If you wanted to get into the criminal drug trade, how would you start? Is there a guide somewhere I can follow?
$13M in cash is an impressive amount. It makes me wonder: There must be all kinds of operations happening around us daily, yet nobody knows about them. And those operations need members. Where do they come from?
The inner workings of this stuff is fascinating. To be honest, I wish it were possible to go observe the system in action as a spectator. I'd love to see how the packaging is done, the supply lines, the transport logistics...
(I balance this with a deep hatred for cartels. If you trace these questions far enough, it seems to often lead to "the cartels are at the center of it all." And they're responsible for unspeakable miseries.)
To be clear, my question is: how is the knowledge necessary for such operations preserved? I'm a programmer. I learned it from the internet. Where do they learn? And these aren't street dealers. It's an organized, carefully designed, well-oiled machine. How does this machine work? How does it survive the loss of so many members?
>(I balance this with a deep hatred for cartels. If you trace these questions far enough, it seems to often lead to "the cartels are at the center of it all." And they're responsible for unspeakable miseries.)
This is why all drugs should be legalized (not just decriminalized, decriminalization still leaves a black market). Cartels are meeting a demand, but cartels make up their own rules and will do anything they want to stay ahead.
Just legalize them, it solves so many problems.
1. Quality and proper labeling (no more mystery drugs/dosages). Buyers know exactly what they are getting, which would decrees the amount of OD's.
2. Vast reduction in violent crimes (legitimate, licensed distributors are very unlikely to have violent turf wars as this would jeopardize their license). Black market would suddenly have no market (provided the taxes on legal drugs aren't stupid), which means no money, which means there is nothing to kill/fight over.
3. Increased tax revenue
It is a win/win/win for everyone, I just don't get it....and please just don't with the tear jerking "What about the children!" The kids will be fine. No legalizing doesn't send a message that "drugs are OK". No it won't make them more accessible to kids, please stop fearmongering you don't know what you are talking about.
That can work for drugs with low abuse potentials, like psychedelics. But why do you think drugs like heroin will benefit the society or the people who are taking them?
There is a different course of action for high-abuse drugs. Apparently in Switzerland you can get an "addict" prescription from your doctor, and with that prescription you can go to an injection clinic and get a free professional injection of heroin and a bed to lie on.
The result of this is all drug dealers going bust, and no drug dealers - no one to market the drug, so no new users. All addicts in Switzerland are now old people, and as they die of related diseases and old age the Swiss are having hard time keeping the clinics open because there are not enough takers for free heroin.
I think all opiates can and should be taken care of this way. Not sure about stimulants though - one doesn't just lie down on a clinic bed after a dose of meth or crack. Maybe if regular coke is legalized people will give up meth and crack?
There are, in fact, even heroin dealers in Switzerland, and of course all sorts of other drugs are still being sold illegally, but compared to the early 1990s, before the heroin prescription policy, there is practically no visible drug addict scene anymore.
The problem is that people who want drugs (either because of addiction or desire to try them) will always find a way; this war has been lost already. However making these drugs legal will still remove the negative impact of the illegal drug trade such as cartels and their inherent violence (which also enables other crimes as cartels might be willing to supply their weapons - which they source already because they need them - to other criminals who are willing to pay good money for them).
People already take those drugs. Drugs are everywhere and have been for a long, long time. When I was a teenager, it was easier for me to get marijuana than alcohol. Why because one was regulated.
Why do you think the world will flock to drugs if they were simply made legal?
Drug addicts (people who need to get high) will find an alternate high if they can't get illegal drugs.
I agree with this. I don't think legality dissuades but a tiny number of people. I think most people who aren't going to do it don't take drugs because they've seen the results of the harder drugs and don't want anything to do with it.
Heroin will not benefit society, the hypothesis is that it will cause less harm if users receive it from a boring, official, controlled source instead of letting violent criminals earn millions with it. The idea that prohibition can somehow end drug use was proven wrong a long time ago.
I would not necessarily credit Heroin for it (and would definitely not advocate its use), but a sizable proportion of Rock and Jazz performers have composed and performed music under its influence.
Drugs with very high abuse potential like opioids are very dangerous and a big problem - but looking at the epidemic of opioid abuse in the US, it's evident that criminalization isn't helping.
I don't, and that's a good point - if the number of users remain the same (or even increases slightly) than I do see how legalizing can be beneficial. However, in my mind legalizing drugs also means easier access, and that can lead to an increasing number of people using drugs.
>However, in my mind legalizing drugs also means easier access, and that can lead to an increasing number of people using drugs.
How many adults do you know that have never done, or tried, heroin would suddenly do so if was legal? I think the amount of people that would try heroin because it became legal would be staggering low. I don't think there are many people out there going "Man, if heroin was just legal then I would totally try it!". People that want to do heroin are already doing so, it being illegal isn't stopping anyone.
