If I were running a Mexican drug cartel, I'd be trying to ensure all the drugs I was importing into the US stayed illegal there. How would I do it? And can we detect them doing that? It would be fascinating if we could, and spam filtering showed me people often leave trails they don't realize they're leaving.
Easy. Trivial, even. I set up a small organization with one goal: Get kids to smoke weed.
Pick a handful of communities in the legal states: Wealthy, suburban districts that went blue, but narrowly. Send a couple of guys to each one with ten pounds of marijuana and ten thousand dollars in cash. Have them recruit some bored 21-year-old stoners, give them each twenty bucks for snacks and a dozen rolled joints, and have them hang out at the skate park or movie theater or wherever and just pass out free weed.
Those joints will inevitably wind up in the hands of teenagers and even young children. Ramp up the operation enough, and you've got a full-blown weed epidemic. Without any further prompting, parent groups will petition the state and federal government to intervene, and if not repeal the law then at least impose enough additional restrictions to keep an illegal operation cost-competitive with a legit one.
Of course, there are lots of ways this strategy could fail or even backfire.
From my experience, in the early 00's, getting pot in a public school was as easy as handing a 20 to the guy everybody knew sold it. It was literally easier to buy pot than a can of cola, as our school didn't have soda machines.
Alcohol? You could get a few cans of beer or maybe half a bottle of vodka, but anything more than that required a degree of planning or connections. Fairly easy, but nowhere near as easy as pot.
You probably wouldn't have comparative advantage in influencing US politics, given that you're a foreign cartel. So you'd presumably rely on powerful entities in the target country whose interests are reasonably aligned. Fortunately, it's a huge industry, so it's not hard. Natural allies may include the prison industry (which includes some prison manufacturing) and US banks. (http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/199804--.htm)
And not those with just an economic interest, but relatively political interests in imprisoning/disenfranchising hard-to-control parts of the population, and limiting free travel over the southern US border (due to things like NAFTA).
Be interesting to look at the data from the 2010 Prop 19 'no' vote to see if anything along those lines could be inferred (e.g. strong no vote from areas with high cannabis possession / distribution arrests, suggesting vote buying).
I know correlation doesn't mean causation, but that doesn't mean the data point would not be interesting. Is that kind of data publicly available?
Some people here in HN tend to think that drug cartels run businesses, but they're wrong. Those guys are regular greedy criminals, some with sociopathic tendencies. That's why I don't think they'll even bother trying to go after the lost revenue with marijuana trafficking. What I think they'll do is to migrate their activities to other drugs or another types of crimes like kidnapping and human trafficking. That aligns much better with their values.
> Some people here in HN tend to think that drug cartels run businesses, but they're wrong.
If they weren't, they'd quickly got kicked out from the market by someone who was.
> Those guys are regular greedy criminals, some with sociopathic tendencies.
Like some enterpreneurs are much different.
You assume that because they're doing bad things (morally and/or legally), they're not thinking, but instead they are driven by their impulses. It's a silly assumption and I think disproved many times. Freakonomics comes to my mind as one example.
> If they weren't, they'd quickly got kicked out from the market by someone who was.
It's pretty naive to imagine that black market cartels are competing in anything like an idealized free market. In the lawless environments being talked about, a worse businessman can always beat a better competitor simply by being better at violence.
Gang warfare and mass killings are rife down their. This isn't some naive libertarian fantasy market where La Familia is just another scrappy silicon valley startup.
The abstract structure of a market seems to be the same, just the rules are different. Companies operating legally fight in courts, drug cartels fight on the streets with guns. In both cases, it's part of the rules the environment sets. So the competitor better at violence is a better competitor, by the rules of the market they operate in.
Corporations have had entire armies and countries at their command (not to mention that there is no clear dividing line between corporations and the government). The lives lost due to turf wars waged by drug cartels are not even a drop in the ocean compared to the lives lost in real wars waged for profit.
Let's see. The current Mexican drug war seems to have taken about 50k lives.
The Nicaraguan counter-revolution backed by the CIA took an estimated 29K lives.
The two seem comparable. And the comparison in this case is reasonable because the Mexican war stepped up when mercenaries who had fought in Central America joined the cartels.
This is true for a small % of the people. But if those people move over to cocaine or kidnapping or human trafficking, they will at least be in a smaller market. Their sociopathic tendencies will effect less people.
> Mexico's most-wanted drug trafficker and whose estimated net worth of US$1 billion makes him the 1140th richest man in the world and the 55th most powerful, according to his Forbes magazine profile.
> The United States Intelligence Community considers the Sinaloa Cartel "the most powerful drug trafficking organization in the world" and in 2011, the Los Angeles Times called it as "Mexico's most powerful organized crime group."
> Los Zetas — a paramilitary group that acts as enforcers for the Gulf Cartel, the organization of drug gangs that controls narcotrafficking on Mexico's east coast. Many of the Zetas are former Mexican soldiers who were trained to combat drug gangsters. Some of the gunmen are thought to have received training in the United States at the military School of the Americas.
[...]
> The Zetas were among the first criminal groups in Mexico to employ military tactics and heavy weapons, including 50 caliber machine guns, grenade launchers and even ground-to-air missiles.
I am very skeptical of statistics touted by so-called "security experts", spy agencies, or anti-drug organizations like the DEA. They aren't exactly impartial observers, and have every incentive to greatly exaggerate the scale of their opposition. The bigger and meaner their opposition looks, the better the case they can make for increased funding of and attention to their own business.
