and one to control it at the destination coast, killing power to each. And make it autonomous on the way. This leaves the problem that there is a sudden (dis-)appearance of the link at sea, which might still make you light up like a lighthouse in analysis.
However, it would seem cartels could use a cubesat and make their own links?
One cubesat launched as a rideshare payload wouldn't cut it. Those typically get dropped off in a highly inclined low earth orbit -- around the world, roughly pole to pole, in 90 minutes. Any given satellite in that sort of orbit will only be useful to a ground station when it has line-of-sight for maybe 5-10 minutes every few days.
At the very least you'd need a few dozen. Iridium manages to get coverage from 66.
Then there are the power/cooling/antenna size issues.
Not way higher. wikipedia says Iridium satellites orbit at 781km altitude.
Starlink satellites are a little lower -- mainly at around 560km (but there's some variation).
Way higher would be O3B at around 8,000km, GPS at 20,200km and geosynchronous at around 35,800km.
GPS is only a confirmation of positioning. It doesn't free you from having a pilot in the vehicle.
Starlink opens the possibility for remote command & control. It opens up the possibility to fully remote drone capabilities.
Starlink should probably be disabled except to rarely report sensor data and accept new routing commands, so law enforcement can’t use EM scanning to find the source.
At the cost of it being really obvious where you are.
However the bigger draw is probably high bandwidth two way communication globally. No need for an obvious route as you can use GPS to get near US waters before turning it on, while still being in control of location of delivery or even meet up with it on the open ocean.
Sending the position only requires a few bits, let's say 48. A position update requires even less, depending on how far it could have travelled since the last known position. At such low data rates you could hide the transmission quite effectively.
As a once off it’s not going to be investigated, start making regular trips and people are going to start looking for such signals. Short bursts strong enough to detected many hundreds of miles away inherently need to be fairly strong making them standout from the background noise for close receivers. You can similarly triangulate based on signal strength given some ocean ships or even cheap buoys.
Starlink needs to be detectable by satellites, but you can almost completely block the signal going in other directions.
SpaceX might already be sharing it’s data with coastguards though.
I also wonder if you could have a visible surface vessel (e.g. fishing boat) which acts as a navigation beacon for the sub. Sub can just follow the beacon without any active communication of its own. If enforcement appears, sub will destructively sink to avoid revealing the operation.
Wikipedia says unmanned underwater vehicles fall in the drone category as do unmanned surface vehicles.
Speaking of which does Ukraine use weaponized RC vehicles and roaming unmanned anti-ship subs? I would think you would get a larger payload and better damage from the undercarriage.
I think you are making mental assumptions that aren’t justified.
Narco drone subs are delivery vehicles, just not for the “last mile” to the end user. They are more like self-driving long haul trucks that don’t care about international borders.
But you could theoretically build a drone that would guide itself to a destination with just GPS right? It would potentially be even easier with water?
one thing I like about permissionless finance is that operations like these can be publicly traded, specifically for aggregate forecasts of value and price discovery
I dont like how publicly traded status is put on a pedestal and treated like a reward
The definitive source for this stuff - he literally wrote the book on it - is H I Sutton http://www.hisutton.com/
He does videos on youtube too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rO-VQllYIZo
Its very likely the mainstream media pick up this stuff because they follow him :D
Wow, that website has some interesting stuff on it!
"The vessel was not carrying drugs"
Why wouldn't they track it and wait until it rendezvoused with people they could arrest?
Also, today I learned it's illegal to operate a semi-submersible in Colombia.
I wonder how much of this is just a publicity stunt. Last time I dove deep into studying corruption in Latin America at University, Colombia was pretty much captive to the cartels. Hope it has gotten better now but I’m not sure if that’s the case given the massive Colombian diaspora that keeps increasing.
The thought is that things had improved in Columbia, until a recent attempt on a Columbian senator.
Miguel Uribe is in the minority conservative party and was shot three times at campaign event by an underage youth who was hired for this purpose. A number of arrests have taken place.
The leftist president Gustavo Petro has not strongly reacted against this event, and the U.S. recently recalled their ambassador for somewhat confusing reasons (Columbia did the same).
https://thecitypaperbogota.com/
I just came across this podcast in the last week after wondering what ever happened to the FARC and AUC (right wing death squads) after the peace deal. How did things end up playing out relative compared to what was expected and feared at the time.
It’s a pretty batshit story that focuses on what became of the right wing death squads (they run the start of the cocaine supply chain it turns out among many other things) that’s extremely well researched and has amazing access. A strong recommendation from me https://insightcrime.org/audio-from-the-ground-up/the-shadow...
FARC was left-wing death squads; AUC far right counter-death squads.
What is a counter-death squad? A ragtag band of obstetricians?
Unless there’s a type of killing that doesn’t involve death, looks like the AUC was a far right wing death squad.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapirip%C3%A1n_massacre
A death squad to attack the other death squads.
Perhaps because they watched it long enough to know that it is not going to rendezvous with anyone, and if they wait longer it may turn around and they will lose sight of it?
It very well might have a camera--they knew they had been seen and couldn't just tail it.
it'd be really silly to have a long distance anything with full starlink bandwidth and not transmit images or video. they would have seen law enforcement catch it and poke at it for sure. and even if it was just telemetry, they'd see it was stationary for some period of time, and maybe even detect it was out of the water for a prolonged period of time
I'm kind of curious how much this matters to Colombia now. For this who haven't been following the drug wars, most of the action, and money, has moved to Mexico. If you only know this stuff through pop culture, Mexico today is what Colombia was in the 80's and 90's: the violence, level of corruption, money flowing through, etc.
Cocaine is still produced overwhelmingly in South America. Yes, it does have to go through Mexico. But the start of the trade route is Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru.
Also Mexican cartels are wreaking havoc in coastal Ecuador, which is being used in an alternative sea route for drug shipments north.
So yeah, South America is still a main hub of the drug trade.
It's important from a supply chain perspective, but not in the getting-rich-off-of-this sense anymore. The analogy I use is Apple in the USA (Mexico) and Foxconn in China (Colombia).
Colombia is the main producer of illegal cocaine, responsible for 70 to 80 percent of the world's supply. It is the largest producer in the world.
Colombia produces the raw materials, so it is "essential" in that sense, but that is not where the money and power is now (that's Mexico). Kind of like how your iPhone is manufactured in China, but the world's-richest-company status goes to Apple, in the US.
Quoting an AI summary (because I'm looking for a quick answer here):
Mexico has become the primary financial beneficiary of cocaine money today. Mexican cartels now control the most lucrative parts of the supply chain - smuggling into the US market and wholesale distribution. They've essentially become the "middlemen" who buy cocaine from Colombian producers at relatively low prices and then sell it in the US at much higher prices, capturing most of the profit margin.
