Drug War Whack-a-Mole
Via the WSJ: America Loves Cocaine Again—Mexico’s New Drug King Cashes In.
Cocaine sold in the U.S. is cheaper and as pure as ever for retail buyers. Consumption in the western U.S. has increased 154% since 2019 and is up 19% during the same period in the eastern part of the country, according to the drug-testing company Millennium Health. In contrast, fentanyl use in the U.S. began to drop in mid-2023 and has been declining since, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
For new users, cocaine doesn’t carry the stigma of fentanyl addiction. Middle-class addicts and the tragic spectacle of homeless crack-cocaine users in the 1990s helped put a lid on America’s last cocaine epidemic.
[…]
Colombia is producing records amounts of cocaine, and the volume of the drug arriving in the U.S. is driving down prices, the people familiar with cartel operations said.
Cocaine prices have fallen by nearly half to around $60 to $75 a gram compared with five years ago, said Morgan Godvin, a researcher with the community organization Drug Checking Los Angeles. “The price of pure cocaine has plummeted,” Godvin said.
This is just another chapter in a very thick book titled The Whack-a-Mole Nature of the Endless Drug War.
I was originally going to just put this story in a tab-clearing post, but in reading it I was so struck, as someone who has been reading news reports about the drug war for going on four decades, how, like so manty such stories over the years, this one just feels like they took one of dozens of such stories and just changed the names and a few other descriptive details, like which specific drug we are talking about this year, or which Latin American country is suffering from lack of state control of some of its territory.
Elements that feel timeless to me include:
- Major Drug Lord Captured! Oops, new drug lords emerge.
- Internecine fighting among the capos!
- Major focus on one drug by the US leads to other drugs surging in the market.
- Record production!
- Better purity!
- Cheaper prices!
- And the main constant in all of this, to repeat a line I said oh-so-many times in class: people like their intoxicants.
Even the maps and graphics, while maybe cooler and more modern from a technical point of view, are deja vu-inducing in me.
I do not have a good and perfect solution to the real problems caused by drug abuse and addiction, but one thing that a career of paying attention to this stuff emphasizes to me over and over and over again is that the drug war approach to it does not work and just costs a lot of money and leads to violence and criminality. The cycle really does feel endless.
And the Trump administration can pretend like blowing up fast boats will solve the problem; they are sorely mistaken.
Perhaps the first decade of the war on drugs was a sincere effort to eradicate a societal scourge, but since then the effort has fallen into two categories, performance and political cowardice, those in charge know that the drug war is a failure, but afraid to abandon it due the anticipated political repercussions.
It goes on forever, drug prices essentially never change indicating we are actually have little effect on supply. We spend a ton of money and have nothing to show for it. What doesnt get emphasized enough is that it also ends up hurting lots of innocent people. The police make mistakes and raid the wrong house more frequently than people know. Police try to avoid keeping statistics on this but when tracked like the NYPD did in 2003 it was 10%. So 10% of the time the police come in and shoot your dog, destroy property, scare people and sometimes harm them. Maybe some collateral damage is ok if we had something to show for it, but we dont.
Steve
The east-west difference in increased consumption in the US seems rather remarkable.
@Sleeping Dog: Following Dr. Taylor’s theme of deja vu:
@steve222: Ten percent! I had no idea it was that high. Holy spit! They’re not even trying. What happened to, “It is better that a hundred guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”
Wiping out drugs once and for all would require wiping out all life on the planet. I don’t doubt the will is there, but the means are lacking.
@Kathy:
Give us time. Researchers are toying with mirror life, which includes the possibility of creating a universal pathogen that would be fatal to everything based on right-handed DNA (ie, all life on Earth).
This makes sense since, according to our President, 300 million Americans have been killed by fentanyl. There just aren’t that many people left.
@Michael Cain:
I’m sure bacteria would adapt and eat it, then evolve to higher lifeforms. And even if they don’t, then the mirror life would eventually get addicted to mirror drugs.
We’d need something like the Death Star, and tractor beams to drag the debris into the Sun. It’s the only way to make sure.
@gVOR10:
Or, to put it another way…
https://youtu.be/PDBiLT3LASk?si=JlwAeCKMdT65RwNb
@Michael Cain:
Though I recall another biologist opining that a “mirror organism” would not be able to be infectious due to the incompatible biochemistry: they could not readily use normal biochemistry materials as “food”, or subvert the cellular replication mechanisms with incompatible RNA.
Though creating a “mirror boichemistry” virus “just to see” would be a bit daft.
@Kathy:
Recalls one of Neal Asher’s books, where “Jain tech” devices are dropped into a star, but still lurk in the photosphere, in rather worrying fashion.
Embrace the Heat Death of the Universe: it’s the only realistic solution to every problem!
According to media reports this morning, the regime is contemplating military strikes against “The Cartels” inside Mexico. I’m sure the MAGA base would cheer them on almost as enthusiastically as it would jeer at Mexico’s subsequent protests.
@JohnSF:
It still leaves the problem of maintaining shareholder value after the end of everything. No amount of Heat Death will solve that.
@Ken_L:
At this point, I wonder if Sheinbaum would protest too hard.
Also, the end result will be dead civilians, and angry drug cartels. They won’t spike their fentanyl with arsenic or anything that stupid, but they might order hits on US officials in America.
@Kathy:
The singularity of the accountants vs black hole evaporation.
There must be a story in that, surely?
Paging Charles Stross, lol.
@Kathy:
It would be silly of the cartels to do so.
A mobilized state without limits on action is orders of magnitude more dangerous than a mere cartel.
“Identify and extract or kill all cartel family members, wherever located. Use deniable operations to detain, torture, and slaughter, all even suspected of links.”
It’s not necessarily a sensible or ethical policy; but it is an option.
@JohnSF:
@Kathy:
It could be a bit like how the fascists dealt with the Mafia in Sicily.
It was not lawful, or ethical, but it WAS effective.
For a time.
The difference being: the Italian fascist state had state-level uncontested rights over Sicily.
The US does not re Mexico etc.
That could make a lot of diffrence; few Italians were inclined to a patriotic resistance on behalf of the Mafia.
The situation might not be the same if the US attempts to assert arbitrary powers over much of Latin America.