
Meth and murder: New kind of drug war makes Tijuana one of deadliest cities - glassworm
https://www.latimes.com/world/mexico-americas/la-fg-mexico-tijuana-drug-violence-20190130-htmlstory.html
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tcj_phx
The so-called drug war is a great tragedy. It is unwinnable because we can't
wage war against inanimate objects and expect to win. War-as-a-metaphor [1] is
usually a bait-and-switch campaign: war on poverty, war on cancer, etc. Real
wars are always between people. The so-called "drug war" is really a war on
ourselves.

Johann Hari wrote a book about the futility of this particular societal auto-
immune disease [1]. He points out that Portugal has decriminalized drug
possession, and uses the resources that were formerly used to subjugate their
struggling people to help them instead.

Switzerland has made heroin legally available to their hopeless addicts. Over
the last 20+ years, they haven't had many (any?) overdose deaths of the people
in their legal heroin program.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_as_metaphor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_as_metaphor)
[1] [http://chasingthescream.com/](http://chasingthescream.com/)

If the donkey party wanted to win in their ideological struggle against the
elephant party, they'd make the case that the government should put the
cartels out of business by taking care of our own addicts, and that it's a
better use of funds to put people in treatment programs than in prison.

~~~
hash872
Easy solutions to the drug problem are mostly populism. Unfortunately there is
literally no known society-wide cure.

Lots of well-meaning people think that offering rehab to addicts is some type
of magic cure. Unfortunately, the average addict has to go through rehab 7 or
more times before it 'sticks', and the cost of providing rehab to anyone who
needs in it a country the size of the US is about as unrealistic as an AOC
economic plan. There is literally not enough money in the federal budget. I
think of lots of well-intentioned middle & upper middle-class folks who have
never done a hard drug in their life imagine addicts as desperate to get off
the drugs. In fact, tons and tons of addicts are at least moderately happy
with their situation and not really looking to change. And/or, they enjoy the
street lifestyle more than their likely other option of a boring, low-wage
life of 40+ hours a week. Source, have tons of family & friends who are
lifelong addicts, and I did plenty of hard drugs recreationally myself in my
misspent youth (now many years in the rear view mirror).

While I am no fan of the War on Drugs, the Portugal decriminalization story is
the classic fallacious argument I see a lot on the left- 'let me compare this
tiny culturally homogeneous country of 10 million people to your wildly
diverse nation of 330+ million'. Solutions that work in tiny countries often
don't scale, and the US is simply culturally different than Portugal around
drug abuse.

As a thought experiment- opioids are legal with a prescription in the US, and
also kill more Americans every year than died in the Vietnam War. Let's
imagine instead that no prescriptions were required, and for the last 20 years
anyone 18 or 21+ was able to walk into a store and buy Oxycontin directly off
the shelf with zero restrictions. Do you think the death toll from opioids
would be higher, lower, or the same than it is now? It would (obviously) be
even higher. Americans really enjoy getting extremely high. That's great that
people in Portugal appear able to resist the temptation of
cocaine/heroin/meth/whatever, but that is clearly not the case in the US.

While I do support more money for rehab and other anti-Drug War policies like
federal marijuana legalization, the sad fact is that there are no solutions
whatsoever to widespread hard drug abuse. It's a part of American society
that's not going away anytime soon. Rehab for everyone and complete drug
decriminalization are unfortunately not realistic policies

~~~
alexanderdmitri
> Do you think the death toll from opioids would be higher, lower, or the same
> than it is now? It would (obviously) be even higher.

My understanding is a great deal of od'ing comes from people not knowing what
or how much of what they are putting in their bodies. If your point stands,
why did the clamp down on opiod prescriptions correlate with a massive
increase in overdoses and fatalities?

~~~
hash872
>My understanding is a great deal of od'ing comes from people not knowing what
or how much of what they are putting in their bodies

I don't see how that's possible with opioids, they are manufactured in a
professional pharmaceutical factory with precise dosage. Percs, vikes & oxys
are described by dosage amount (there are Oxy 20s, Oxy 40s, Oxy 80s, etc.)
Nothing like street drugs. Not sure what you're referring to in your second
sentence (my impression is that lots of recent ODs come from fentanyl)

~~~
alexanderdmitri
Once the government and industry took measures to try to reign in the pills,
ODs starting rising dramatically as people turned to street drugs (sometimes
dangerously spiked with Fentanyl without the consumer's knowledge).