Colombia remains important as a producer of coca and cocaine, but the economics have changed dramatically. Colombian groups now often function more as suppliers to Mexican cartels rather than controlling the entire supply chain themselves. The raw materials and initial processing generate far less revenue than the final distribution stages.
And Ecuador, sadly.
Just legalize it already. This is stupid.
Cartels are already diversifying, thanks to bullish gold market they are going full tilt on gold. "In Colombia and Peru gangs are now thought to make more money from gold than from the sale of narcotics."[1]
[1]: https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2025/06/26/the-gold-b...
Even if they do, the cartels already own huge man & firepower. They will just move on to the next thing, maybe coffee, avocados, oil whatever.
When you have accumulated so much power you can demand cash from the world around you.
Coffee, avocados, and oil aren't illegal. But I'm pretty sure if you banned coffee it would spawn criminal gangs that made 1920s prohibition look tame.
There's no substitute for the margins you can get in the illegal drug trade. Take away the primary source of funding and you make it much easier to break the gangs. We've already gone through this. Just legalize it already.
They already extortion every single producer. Any coffee and avocado coming from South America has an extortion tax somewhere in the supply chain whether it’s to the farmers, shipping companies, distribution center warehouses at port or whatever you imagine. The extortion comes as placing gang members as part of security, real threats or just bribes to unlock to keep moving towards the consumer.
Illegal goods have better margins but extortions provide a platform for power and money with less effort.
They could set a 1000% tax on the coffee produced, if they can consolidate control. Latin America is 50% of the world coffee production. What will Starbucks / Nestle do? They will just pay up. They can even go against the families of the execs to make their case about the new price.
> What will Starbucks / Nestle do?
Finance wars. Like with the "Ten Cents War": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Pacific
They tried this before with fruit. The US companies just sold their interest in production and have plenty of other options for acquisition if they try to tax beyond the relative ease of South America verse anywhere else in the global south.
I would agree that letting black market bs continue will eventually lead to groups that could threaten global control on random other commodities but that's no reason kick the can further down this road.
Part of the reason such a large percentage of coffee is grown there is because it's cheap. The cartels can (and do) make profit on legitimate crops, but they can't magically rewrite the rules of capitalism.
Coffee beans are notoriously picky about their environment. But with modern technology, it wouldn't surprise me if large companies would resort to growing it in artificial greenhouses, or putting more stock in breeding plants that can be grown elsewhere.
>They could set a 1000% tax on the coffee produced.
No they couldn't. That'd just mint another cartel run black market that they don't control and that cartel would tax the black market coffee at substantially less.
You can kind of think of the current drugs situation as a "so big the number doesn't matter, it's a non stater" percent tax.
That new cartel would invite a war against it. These disputes are not resolved through capitalistic means. You cannot just price out the big guys.
How is that any different than the current situation where the current cartel is fighting with the government?
Wasn't that same argument used for legalizing cannabis? How did that work out?
Exactly. These cartels are basically competing governments. They're in the drugs industry in the same way that there's state oil industries. The only choose crime because that activity has to exist outside the existing government system.
high tariffs could make every commodity an opportunity.
They'll probably move onto mass producing weaponry, which, depending on the sophistication and scale, could be big issues for the rest of the world. They already partner with terrorist groups and other unsavory orgs as-is. Any group worth mentioning these days interfaces with the cartels
I don’t think weapon production is in their wheelhouse. Arms dealing maybe but not manufacturing. Facilities like those are permanent locations. Permanent locations tend to get raided and attacked.
I think controlling municipalities like they are is working fine for them. No need to mass produce weapons when you can just buy them.
They do have expertise in manufacturing and managing manufacturing facilities and logistics though. Likely the production equipment is not very sophisticated/ hard to reproduce if destroyed. I don’t expect them to produce state of the art F35s anyway.
Ehh, im not sure I agree that arms production is that difficult. Yes you need machine shop equipment, but machine equipment from any time in the last 75 years would be more than capable and there is plenty of unused equipment sitting around and new cheap chinese equipment you can buy that would be workable even if it isn't great. Even the US where guns are about as legal as they get, there are illegal gun manufacturing shops busted basically every week. Half of them are probably just making trash that is super easy to do like giggle switches and mostly publicized as pure propaganda for police departments, but that still leaves a significant number of people producing working illegal arms even in a market where guns are dirt cheap.
And now you got an entire online community dedicated to 3d printing firearms and sharing models and designs, and it is REALLY easy to go from 3d printer design into sintered or casted metal parts that require little to no actual machining to operate.
In my opinion, 99% of the barrier to obtaining firearms in this era is purely a lack of desire and them already being so cheap to get. It doesn't require a craftsman of 20 years to produce working fierarms nor even specialized or unusual equipment or materials. But even if someone did order more specialized machinery from China to produce say cold hammered barrels at a factory scale, a chinese tool making company isn't going to think twice about shipping it and taking the money, and if the producers can run it for just a few months it would have paid for itself.
There’s making a gun and making weapons. I’m sure they are capable of making AR style rifles. Can they manufacture mortars? RPGs? IEDs and Landmines and drones are about as sophisticated as they can get.
Where do you think this submersible was manufactured?
Building a couple of small boats isn't the same as mass producing weapons. I can build cars in my garage, but I'd need a machine shop full of extremely heavy equipment and tons of metal stock to build guns.
Not really, the competition with the existing governments will significantly limit the amount of replacement cash they can demand, so they won't be able to sustain the same scale of man/firepower
Applies to corporations as well but they do it legally and we consider part of our 'economy'. Heck we even subsidize them and give them the power to lobby and legally be a 'person'.
- Problem? What Problem? I don't see no stinkin' Problem!
Which drugs exactly are you proposing to be legalized? All?
That would be the humane and sensible thing to do, so obviously we are not going to do that. Let’s double down on enforcement so violence, corruption and profits increase.
We really did not learn anything from the alcohol prohibition.
It's not a choice between legalization of all drugs or violence and corruption. Sure, the way the US cracked down on drugs did more harm than good. But that doesn't mean there should be no regulation for drugs whatsoever.
Take the opioid epidemic for example. It claimed the lives of hundreds of people per day. Do you think "humane and sensible" people were responsible for that?
No. The drug warriors are neither humane nor sensible. Opioids are actually not all that dangerous, but the range between high and dead is not all that great. When you know what you're getting (chronic pain patients) the problem rate is low.
But with the street you get varying purity. And the drug war has caused the manufacturers to move to more concentrated products to make smuggling easier. And fentanyl has a very nasty property: the tendency to clump. This is no problem for the pharmaceutical industry, but when you have a dealer mixing stuff it's easy for a lethal clump to remain in the product. You get that, you better hope somebody nearby has Narcan.