So the counterargument is hydrocodone. It is legal, and people that would never in their lives think of shooting smack now had doctors, many of whom knew better, prescribing them a highly addictive narcotic in order to get compensated by the manufacturer. Purdue Pharma was a wholly legal cartel with thousands of dealers worldwide moving their product for them.
"Heroin" has a bad name, so your legalized version would have some innocuous made-up marketing name, backed by tens of millions of dollars of advertising and it would sell like hotcakes.
My response to that is to assert that most of the negative impact of the opiate crisis is due to the fact that people become addicted to them and are then unable to obtain them through legal means, which effectively forces them into criminal activity.
I'm certainly not saying opiate addiction is a neutral/good thing, but I don't think it would cause the societal harm that we see today with them being tightly regulated.
Potential case in point: illegal methamphetamine usage/addiction is a huge issue today in the US. I qualify that as "illegal", because meth is available by prescription under the trade name Desoxyn. Many drugs with similar effects are likewise available and much more commonly prescribed - but I'm not aware of anyone calling for them to be banned. If anything, I suspect in that case the overall societal impact is positive: I know I would be much less effective as a developer if I were to lose access to ADHD medication.
Not to mention the way the opiates where marketed at doctors with claims they where less addictive.
Meaning doctors where more likely to prescribe them, that whole episode was one of multiple fuck ups at every level backed by some unscrupulous fuckers.
>So the counterargument is hydrocodone. It is legal, and people that would never in their lives think of shooting smack now had doctors,many of whom knew better, prescribing them a highly addictive narcotic in order to get compensated by the manufacturer.
How is that a counter argument? This is a breakdown/fault of the medical community and has no relation to making drugs legal. To be clear, I am arguing that all drugs should be legal for recreational use (not require a prescription).
No question, doctors need to vet information on drugs better (they should not be taking literature/studies that come from the drug manufacturers as a reputable sources of truth). No question doctors should be extremely hesitant prescribing any opioid at all. No doubt that a lot of the current opioid epidemic stems from doctors (either unwittingly or not) prescribing things that they shouldn't be. Those are all medical industry issues that need to be solved (regardless if things like heroin are legal).
I don't suppose, and don't recommend, doing a self diagnosis and getting whatever drugs you feel will help. The medical community is supposed to be the experts on that subject matter.
That said, people need to be free to determine their own risk tolerance level regarding what to put in, or use on their bodies.
Me personally? I am not going to stop going to the doctors to get medicines when I am sick, even if I could buy any and all drugs over-the-counter. Also I am sure prescriptions aren't going away even if all drugs could be bought over the counter, there is no way insurance would pay for drugs that weren't prescribed by a medical professional.
You are using "legal" in a way that implies unregulated. Regulations have a large value, at least to some people. For instance, I would like to try CBD, but I don't trust that some random product will be safe and effective and have the right amount of the active ingredient. Unless it's an approved drug.
If you have regulations on drugs, then you have all the problems, to some extent, that people attribute to their illegality.
I am afraid of opioids, and I don't trust even doctors, so I never took the ones I was offered and didn't get addicted. But there must be millions of people who wouldn't trust a heroin dealer and would trust their doctor, so legality makes a big difference.
Why would a doctor promote Heroin? If they would, especially for recreative purposes, would be very much at odds with any medical ethics. What is clear via Oxy example is that medical ethics really need to be upheld and profit taken out of the equation.
Do you see doctors promoting cigarettes? Alcohol?
I would say that your reasoning why you aren't doing CBD is highly rational. Do you really think that even if you wanted to try heroin and if you did it, it would automatically addict you? Like you're instantly gone in to the abyss?
People try heroin and nothing happens to them. Some even hate the experience. People use heroin for prolonged periods and then simply stop (non unusual in the late teens, with some kind of a trigger in the mid 20).
If there was not so much stigma involved and so much risk taking the stuff, we might see people coming out of this juvenile experimenting phase in a much much better state.
Also, do you really think that people that lifelong addicts, don't have some kind of deeper psychological reasons to go down that path?
>if you wanted to try heroin and if you did it, it would automatically addict you
I have no idea. Lots of people experiment with things and it's no big deal and they insist that must be a universal experience. There's a selection effect. If you try something at 20 and don't survive, you're not around at 40 or 80 to tell people it's no big deal.
When I was young, I enjoyed alcohol a lot, but didn't really struggle giving it up when I had to. Nor did I ever drink until blackout or vomiting, which you know, whether or not it's pathological/alcoholism, is common. I am certain that the level of compulsion is very different for some people.
I have a sibling, who I believe smoked cigarettes off and on but it never became a permanent habit. But a lot of people find them extremely addictive. I never smoked my first one, just because there was never an anticipated reward that seemed worth it. I might have been wrong, or right. Some people seem to get substantial cognitive benefits from nicotine.
