
How DEA Agents Took Down Mexico's Most Vicious Drug Cartel - jseliger
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/01/drug-enforcement-agency-mexico-drug-cartel/419100/?single_page=true
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SlyShy
An ultimately futile thing to do until we change our own drug policies which
fuel the economic incentives for such cartels to exist. Unless we change out
laws and end prohibition new cartels will continue to spring up out of
economic necessity.

~~~
HillaryBriss
It's a fantasy to think that the cartels and their violence would stop
existing.

Even if governments legalized all drugs by eliminating all anti-drug laws and
agencies, the cartels and the people who run them would quickly find another
path to profitability. They would find or create another industry in which
applying their violence gives them a competitive advantage.

~~~
armitron
Let them do that then. It's not as if it would be easy. Prohibition showed how
effective legalization can be (and I don't mean just marijuana). Legalize
everything across the board. That means pharma-grade cocaine, heroin being
sold without prescription (and taxed) to any adult that wishes to buy them.

Alas, let's not pretend that the 'good guys' (at least the americans) want to
solve the drug problem. It results in lucrative profits that can be kept off
the books and fed into various "programs", and has also led to the
establishment of a massive bureaucracy that will be hard if not impossible to
dislodge.

Someone else mentioned the movie Sicario in this thread. It's pretty bad in
terms of plot, but one line comes to mind: One of the characters that plays a
CIA agent says: "If only 20% of the population could be pesuaded to stop
smoking and snorting that shit..." in order to conveniently shift the blame
towards the populace. As if that worked with alcohol, or cigarettes or
anything that can short-circuit the pleasure/reward neural pathways.

But I'm digressing here. A bad movie does not a point make. The real CIA knows
full well I imagine that legalization is the only real solution to the problem
(even if it comes with its own costs) but of course the real CIA also needs
endless suitcases full of dollars to fund its operations.

~~~
digler999
> pharma-grade cocaine, heroin being sold without prescription

what do you honestly think our society would look like if this were the case ?
Have you seen what cocaine does to people ? Have you seen how it causes people
to lose their impulse control and go crazy ? What about driving ? We have a
bad enough problem on our roads right now with alcohol, what do you think the
morning commute will be like with people high or nodding off from opiates ?

I'm certainly against our drug "war" just like most people, particularly with
its draconian punishments, but be careful what you ask for.

~~~
armitron
Have you seen what huffing glue does to people? They go completely crazy.
Maybe we should ban glue too.

You do realize cocaine and heroin used to be sold at pharmacies in the 1900s?
There were a lot of functioning heroin addicts back then who could hold down a
job and live a normal life. Nobody talks about that though.

Somehow they didn't trigger the collapse of civilization. The existing legal
frameworks are enough to deal with _abuse_ of those substances, we don't need
to ban the substances themselves just because of the _potential for abuse_.

This is the same idiotic argument that opponents of marijuana legalization
present. They assume vast numbers of the population will start fiending on
those substances and it's only THE LAW that keeps them in check. This has been
proven false time and time again, in Europe and in the US states that
legalized, but don't let that stop you making the same fallacious points.

~~~
digler999
> Maybe we should ban glue too.

if it bound to the same dopamine receptors it would absolutely be banned, and
called a narcotic.

> You do realize cocaine and heroin used to be sold at pharmacies in the
> 1900s?

what percentage of people drove back then, per mile, per day, and at what
speed ? Nodding off in your model-T is quite incomparable to nodding off on
the 405 Freeway. Hell, what percentage of people even had _access_ to a store
? Most people lived on farms and went to town once a week. They didn't rely on
money as much, they grew their own food and sustained themselves.

This is the same idiotic argument that free-drugs-for-all proponents always
present. They assume the same cultural viewpoints from 1900 still apply today.
They assume every other variable has been controlled for and still applies,
then uses strawmen aguments like "lets ban glue too".

People _didn 't know_ how addictive heroin was in 1900. It was just another
drug in a pharmacy for people with a cough. The mechanisms for how they worked
weren't discovered yet. The same stressors from family and society that drive
people to seek chemical escape didn't exist back then. Please retry your
argument, sans strawmen, and lets see how you do. Here's how ridiculous your
strawman sounds: "You know, cars didn't have seatbelts back in 1900, those
people were fine. See, we don't need seatbelts or even airbags today, because
people in 1900 didn't have them..." Speaking of 1900, they didn't have the FDA
in 1900 either, so by your logic, we should abolish that too and regress to
the days when the pharmacy sold _literally_ snake oil and marketed as a cure
for all types of cancer. I mean, they didn't have double blind trials back in
1900, so why do we need them today?

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zouhair
Do you think alcohol is less dangerous than cocaine?

~~~
digler999
Have you known anyone who has experienced sudden death / heart failure from
ingesting one drink ?

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NickHaflinger
'How DEA Agents Took Down Mexico's Most Vicious Drug Cartel', and how it was
replaced with a similar organization within a week. Besides the drug money is
keeping a number of western economies afloat.

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discardorama
Money quote from the article: “Drug enforcement as we know it,” Herrod [the
DEA agent] told me, “is not working.”

~~~
fucking_tragedy
That would be refreshing to hear if you didn't know the next conclusion to be
drawn would be, "Therefore, we need to double down and increase funding."

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patrickaljord
By spending billions of dollars to stop people from committing victimless
crimes.

~~~
mbrutsch
In other countries, no less. I wonder how the American public would like
Mexican government authorities doing the same thing within our borders?

Team America, World Police.

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randomfool
"Mexico's Most Vicious Drug Cartel" \- ¿Dónde está Zetas?

~~~
WildUtah
The Zetas didn't emerge until after op's story ended.

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betolink
Also, if you're interested in this topic I recommend this TED talk from Yale
professor Rodrigo Canales: "The deadly genius of drug cartels"
[https://www.ted.com/talks/rodrigo_canales_the_deadly_genius_...](https://www.ted.com/talks/rodrigo_canales_the_deadly_genius_of_drug_cartels?language=en)

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cauterize
If you like stories like this, check out the movie Sicario for a very eerie
telling of cartels and the police.

~~~
seivan
Narcos on Netflix is also pretty good.

Pretty good is underselling it. I think it's better than Game of Thrones :)

~~~
yeukhon
Also worth mention the DEA plots in Breaking Bad, especially the scene when
bomb exploded next to a bunch of DEA agents, that was terrifying.

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atomicbeanie
Try harder seems like it has been done in this area for some time. Can some
creativity get into this process? It gets worse the more we invest. The
cartels are ever more monstrous.