You don't see it killing the pain patients like it kill the people on the street--this is a dose problem, not something inherent to the drugs.
And why is that a reason, anyway? There is no question as to the most deadly recreational drug: tobacco. Yet it's legal. Protecting the user is clearly not the motivation. (The data isn't so clear on the second because the data is so contaminated, but it looks like it is alcohol.)
Also, the majority of crime traces back to drugs. Remove the drug market, you cut the crime rate in half overnight. And there's no question the drug war causes a lot more harm than the drugs.
I can see no reasonable justification for the low-addictive stuff not to be legal. The highly addictive stuff you can make an argument for it being legal with a prescription, addiction is a valid reason for a prescription. It has been handled that way in the past in England and worked well. In in ideal world I would favor this approach, but I have a sufficient distrust of the politicians to trust this wouldn't become full of obstacles.
Amsterdam's experience with legalization says that it doesn't increase use, but advertising does.
Thus, what I would like to see: General promotional stuff is limited to simple item-price listings. Nothing more can be presented unless the customer has already demonstrated interest, either by entering a website (and the insides of the website can't be bookmarked, you must enter the gate each visit), or by entering a portion of a store devoted to that drug. Externally there must be a minimum of information needed to identify what the business is.
The selecting your stuff part can never be mixed, you want two different types and you must visit both places even if they have a common checkout.
The same rules apply to all recreational drugs, including tobacco and alcohol.
> No. The drug warriors are neither humane nor sensible.
I never once advocated for the war on drugs approach, and I made that crystal clear in my comment. Proper policy != war on drugs. It means making sure that drugs get properly certified and its distribution controlled. It means focusing on treatment rather than aggressively punishing those who get addicted. It means addressing the underlying social issues that pushes people towards drugs rather than pouring all money into militarizing the police.
> Opioids are actually not all that dangerous
Victims of the epidemic would beg to differ. The epidemic highlighted the need for proper control of drugs through certification and prescription. It showed how far the pharmaceutical industry will go if left unregulated.
> But with the street you get varying purity.
I never advocated for this either. It should be illegal to sell drugs without a license.
> There is no question as to the most deadly recreational drug: tobacco. Yet it's legal.
Which is why regulation has increased for tobacco all around the world. We could do more to limit the exploitation of people by tobacco companies.
> I can see no reasonable justification for the low-addictive stuff not to be legal.
Yes, the specifics of regulation should vary depending on the dangers of each drug. I'm against all drugs being unilaterally legalized.
I mostly agree with your viewpoints, but why would you leave some drugs unregulated and could you provide some examples of such drugs?
Opioids are only dangerous due to variance in purity (overdoses) and availability (withdrawal-motivated crime).
Of course addiction and dependence can be exploited for profit, but how is opioid dependence different in that respect from alcohol dependence, gambling addiction, sex addiction or even TikTok?
We already know what causes compulsive behaviors linked to addictions and also how to undo them. Amphetamines, cocaine, opioids, gambling and sex have a common denominator, namely overexpression of Delta-FosB protein in the orbitofrontal cortex. Those changes can be eradicated overnight with histone deacetylase inhibitors, but this treatment is not generally available.
You can slowly quit alcohol and tobacco addiction with your own willpower alone, but not opioid addiction. Imagine if it were an saas where signing up for a subscription is super easy but quitting on your own is almost impossible, of course regulators would step in.
The thing is cold turkey doesn't work. The reactions are bad and can be deadly.
But if you have access to accurately known doses that can be stepped down in small amounts you avoid all the bad things.
Remember, there's a big problem with inadequate pain control. Drug doesn't work exactly as the doctor expects, they assume drug seeking--and now you have people driven to the street to make life bearable. You're not going to "cure" an "addict" that actually needs the pain control.
Cut out all the nonsense, with addiction a valid reason there would be no drug seeking and doctors would be able to work with the patients much better.
It doesn’t need to be entirely willpower. Opioid dependency can be dealt with by doing what they would do in rehab: slowly taper down the daily dose over many weeks.
Of course, that only works if you have access to a standardized, regulated supply of opioids. You can’t do it with street drugs of unknown purity.
Going cold turkey off potent opioids is a recipe for relapse, or at worst, death.
Still, the likelihood of dying from withdrawal is much, much lower than with benzos or alcohol: both of those can cause seizures in withdrawal.
The opioid epidemic is not a great example, as it began by overprescription of legal, regulated medicinal drugs. The problem blew up when authorities started cracking down on those prescriptions, and the newly dependent started seeking drugs from illegal sources. Those sources included clandestinely produced heroin and fentanyl, leading to massive numbers of overdose deaths.
In other words, it was the enforcement of prohibition that ultimately caused more societal and health issues than the quasi-legal sales of hard drugs. It definitely wasn’t the doing of ”humane and sensible” policies!
So you see, it is actually a choice between legalization of all drugs or violence and corruption.
The system can only regulate drugs when they are legal.
Illegal drugs combined with enforcement of prohibition pits producers, traffickers, dealers and users against the police and ultimately the army, which are usually the only groups of people who have a state-sanctioned mandate to use violence against other people.
How could violence not result, when it is an integral part of the alleged ”solution”?
Just add pervasive income inequality, throw in some general lack of future prospects mixed with widely publicized lies about the billionaire class being entirely self-made through hard work, and baby, you got a stew going, and the people getting thrown in the hot water are already boiling over.
Actually, it had another serious flaw:
The drug at the center of this was listed as working for 12 hours. In many patients it did not. And the docs do not listen--it's supposed to be every X hours, it's every X hours. Fortunately I've had very little need of pain stuff because I know every single drug that I have ever been able to discern wearing off does so in less than the specified time. Blood pressure by the book of 1/day swings both too high and too low. Same total dose split into morning/evening provides very good control.
That's quite some wall of one insane libertarian take after another that it's impossible to keep up. Regulating drugs isn't the same thing as turning into a police state.
> The opioid epidemic is not a great example
You think the issue of regulating heroin and fentanyl is comparable to alcohol prohibition, but not the opioid epidemic?
> The problem blew up when authorities started cracking down on those prescriptions
The problem blew up when pharmaceutical companies deceitfully advertised addictive pain killers as safe and aggressively prescribed them to even those who didn't need it. It would've been prevented if the government adequately stepped in before it happened. It was already too late when authorities started cracking down, and to frame that time as the starting point of the problem is blatantly disingenuous.
> It definitely wasn’t the doing of ”humane and sensible” policies!
It's you who's framing the deregulation of OxyContin, heroin, and fentanyl as "humane and sensible," not me.