Occasionally having a negative reaction to a prescription drug makes me wary of recreational or unregulated stuff, too. Seeing homeopathic stuff in the drug store makes me fearful that a CBD product might be fake too. So when I had wisdom teeth pulled and I was given a bottle of big pink pills (I think it must have been oxycodone/paracetamol based on a quick google) I didn't use a single one.
For what it's worth, I think you're at least mostly correct - I would also expect legalization to lead to increased usage, at least in the short term. I'm just the type of person who challenges those sorts of expectations, including when I'm the one holding them.
Along with wondering if "legalization leads to increased rate of usage" holds true, I also wonder if the following is true:
> legalizing drugs also means easier access
Criminality is a "barrier to entry", surely, but I'm not at all sure that ease of access changes because of it. In Arkansas, where I live, cannabis is illegal. Even though I don't consume it (the risk isn't worth the benefit to me), I'm extremely confident I could make a couple of phone calls and have some delivered to me if I wanted to. That's really no different from my experience in the LA area.
In fact, it might actually be more difficult to obtain it in LA through legal means. Generally you have to seek out a dispensary (physically, or via phone/app) and provide identification. I wouldn't need ID to get it illegally in Arkansas. If an ID requirement has a negative participation impact on other things (like voting) then I would expect that to hold true for this as well.
I don't believe that drug addicts face any real difficulty obtaining their drugs; they do face hazards to their safety and economic security.
The risk of legalization isn't so much ease of access as it is the normalization of drug abuse. We have shown with cigarette usage that education, propaganda and marketing laws can de-normalize drug use.
If anything, by making high risk drugs safely available through official venues, you can provide social services better access to those who need help.
I would say that you would likely see an initial increase in users but that a well run program would lead to both a overall decrease in users and more importantly a reduction of average harm per user.
I think that is a common misunderstanding. Access is there and not much more difficult than deciding you are curious and going to a specialty shop. Look at marijuana legalization, not a big uptick in consumption by most approximations.
Correct, heroin addiction is problematic. In fact, I'd go so far as to simply say "addiction is problematic" If we say that instead of "drugs are problematic" perhaps a different approach seems reasonable.
Portugal decriminalized drugs and focused on addiction treatment. The model isn't perfect, but it might be worth a look.
of course not; but neither does the war on drugs. Or legal drugs like alcohol. And it's quite obvious at this point that the negative consequences of the war on drugs far outweigh the negative consequences of drug use, especially if such use was regulated and supervised, and had compassionate treatment options
It is hard to see how financing a global network of violent and terroristic criminal organizations could ever be a better state of affairs than having more drug addicts. If you then include the massive loss of freedoms imposed on us to fight these organizations, it boggles my mind that anyone can support the war on drugs.
Edit: The answer I guess is that those who have supported the war on drugs had other goals than "reducing the number of addicts". If you look at the history of how the war on drugs has been used by western intelligence agencies to grow their surveillance powers and finance and the fight against left-wing/communist organizations, the real reasons become more clear.
Governments can and do tax illegal drugs. Just issue tax stamps. If drugs are found without them, you also get them for tax evasion.
All drugs used to be legal in the US. There is a reason that they became controlled a hundred years ago or so, and it does not involve conspiracies by big pharma. Go research the history - it's fascinating.
Alcohol is one of the leading causes of death in the US. A large share of car accidents, suicides, crime, heart disease, and many other things is caused by it.
This libertarian trope has gotten more annoying as I get older. No matter what you want legalized/deregulated, there is something that even you can't stomach. And organized crime can focus their business on that something. They probably already have.
You say legalize everything and then you say there will be "quality and proper labeling". Well duh, you have to enforce that; that means drugs that don't meet the standards are illegal. And your organized criminals will deal in them. There's no way out.
Current drug laws can be framed as a matter of "quality and proper labeling", we're just quibbling about the details.
Even legalizing some drugs would reduce organized crime. Would it completely destroy it? Probably not, but it would mean that there's less money to be made in it, and that means fewer people involved, less violence, less corruption.
At the bottom usually. Either that, or you'll need some specific smarts or connections that are sought after. That's how it survives the loss of members. Many are low level and are replaceable, they have no actual knowledge about the high level trade. The high level bosses hide really well and try to stay untouchable by letting others do the dirty work.
From what I understand about Dutch organized crime, if you'd start for yourself, you'd have to fight a turf war and will always be at the top of multiple hit lists.
The safest bet is probably shipping drugs by mail through dark markets. A Dutch guy (SuperTrips) got arrested in Miami a couple of years ago. He sold drugs from his bedroom in his parental home. Was estimated to have earned 385k BTC through this.