Unfortunately, the mainstream media usually quotes these biased sources as if they were speaking gospel truth, without a shred of criticism or doubt. These sources are virtually never held to account, asked to justify how they came up with their estimates, or have their estimating methodologies critically scruitinized.
Here's some numbers for what has effectively become a civil war in Mexico: ~55,000 total deaths (16,000 in 2011 alone); nearly 60 journalists killed, over a thousand police and prosecutors killed, nearl a hundred politicians assassinated. Drug revenue in the tens of billions of dollars and somewhere around 100,000 soldiers fighting for the cartels (compared to about 250,000 total soldiers in the Mexican armed forces).
It's an unusual war because the cartels don't care about actually controlling territory too much, they just need to be able to operate, so there are rarely large scale battles between cartel and government soldiers, if the government moves in to some area in force the cartel can just melt away and then hit the government forces opportunistically. Although typically the cartels don't even do that, instead they kill civilians, police, children, and politicians in order to maintain a state of terror and get people to keep their heads down and ignore cartel activity.
Yeah. That's true I know they're big and have a huge effect locally, but scheming to influence lawmaking in another country is pretty big thinking. It's also forward thinking, worrying about your profits 5 years from now.
If I were a Mexican drug cartel, I would use my existing connections/influence in Mexico to use Mexican media to attempt to paint the picture: "Mexico thinks legalization will lead to more violence".
Right now a powerful argument in favour of legalization in the states is that it will reduce drug related violence, since the cartels will be forced out. Try to make it seem that Mexico disagrees. You don't even need to counter the "legal => less violence" argument with logic or facts; just use FUD combined with the inherent additional credibility you will have in Mexican affairs by being from Mexico.
Focus the distribution through organisations that seem very illegal and scary. Like outlaw biker gangs, or other gangs. Otherwise why should these gangs flaunt their anti-socialness so brazenly? It doesn't seem optimal. I think the brutality of criminal drug distribution might tend to a more cooperative equilibrium without the advantage of the benefits of illegality.
Well, at the end of the day they would want to make sure that they possessed a certain level of voter influence in the short term and long term.
In the short term, I would bet that the legalized outfits would be co-opted by the drug cartels and used to launder money, and then 'caught' within a year or so.
Since devout Christians (especially Evangelical) are their #1 ally, I would guess that numerous churches would start being built in these battleground states, and that the people who would be administering would be told about how future 'proceeds' into their personal and church funds would depend on their conversion rate of the local populace. Probably risky, and not likely to work all that well.
tl;dr legalized outfits are going to have overstated connections to criminal organizations and the people in the outer neighborhoods are going to try and won over with rhetoric about separating them from the sinful ways of their neighbors.
"legalized outfits would be co-opted by the drug cartels and used to launder money"
If you were looking to launder money, why would you pick a front that probably had some of the most intense government scrutiny of any business in the country?
Furthermore, do you see many legal aspirin manufacturers co-opted by illegal aspirin cartels? Beer manufacturers co-opted by illegal beer cartels?
Organized crime has been getting in to cigarette smuggling as high cigarette taxes have made legal cigarettes prohibitively expensive and created a black market for them. But this problem did not exist when cigarettes were plentiful and cheap.
We should learn the lesson here and keep legalized drugs plentiful and cheap, so that organized crime has no incentive to get involved and there's no demand for a black market.
The point of laundering money at legal marijuana outfit would be getting caught, showing the public that there is a permanent 'criminal nature' to drugs such as marijuana.
I'm not saying this makes any sort of business sense, it's just a way of influencing public perception.
You asked how a criminal organization would do it; so this gets a little dark:
- Go to both main cities where marijuana is legalized and make up fake scenes where marijuana seems to be responsible for some tragedy (like multiple fatal car accidents where there is marijuana all over the car). People love sensationalism and controversies.
- Another way is so to lobby for all the politicians who strongly oppose legalization (using a legal company as facade of course)
- Another way is to kill political leaders that are in favor of legalization and make it look like unrelated accidents/crimes (otherwise the movement gets sympathy by the victimization of the cause).
Their weak point is that they are not as organized as one may think; and their savageness sometimes lead them to do stupid things (like kidnapping hackers to steal credit cards); most of them are probably not tech savy so there may be many ways to intercept their communications.
Variation of second point: Kill political leaders who are against legalization, and make it clear it's because of their position on this issue. This would imply that pro-legalization people are willing to murder to get their way, and so in sympathy the public would vote against legalization. [Call this the 'anti-legalization martyr' play.]
They are able to kill with relative impunity in Mexico because the Govt isnt big enough or strong enough to stop them. If they killed an American politician, regardless of which side they are on, it would draw the focus of the US law enforcement agencies. This would cause them some very serious issues.
They have been careful to keep the violence south of the border and I think they are cognizant of the fact that killing south of the Rio Grande brings profit, killing north of the Rio Grande can bring ruin.
The smart cartels have certainly invested in the U.S. prison industry. Great hedge against their drug business. Not to mention phenomenal growth because of "war" on drugs.
Proly make money running the drug smuggling as loss-leader just to keep prisons full.
or...they could go to a big time lobbying firm and have the media do all that, but in a legal and more effective fashion. They may not be sophisticated enough to do something that simple, but it would be far more effective to pay experts to do the dirty work than handle it yourself.
edit: to answer PGs question, follow the money trail.