> So you see, it is actually a choice between legalization of all drugs or violence and corruption.
No, you haven't presented a single supporting argument that stands the test of logic and common sense.
> The system can only regulate drugs when they are legal.
What kind of logic is that? The only way to regulate something is to not regulate? What kind of mind games are you playing here?
> Illegal drugs combined with enforcement of prohibition pits producers, traffickers, dealers and users against the police and ultimately the army, which are usually the only groups of people who have a state-sanctioned mandate to use violence against other people.
Just because the US tries to solve every social issue with over-policing, police militarization, and mass incarceration doesn't mean that it's the only solution.
> Just add pervasive income inequality, throw in some general lack of future prospects mixed with widely publicized lies about the billionaire class being entirely self-made through hard work, and baby, you got a stew going, and the people getting thrown in the hot water are already boiling over.
Yes, and you think having more would-be Sacklers selling highly addictive drugs without anyone to stop them is a solution to that? Give us a break. Libertarianism doesn't stop billionaires and their exploitation of everyone else.
Thank you for the strawmen. I will burn them at Christmas.
Do you really think ”legal” means unregulated? That, if something, is a libertarian viewpoint.
Think about how many regulations you need to fulfill to be able to legally build a house, or employ a person. Are those things completely unregulated? How about the fuel you purchase at a gas station? Ever get only water or nitromethane instead of unleaded gas? Of course you haven’t, because you are buying a legal, regulated product.
Making drugs legal would make it possible to enforce standards of quality, labeling, age limits, et cetera before the products ever got to market.
By making drugs illegal, the society has abandoned all those controls and replaced them with the threat of violence: enforcement of behavior instead of enforcement of regulations.
That does not sound like freedom to me.
(Please don’t start arguing that murder also needs to be legalized, we both know that is not what I’m arguing for.)
> Take the opioid epidemic for example. It claimed the lives of hundreds of people per day. Do you think "humane and sensible" people were responsible for that?
If an opiate addict could get their daily heroin legally for $10/day, there would be no black market filled with poorly dosed fentanyl pills that kill people.
The amount of overdose deaths is caused by enforcement forcing the market to select an inferior product, fentanyl
I’m not advocating for making opiates legal, for what it’s worth. I’ve been addicted to heroin, suboxone got me clean.
Not even $10: one tablet of buprenorphine costs like $1 at the pharmacy. Probably more in the US, though.
I would say yes, but I would 100x more say yes to cocaine. Cocaine usage is statistically less deadly than alcohol usage, and the vast majority of cocaine deaths are due to mixing depressive drugs with cocaine to keep them awake and able to take more depressive drugs until the cocaine wears off and they die from the heroic doses of pills or heroin or alcohol they consumed. And a lot of that problem can be mitigated with education, knowledge, and clean source material that doesn't have other cheaper drugs mixed in already.
Despite the strong effects cocaine has on users, it isn't really especially dangerous or damaging except to people with heart problems who would have similar issues with other stimulants like caffeine. The most dangerous thing about cocaine might just be how obtaining it involves interacting with such serious and expensive criminal markets and the legal problems of getting caught with it. The War on Drugs has propagandized it seem to like some super-drug of the most dangerous order that drives people mad and turn into cannibals or some outlandish shit, but it is a huge mischaracterization; basically the same kind of thing they tried to do to marijuana in making people think it turns you into a rapist or makes you a drooling idiot.
The only conclusion i can draw from all this insanity is that the powers that be want things to be this way.
Of course, "the powers that be" can want things to change, but not want to pay the cost required to truly change it.
As hyperbole, you can stop all court cases, assume everyone is guilty if they're arrested, and give everyone capital punishment. That would most likely end cartel issues rather quickly, but it would absolutely mess with society to a dangerous level. El Salvador took a (less hyperbolic) extreme approach, and it dramatically reduced crime, but it's not clear that citizens are actually happy with this outcome as.
Of course, it could be possible that leaders are corrupt, but it could simply be that the cost to fixing things is very high.
What costs are you talking about? By just about every humanist and economic metric there are only benefits to decriminalisation.
They make more on human trafficking now, I’m assuming you don’t mean that.
The outcomes are bad for all parties involved.
Or fix up the Latin America. Just stop pretending US has no control over internal politics of foreign countries.
We don't do that precisely because that's how you end up with this situation. We wonder how history repeats itself, but we can't be bothered to know history from over 40 years ago.
60 years actually but for the recent criminality you need to look to Venezuela’s attempt of revolution in the late 10’s which generated the expansion of the Tren de Aragua which evolved extortion from random events to an enterprise level kind of thing.
The US made this.
That’s a really smart idea, I don’t know why nobody thought of this or tried for multiple decades before.
The US is a big part of the problems of Latin America. They participate in the drug trade, big time.
Cocaine, I could maybe see the argument. But the article also said there was another submarine seized with 4.5BN worth of meth aboard. And I really hope you aren't suggesting legalising meth. I could see the argument that if other amphetamines were legal no one would use meth, but.....I don't think that's necessarily true. All the illegal meth would have to do to keep existing is to be cheaper than legal speed.
The war on drugs has failed.
Everyone agrees that no-one should do meth. But the solutions presented so far by prohibition are not just conceptually flawed - they demonstrably don’t work. We literally have 50+ years of data that shows it.
We need to a) legalize drugs, b) provide proper treatment to addicts, and c) get unsafe drugs off the streets.
I’m speaking as someone who lost a close family member to an overdose. What we’re doing now is not working.
I know we have data that shows just how harmful the war on drugs has been, but I'm curious if we have data showing that legalization in a modern society, with global supply chains and marketing campaigns, does not result in a bunch of people who previously wouldn't have done drugs - for fear of legal consequences, or just because they're hard to obtain - suddenly doing drugs. I'm genuinely interested to know, this isn't something I've made up my mind about.
I finally managed to quit vaping a year ago after starting as a teen. To be honest, if I could get a dime bag at the corner store, I'm not certain that I would be able to resist the temptation to do so for the first time or umpteenth time. Speaking only for myself, I suspect I would be a happier and more productive member of society if it continued to be the case that these chemicals were inaccessible to me. I'm interested to know if there's data suggesting that I'm mistaken or just an outlier.
Just given what I know about the issue (which, admittedly, isn't a lot), I feel decriminalizing possession and keeping distribution illegal would be my first choice. I want people to be able to test their drugs for fentanyl without fear of legal consequences, but I'm reluctant to trust corporations or individuals not to push addictive poison into the hands of the vulnerable when there are profit incentives and no legal boundaries.