I'm pretty sure we're agreeing now, but in your original comment you were
saying more people would OD if it were legalized. Maybe more people might
experiment and pick up a habit when it's legal, but the data here shows more
people OD when they can't procure it in normalized and knowable amounts.

Also, relying on a black market to stay high is likely to have other
consequences on your life in all sorts of ways not related to the act of
ingesting an illegal drug, but more the fallout from engaging in (by
definition) illegal actions to make it possible for you to ingest the drug.
This complication is likely to further, rather than reduce, risk-taking
behaviors that are not organic using the substance itself. When combined with
the general volatility of the the market in general given chaotic measures
that temporarily create false scarcity for a product that someone suffering
from addiction cannot fathom going without, individual behaviors and decision
making will definitely be negatively affected.

Basically the argument for the criminalization of drug use/commerce is:

Drugs are addicting and can be abused, so we decided to criminalize them with
penalties that may seem excessive but are definitely warranted. And you know
what? After putting this in place, man, you should see just how dangerous
these drugs actually turned out to be. Turns out, once you make drug users
criminals, they start committing more crimes and they lose their jobs and
neglect their children and started overdosing and end up in jail and on a
macro level violent organizations have come into being with the means to
subvert whole nation states and law enforcement has a whole lot more to do.
Could you imagine the anarchy if we legalized this shit? Overdoes would go up,
violent organizations would take over the world, a whole generation of kids
will be fucked and our prisons would be bursting from addicts committing
crimes while law enforcement would collapse from being underfunded and
stretched too thin.

Don't get me wrong, I believe drugs are Stupid, it's just the consequences of
making them illegal is like Stupid started doing drugs and then began
committing crimes to pay for the price Stupid artificially inflated against
it's own interests so that it could in fact continue claiming to stupidly be
trying to be less Stupid while (with near preternatural stupidity so sublime
it becomes indistinguishable from Genius) preventing itself from ever being
anything other than just Stupid while also convincing everyone it doesn't have
a problem, in fact anyone who even stupidly suggests that what Stupid is doing
to Stupid is Stupid is themselves in fact Stupid for suggesting something so
Stupid.

~~~
hash872
Just saw your response. Not sure if you'll get mine, but-

>Maybe more people might experiment and pick up a habit when it's legal

This x1million, basically. As mentioned in the 'different cultures enjoy
getting high to various degrees' point that I was making- Americans show
extremely high (ha ha) levels of interest in illegal drug usage. If hard drugs
were openly available in retail stores, casual experimentation would
absolutely skyrocket. (Especially in depleted Rust Belt cities, rural areas,
etc.) There might or might not be a reduction in the number of ODs. But it
seems to me there would be a massive increase in the number of new addicts
from the extreme ease of experimentation.

Decriminalization is a different story, I'd be more open to outright decrim
for small amounts of any hard drug

------
tyingq
_" With 140 killings per 100,000 people, Tijuana is now one of the deadliest
cities in the world"_

That's pretty insane. Compare to the worst year of the Iraq war: _" in 2006,
people living in Iraq had the highest risk of dying violently in conflict. In
that year, there were 91 violent deaths per 100,000 people in the country"_
[1]

[1]
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3039690/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3039690/)

~~~
HillaryBriss
At the same time, we also see official promotion of Tijuana tourism:

 _Tijuana has been recommended by the New York Times as the eighth best site
to visit in 2017. Here you can traverse its streets and immerse yourself in
its multifaceted and vibrant culture._

[https://www.visitmexico.com/en/main-destinations/baja-
califo...](https://www.visitmexico.com/en/main-destinations/baja-
california/tijuana)

~~~
kevinyun
But isn't that like saying Chicago is one of the deadliest cities in America,
but it still shows up on tourist recommendations? As a Chicago native, it is
dangerous, but only if you go way deep into the wrong area, which you would
have to do on purpose -- everywhere else is pretty safe in general

~~~
tyingq
Curious if Tijiuna has safe areas.

~~~
linksnapzz
We call those “San Diego”.

------
joveian
For detailed daily reporting on the Mexican drug war with translations of
Spanish language articles see Borderland Beat:

[http://www.borderlandbeat.com/](http://www.borderlandbeat.com/)