Most places that focus on treatment rather than punishment see drops in all the relevant stats for deaths, crime, health issues, etc. related to drugs usage. And even drops in drug abuse itself. The one thing that has never really worked and continues to create endless amounts of misery is the war on drugs and all the collateral damage it causes.
It never worked. Not even a little bit.
I totally believe that treatment should be the focus for drug users; the only focus, even. What I'm having trouble believing is that convenient access to drugs would not result in net-harms that are worse than those inflicted by (imperfect attempts at) holding people accountable for selling these chemicals to the vulnerable, irrespective of whether or not those people are pharmaceutical companies or cartels.
I would like to see evidence that jurisdictions in the developed world that stop prosecuting dealers for freely selling what I'd call "hard drugs", e.g. opiates and amphetamines, see their population's well-being improve, on the whole - if there has ever been such a jurisdiction.
Drug trade is so lucrative that most drugs are now readily available to those that want them. If you have the cash, getting what you want is very easy and convenient. It's proven extremely hard to make it inconvenient.
So, I think you are over estimating the effects of decriminalizing drug usage. And you are underestimating the effects of getting it out in the open where it can be monitored and be made subject to legislation. And of course there have been plenty of countries that have experimented with this and have gotten good results. And there have of course been plenty of countries that have gotten decent results with decriminalizing drug usage.
The legalization of weed in the US is a good recent example. Before legalization lots of people would get in trouble for smoking or selling weed. And these days the same activity is fine. Do lots more people smoke weed now? Probably to some extent. But it's mostly the same people that were interested in doing that sort of thing anyway. I come from a country where weed smoking and sales were decriminalized decades ago. The system kind of works. Dutch drug usage stats aren't very different from surrounding countries.
I've lived in Scandinavian countries like Sweden and Finland that have a complicated relationship with alcohol. And of course technically, alcohol should be considered a drug. I've seen more alcohol abuse there than in countries where it's perfectly normal to have a drink. You have alcoholics everywhere. But it seems people not getting exposed to a normal set of behaviors around alcohol have a lot of people that overcompensate when it's suddenly made available cheaply. You see this when you meet Scandinavians on vacation elsewhere in Europe.
I currently live in a city (Berlin) where it is considered normal to have a beer on the street, in parks, or public transport. Not just normal. But completely socially acceptable. Nobody frowns at you. Nobody tells you off. And mostly people just stick to a sensible amount. Beer consumption is actually dropping in Germany. People are switching to non alcoholic beverages. That's happening in a lot of places.
> "or just because they're hard to obtain "
Are they?
I have the feeling they are easier to obtain than if they were only sold at dedicated stores and teenagers had to show an ID, or similar to casinos addict trying to get out could ask to be put on ban list.
Having said that, legalizing would not get rid of cartels, who are very diversified and also operate illegally on legal products by taxing producers and controlling transport and distribution. It would merely allow us to spend the same amount of money on health care and prevention so that less people get addicted and those who are have more chances of rehab.
If war on drug worked, you would see addicts accross the country in the news complaining that their dealers are all in jail and they can't find a new one. Or saying that their dealers do not have any stock so they have to travel to get their fix. Has this ever happened?
At least in my circles I'd have a much harder time getting access to meth or heroin than I would a product that can be bought from a special store. I imagine there are many individuals like me, but I'm not sure, which is why I ask for data.
There's no doubt in my mind that addicts know how to find dealers, and don't have trouble finding new dealers when their former dealer gets arrested. What I'm worried about and asking for data about is the possibility of legalization creating a new cohort of addicts who would start to use hard drugs if they were to be as conveniently-obtained as liquor.
I'm not advocating for the war on drugs, to be clear, I'm dubious about treating hard drugs like alcohol, tobacco, or weed (in some states). I still lean towards decriminalization of possession and harm-reduction as being better policy, but I recognize it doesn't solve all the issues.
Most people have the common sense to avoid using the stuff without very good reason. Availability isn't going to be a big factor.
And decriminalization of possession doesn't really do much. Cops don't focus on possession in the first place. It lets people be more open about possessing (which is a good thing for opiate users--much more likely to get Narcan if needed) but does nothing about the quality problems from the supply chain.
And if you get rid of the drug war you get rid of the insanity around prescribing controlled substances.
> Most people have the common sense to avoid using the stuff without very good reason
I agree that most (not all) people have the common sense to avoid the stuff most of the time. I think things would get dangerous if these substances were to be available at all times to just about anyone; that would mean them being available to people who are at their lowest or least-rational, as well as the intersection of people with an innate lack of self-preservation and those who previously lacked ready-access to drugs. If someone just lost a loved one or had a few too many drinks I think they're a lot more likely to make reckless decisions - I think policy should protect our most vulnerable.
> And decriminalization of possession doesn't really do much. Cops don't focus on possession in the first place. It lets people be more open about possessing (which is a good thing for opiate users--much more likely to get Narcan if needed) but does nothing about the quality problems from the supply chain.
If I were to believe these claims I'd need to see some evidence, it doesn't align with my intuition. My sense is that drug users would be more likely to test their drugs if they didn't have to fear the law and I haven't seen any reason to believe otherwise - of course the government ought want to ensure that drug-testing solutions were more readily available before decriminalization policy went into effect.
I think decriminalizing the sale of all drugs, without a great deal of research supporting the conclusion that it wouldn't catastrophically increase the rate of drug abuse, would be highly reckless from a policy perspective. Decriminalizing possession seems like a good first step to precede more research, I think we agree about the harms and immoral motives behind the war on drugs - I don't yet have reason to believe that the war on drugs is a loose Jenga piece that we can freely remove.
Within your circles it may be hard. But if tasked to get some hard drugs today in a big city you could easily get it done. Find the tweakers who are very public in most cities and ask if they’d sell you drugs.
I have absolutely no idea where I'd find a "tweaker"(maybe that's a statement on where I live more than anything? and I would never have the courage to go up to them and ask to buy drugs. I imagine best case they'd laugh and ask if you're a cop, worst case they'd sell you god knows what or rob you. It's just completely incomparable to going to a store to buy a product.
In most countries alcohol and tobacco are legal and widely available. They are both highly addictive and hazardous to health. And yet society mostly carries on, though we do lose some quantity of people to both of them.
I have a few reasons I might more willingly accept the legality of alcohol, I believe they're also the reasons prohibition didn't work:
1. Alcohol is deeply embedded in human culture, to get a significant portion of society to stop using it would be like trying to get people to stop eating bread or to stop having sex. It would be expensive and unproductive to enforce.
2. Alcohol is easy, though more dangerous, to make. To prohibit it would be to turn people towards more-dangerous moonshine.
3. Relatively speaking, alcohol's health effects aren't that bad; it's poison, but it's only very mild poison. Overindulging on alcohol once mostly leads to a hangover, it's difficult to drink enough alcohol to kill yourself and it starts to get unpleasant before you reach that point. The real dangers of alcohol seem to come with chronic use.
4. Alcohol is not extremely addictive. It seems most people can somewhat regularly partake without becoming alcoholics. In my understanding most addictive drugs won't get you hooked the very first time you try them, but trying them a few times is usually all it takes. Anecdotally, having used both, sometimes in excess, I find it much easier to resist a drink than nicotine.
If you pair these with the other harms and expenses of general drug prohibition (organized crime, disproportionate criminalization of minorities, etc) it becomes very hard to justify the prohibition of alcohol, in my mind.
Some of those things apply to tobacco too but to a lesser degree, so the case for illegalizing it might have some legs, although I suspect it's not worth it either. I might argue that burning tobacco products, specifically, should be illegalized due to the fact that there are several known, practical, and less destructive nicotine delivery methods. Lozenges, patches, and vapes work, and so far seem to be much less catastrophic for one's health. It's not clear to me that you'd get murderous tobacco cartels who lace their product with fentanyl.
When weed was illegal, buying weedeant calling a guy who also dealt in opiates and meth. When they didn't have weed, they'd try to upsell you on harder stuff.
Now that I can get weed at a legit store, I have no clue where to get the harder stuff. My dozens of hookups have all left the field.
When I bought weed as a teen, I bought from all kinds of characters, but meth and opiates were never on the menu for me.
On the other hand I'd love to try weed but I'm terrified of both the potential legal consequences where I live as well as just interacting with drug dealers is not something I need in my life. The potential payoff doesn't seem worth the risk. But I can promise you that the day is becomes legal where I live I'm going to buy some to finally give try it.
Key here: "marketing campaigns".
Legal drugs, yes. Marketing, *NO*. Nothing more than the minimum for comparison shopping.
making drugs legal doesn’t mean it will be available at your local corner store. I’m all for keeping certain volumes of distribution illegal but no good has come from the war on drugs.
Yep I misunderstood "legal" to mean "regulated like alcohol/tobacco" or "unscheduled" in this context and "decriminalized" to be the colloquial term meaning "legal to own and use but illegal to sell." My mistake!
> To be honest, if I could get a dime bag at the corner store, I'm not certain that I would be able to resist the temptation to do so for the first time
When people discuss "legalizing drugs" in the context of ending the war on drugs, they don't necessarily mean it should be sold at corner stores. Generally the exception to this is Cannabis which has its own legalization movement, but not hard drugs.
> I feel decriminalizing possession and keeping distribution illegal would be my first choice
This is usually what legalization means in most practical policy discussions. They want to make possession legal or "de-criminalized", not distribution. Because they want addicts to feel safe seeking help.
Portugal had a big "legalization" push around 2000 which saw a huge uptick in rehab and addiction treatment cases, and it's often the program advocates point to. Oregon tried this in 2020, but didn't couple it with strong social support (recovery programs) and rolled it back a few years later. Oregon is often what detractors point to.
Decriminalising without legalising manufacturing and distribution is a pretty shitty compromise, because it leaves lack of control of the safety of the drugs, and the violence and other criminality through the entire chain.
I see. I understood "legalization" to mean the same thing in this context that it means for cannabis, e.g. legal to distribute/purchase for recreational use. I should have clarified, thank you.
If amphetamines were legal we could get a lot of people to switch away from black market meth into cleaner and safer amphetamines in better controlled doses though. With most amphetamines being illegal and the fewer medical amphetamines being highly controlled and restricted to limit supply, you guarantee people are going to be taking black market street meth of unknown quality and type. There is a reason prescribed adderall has 4 different amphetamine salts in it and not just one random one, and is a large reason why problems with adderall abuse are so less common and severe than problems with unregulated meth abuse.
If your goal it to have zero bad effects from people using drugs, and you think you can achieve atleast close to that, then prohibition does seem like an ideal policy. But if you believe a decent number of people will find or produce and consume drugs regardless of the law or enforcement capabilities, as evident by the last 60+ years of failed strong illegal drug policies, prohibition drug policies for any drug is silly and leaves you almost no room to educate people about drug usage or how to minimize harm and addiction and limites their choices in being able to pick the safest versions of a drug.
Addicts need help, if we want to reduce drug use we can do it through education and support. That's how tobacco use has dropped in western countries, not by banning it and using violence.
And understand that use of heavy drugs is often driven by seeking to escape some aspect of life. Fix that and people can often quit on their own by slowly tapering. Don't fix that and they're very prone to falling off the wagon.
We already have legal meth, it's branded Adderall® and we regularly prescribe it to children, grad students, and hedge fund managers. You just have to be rich enough to afford the 'scrip.
Adderall is an amphetamine, but it is not methamphetamine. It would be closer to accurate to compare it to Dexedrine than meth.
Isn't Dexedrine just slow release dextroamphetamine?
There isn't really a whole lot of difference between amphetamine and methamphetamine. Meth is, weight for weight, stronger due to the methyl- group enabling the molecule to pass through cell membranes / the blood-brain barrier easier, and at the effect-equivalent dose most people wouldn't notice any difference.
Adderall is a mixture of 75% Dextroamphetamine and 25% Levoamphetamine.
The brand name is Desoxyn for meth
I do think Adderall should be available OTC to everybody. It's an open secret that rich kids with no legitimate mental issues buy prescriptions for adderall to boost their school and job performance. The popular talk of "ADHD brains" for which Adderall works differently is pseudoscience tacitly endorsed by the medical community to make people feel okay about using these drugs. They don't just boost the school performance of people who have ADHD, they do that for everybody. It's a relatively harmless drug in the vein of caffeine, almost everybody would benifit from using it, not just the people with diagnosed attention disorders. Broad legalization would level the playing field.
Meth is different, even though it's basically the same if you look at it reductively. Meth hits you fast, it's not slow release. It gives you mind melting sex and gives you psychosis if you use it a lot. In a world where Adderall is easily and legally accessible to everybody, meth will remain desirable and ruinous.
Disagree--it's not that it works differently, but whether the effect is desirable.
There's always a balance between focusing on the task and dealing with the world. Adderall always turns up the focus. It's just that's a beneficial effect for those who didn't have enough focus, often an undesirable effect for those who already had enough.
Saying it works differently on ADHD brains is like saying the furnace works differently on winter weather than on summer weather.
I wouldn’t say it is relatively harmless like caffeine. You hardly notice an effect from caffeine. You take adderall you are noticeably stimming on the other hand. You feel quite high and it is in no way subtle.
Caffeine isn't an amphetamine so there are differences, but caffeine hardly having a noticeable effect isn't one of them. Dose is everything. If you stick to coffee or cola that limits you, but pick up a bottle of OTC caffeine pills and you can really start to get wired and hurt yourself.
No one should do meth. But that doesn't mean people don't do meth. And many of the bad results are because it's street stuff.
Meth is legal for people with poor attention.
The $amount is dishonest.
Check the weight then compare with wholesale prices
This has been a failed experiment. When you legalize drugs, it comes at increased cost due to taxes and regulations.
The black market can easily compete because they can sell a cheaper product without either of these things (and now that it's legal, it makes it easier to bring shipments into the country under the guise of a legal business) and it eventually drives the legitimate companies out of business.
This has now been seen in both Colorado and California.
Violence still drives the business and it only makes the cartels richer. I'm also tired of all the pot smoke you can smell everyone now in every US city where it's legalized.
The people like me, that didn't want drugs legalized, predicted all this would happen a decade or so ago.
Update: you know I'm right
Wrong antenna choice—should've used Starlink Mini to avoid motor damage from oscillation and salt exposure. Some suggest fiber optics instead of satellite comms, but these aren't submarines—they're boats, and autopilot technology is already reliable. Not sure why real-time communication is necessary; a "fire and forget" approach would suffice to reach the intended target.
Starlink dish does not require "leg" with motors for proper operation.
"Actuated Starlink models are not recommended for in-motion use due to safety risks."– Starlink note on oceanic operation. https://www.starlink.com/support/article/952e770f-570e-d984-...
I wonder what it's like being a developer / systems engineer for the cartel.
I imagine you couldn’t keep pushing deadlines out indefinitely like we can in American software companies.
Probably pretty scary
I'm sure it's very rewarding, but I'm also sure it's a one-way street. So either enjoy your single life while it lasts, and/or use crypto to channel your income to people you care, without being able to enjoy it _with_ them for their own safety.
I have always wanted to do this but it's not like they post on LinkedIn
Why not make a solar-electric narcosub? That way you don't need fuel, and you're not relying on an IC engine with a bunch of moving parts, and that has a heat signature. The sun is shining in the ocean that these cartels are sailing in anyway, so there should be power.
Steer with GPS, that way you are only listening.
I wouldn't rely on Starlink, it seems like something that could be discovered easily. Any authority that had a map of where legit ships are could filter down to the mysterious Starlinks that are in the middle of the water, but near a remote coast, having traveled from Colombia, not on a known vessel.
Maybe if you need the comms, you rely on radio. Whatever the ham radio people use could perhaps be made into something. You don't need a lot of bandwidth anyway.
I guess the question is economics, then. How many trips could you get on a little boat that has a solar panel, electric engine, a battery, GPS, and a radio? And what would that cost?
Because solar panel math doesn't work.
It's the same reason it makes no sense to put solar panels on a car: the solar panels would add minutes of driving daily.
You would need massive area of solar panels to power a sub which is obviously not workable if you want to be stealthy.
RCTestFlight begs to differ:
> 72hrs On My Unlimited Range Solar Boat > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc2PFExZXas
a narco sub could easily be 50x the weight, needs to move significantly faster (RCTF boat is going like 5mph tops), and is fighting against extremely strong currents and waves (RCTF is on extremely still calm water).
But I'm thinking of a sub that is mostly just a solar panel. You don't need to be able to put a person in it? Don't you get a few hundred watts from a square meter?
You need far more than a few hundred watts to move something in the open water, and these semi-submersibles aren't typically more than 30' vessels.
The math doesn't work out.
In the future millions of kilometers of cartel owned fiber optic will be laid from Columbia to the United States
Columbia is in the United States. Colombia is not.
Fascinating. Does the Starlink antenna work well underwater? Or was this sub surfacing to communicate?
Narco subs are mostly/entirely submerged to reduce visibility, but they almost all still operate at the surface
It's not a submarine and I wish news outlets would stop saying "narco sub". It's a surface vessel designed to have only a very small part above water. Building an actual submarine capable of submerged travel for lengthy periods is quite difficult.
The wavelengths used in satelite communication are entirely absorbed by water. I think the sub would have to surface to use the antenna.
Semi-submersible wild be a more accurate description. Most of the boat is under water, usually only an inch or so down so it’s hard to see from a boat.
Next one will lie 300km of it's own fiber optic cable.
The next one after that will have a hologram of donald trump and atomatically try to bribe the officials with a detention center and bitcoins.
> No drugs were found
That’s some level of confidence on the part of the Colombian military. I thought it was still customary to declare at least half otherwise nobody would believe you.
Some smuggling submarines are towed behind a boat. When the authorities stop the boat the smugglers cut the towing cable and sink the submarine.
It’s possible they interdicted this on a test run.
I wonder if the alleged perpetrators are reading this thread? Are there any comments that would help with the next revision?
I think both conjectures are likely true.
I am wondering why they used the link so much that it was able to be used against them. Submersible loses benefits if it requires an external service.
Launch. Submerge. Drunkenly move in the direction of the destination. If N days since last check-in and/or uncertainty in location, ping mothership. Repeat. Only lean on communication channel for final handoff stage.
> Launch. Submerge. Drunkenly
I thought they were smuggling cocaine, not acid.
(this is like the second time this week someone has spelled out LSD on HN and it's been relevant)
To that end I suspect that tracking starlink used in an unmanned narco sub would be trivial for an insider at the company. My first thought was “I wonder if the movement and activity pattern would be unique. Yes probably. If unique could a script be run to pinpoint them? Yes probably.” If law enforcement has tasked someone with doing this (likely and legal) there’s high likelihood that any future narcosub using starlink will be intercepted. So to anyone on either side of this arms race: “you’re welcome”
This strikes me as not a very good technique. With minimal help from starlink law enforcement could find every sub out there. Anyhow, what does this buy you that an offline gps connected controller does not?
If you have direct control you need far less automation and can potentially solve more problems at sea or change destination as needed or retrieve it faster if it breaks down by telling you exactly what is wrong, and it requires less skills to build all the hardware. Your entire radio communications setup is as close to plug-and-play as it gets and it both looks like "legitimate" radio signals and is far less likely to detected on the ground as a remote control link since it is using phased array antennas pointed at the sky rather than at the horizon.
You also have to remember its not like they are building tons of identical subs and moved an entire fleet over to starlink. They could have a dozen very different setups running with just a few guys tinkering around with whatever devices are easy to obtain under the radar, and it prevents single design vulnerabilities from collapsing your entire sub delivery supply line at once. Even if it only evades enforcement a single time by being novel, the cocaine it delivers out values whatever hardware and work it took to setup in the first place.
Because the cargo is high value and illegal, real time connectivity is needed. If it was on autopilot, how could they verify delivery? What if a third party was tipped by an insider and intercepted the shipment? What if it simply sank along the route?
>>If it was on autopilot, how could they verify delivery?
You put in a cheap SIM card and it will pick up signal when you get close to the coast and send a message saying it reached its destination.
I just imagine being a techie working for the cartel. In case you do not receive the ping, would you want to tell this to your violence prone boss: “Hey boss! Sooo. According to my calculations the significant investment you made in my idea should have pinged back by now. Maybe it is there, just there is something wrong with the SIM, or the antenna, or the network. Or maybe it is a few miles left or right on the coast and not getting cell signal. Or maybe the snorkel got swamped out on the sea and it stalled the engine and it is drifting somewhere. Or maybe our rivals nabbed it. Or maybe a random ship colided with it and it sunk. I hope this uncertainty is fine with you and won’t affect adversely our relationship, or how you treat my family.”
Sounds like a nightmare honestly.
Don't ask me how a criminal operation holds together without either someone defecting and getting everyone killed, or someone killing someone else because they thought they were defecting. Presuming that it does, in fact, somehow maintain cohesion, I think they're all aware the submarine stuff is risky.
They're earning however many tens of millions of dollars per successful shipment and it's way higher than what it actually cost them to produce. And I'd guess they send perhaps ten to fifty shipments per year. Having 50% shrinkage is balanced by a 9999% profit margin.
This one, if it truly had no drugs in it, might have been a test run (risk-reducing).
> I think they're all aware the submarine stuff is risky.
Yeah, but that only works if you get feedback back. The problem is not that the submersible sometimes breaks down. The problem is if you only have a gsm modem on it which only sends data back at the end of the run you won’t be able to tell what went wrong, therefore you can’t improve on it.
“Boss, a big wave broke the snorkel and the craft stalled 36% of the way there. Richardo is welding a stronger snorkle on the next one as we speak.” Is what you want to tell your boss. This is the reason why they have telemetry.
The problem with launching the craft into the dark with just a gps sifnal is that it is too binary of a signal. You get one bit of information out of it: made it / didn’t made it. With that your ship can be 99% perfect and still only see the “did not make it” signal because of the last 1% of things not working.
Yes, this one got caught. ;)
This seems difficult. Even with two Starlinks: one to control it in Colombia, and one to control it at the destination coast, killing power to each. And make it autonomous on the way. This leaves the problem that there is a sudden (dis-)appearance of the link at sea, which might still make you light up like a lighthouse in analysis.
However, it would seem cartels could use a cubesat and make their own links?
One cubesat launched as a rideshare payload wouldn't cut it. Those typically get dropped off in a highly inclined low earth orbit -- around the world, roughly pole to pole, in 90 minutes. Any given satellite in that sort of orbit will only be useful to a ground station when it has line-of-sight for maybe 5-10 minutes every few days.
At the very least you'd need a few dozen. Iridium manages to get coverage from 66.
Then there are the power/cooling/antenna size issues.
Isn't iridium way higher, though? At LEO geometry is not your friend.
Not way higher. wikipedia says Iridium satellites orbit at 781km altitude. Starlink satellites are a little lower -- mainly at around 560km (but there's some variation).
Way higher would be O3B at around 8,000km, GPS at 20,200km and geosynchronous at around 35,800km.
GPS is only a confirmation of positioning. It doesn't free you from having a pilot in the vehicle.
Starlink opens the possibility for remote command & control. It opens up the possibility to fully remote drone capabilities.
Starlink should probably be disabled except to rarely report sensor data and accept new routing commands, so law enforcement can’t use EM scanning to find the source.
Remote tracking?
Just a simple radio transmitter could fulfil that function.
At the cost of it being really obvious where you are.
However the bigger draw is probably high bandwidth two way communication globally. No need for an obvious route as you can use GPS to get near US waters before turning it on, while still being in control of location of delivery or even meet up with it on the open ocean.
Not as obvious as a Starlink transmitter though!
Sending the position only requires a few bits, let's say 48. A position update requires even less, depending on how far it could have travelled since the last known position. At such low data rates you could hide the transmission quite effectively.
As a once off it’s not going to be investigated, start making regular trips and people are going to start looking for such signals. Short bursts strong enough to detected many hundreds of miles away inherently need to be fairly strong making them standout from the background noise for close receivers. You can similarly triangulate based on signal strength given some ocean ships or even cheap buoys.
Starlink needs to be detectable by satellites, but you can almost completely block the signal going in other directions.
SpaceX might already be sharing it’s data with coastguards though.
I also wonder if you could have a visible surface vessel (e.g. fishing boat) which acts as a navigation beacon for the sub. Sub can just follow the beacon without any active communication of its own. If enforcement appears, sub will destructively sink to avoid revealing the operation.
No. Consider the distances.
I thought drone delivery was years off, but I guess that only matters if the law is being followed.
Like most things, the tech is ahead of the legislation. ;)
Drone delivery is a pretty different thing. Drones are clearly visible to everyone. Submarines are... not that.
Wikipedia says unmanned underwater vehicles fall in the drone category as do unmanned surface vehicles.
Speaking of which does Ukraine use weaponized RC vehicles and roaming unmanned anti-ship subs? I would think you would get a larger payload and better damage from the undercarriage.
I think you are making mental assumptions that aren’t justified.
Narco drone subs are delivery vehicles, just not for the “last mile” to the end user. They are more like self-driving long haul trucks that don’t care about international borders.
I think the person you are replying to was making a joke.
Decoy
What’s the purpose of starlink? Can’t be for GPS?
Remote command & control.
Drone submarine doesn’t require life support systems so it can be smaller, simpler, and stay submerged longer.
Only this isn’t a submarine, as it operates at surface and doesn’t dive. This is semi-submersible. When built right, it’s hard to detect from a boat.
I guess the goal of automation here is like it always is: remove the cost of human labor.
Search "Magura drone boat Ukraine"
It’s a space based data network, used for internet access.
Right I get that. Sorry my question wasn’t clear.
But you could theoretically build a drone that would guide itself to a destination with just GPS right? It would potentially be even easier with water?
Do you even need the two way command and control?
In theory, yes, in practice this probably requires engineering beyond what is available to these organizations (or the cost profile of the vessel.)
These aren't autonomous true submarines, they're semi-submersibles. Weather and surface conditions will vary (potentially greatly) along the route.
one thing I like about permissionless finance is that operations like these can be publicly traded, specifically for aggregate forecasts of value and price discovery
I dont like how publicly traded status is put on a pedestal and treated like a reward
everything should have price discovery
George Foy - Contraband
Bokon Taylay!