If you want to see it at work, you could go to some of the Caribbean Islands. Drug trafficking runs through many of them and you can actually see the impact it has on some communities. In Haiti, I was warned to stay away from packages on the beach (though I didn't spot any). Apparently they throw them overboard near the coast, locals find them and sell them back to drug traffickers for about €50 a kg. This way the traffickers don't need to be directly involved with bringing them to shore.
Hopefully this gives you some info. There's lots of books and documentaries about this stuff too, by ex-criminals, insiders and researchers.
yeah, even parts of Panama and Costa Rica have so much cocaine running through them that people basically just have gobs of the stuff on them and 75% of the ex-pats there are somewhere between drunk and coke-addled most days :P Mind trying to buy it as a tourist though, "Just follow me down this alley" - ah you'll prob just a confusing fast run around about needing to make change in a currency not your own and end up with a little bit of what you thought you were buying for a whole lot more than it should have cost...
>and Costa Rica have so much cocaine running through them that people basically just have gobs of the stuff on them and 75% of the ex-pats there are somewhere between drunk and coke-addled most days
Not my experience at all. The expats I met are usually doing some combination of bar work, yoga classes, and other such things. Among the entire cohort of the hostel inhabitants (mostly tourists I imagine?) I haven't seen one drunk or drugged person.
I did see plenty of drug dealers though - some shady dealers on the street and some very presentable resident dealers inside various venues. So there has to be a lot of drug use going on, just none that I have noticed.
I was once approached to develop a darknet market. I spent a few weeks scoping out the work, unpaid, before I turned down the opportunity due to the legal and ethical problems.
I did spend that time pondering and scoping out the work because I found it a fascinating challenge to design an ecommerce platform with very heavy requirements for user privacy and anonymity.
The source code for an existing platform that I was granted access to view showed me that a lot of encryption techniques were just smoke and mirrors. Mostly, everything was stored unencrypted or using symmetric encryption with the encryption key stored on the same filesystem as the server generating the pages.
It was fun designing an asymetric multi-key encryption system, where a user's "second password" with a hash (stored with a microservice API on another server in another data center) generated one of the multiple keys required. Even server seizure wouldn't result in anything usable.
Another challenge was how to prevent servers from being overwhelmed with DDoS attacks. That would have been achieved by using the Tor API to generate custom onion addresses for each user and vendor that they could bookmark. The only site that could be DDoS'd would be the landing page. It also allowed for an easy route to horizontal scaling.
The old system also didn't properly delete stuff, it just flipped a boolean "deleted" field to prevent it from being visible anymore... Not very smart for data hygiene.
I've been wanting to use what I planned out to build a product for the last few years, but I can't think of anything legal & legitimate that would have such strict security requirements that also has potential for profitability.
> Another challenge was how to prevent servers from being overwhelmed with DDoS attacks. That would have been achieved by using the Tor API to generate custom onion addresses for each user and vendor that they could bookmark. The only site that could be DDoS'd would be the landing page. It also allowed for an easy route to horizontal scaling.
If the market were compromised and the URLs exposed, this would make it easier for a bad actor to connect a user to the URL, right?
A friend told me the story of his friend here in Mexico, who was just finishing school (uni) and needed some money. A friend of his offered that if he stayed at some random house for a weekend (to "guard" the house just staying there to sleep) he would be paid several thousand pesos. Not bad for a weekend of doing nothing.
That weekend there was a police raid to that house. The poor guy ended up being arrested along with others and got 20 years jail time because there were drugs and guns in the house.
Assuming your story true (and based on ones I've seen on 'Locked Up Abroad'), I think what happens here is that higher ups are giving the police a win. Everyone in some of these areas is on the take, but the police still need to show arrests once in awhile. So throw some guns and drugs in a house (cost of doing business), put some randoms in there, and call the raid.
Well yeh, that particular idea is not worth it. It's ridiculous. On the other hand in the UK I know people who make huge amounts of tax free money and when they get caught (usually after 5-10 years) they go to prison for a year or two. Not so bad.
> These aren't street dealers. It's an organized, carefully designed, well-oiled machine. How does this machine work? How does it survive the loss of so many members?
Narconomics[1] has a pretty good discussion of the economics (including recruiting) of cartels.
The real barrier to entry here is the stress. Always feeling those butterflies when the phone rings - getting nervous when you see a police car - freaking out a little when the doorbell rings.
It's no way to live - and don't even think about having a family/kids after you get involved. You'll die early of the stress.
If you think you're a master 1337 hacker or online drug dealer - just get a job in IT security. It pays better, comes with zero stress.
15+ years ago when I was hacking and doing credit card fraud, I could make $1000 cash a day without a lot of effort or time. Because I was careful about protecting myself and didn't work a lot I didn't have much stress. I have far more stress with a full time job.
That said, the drug game would be a lot more stressful.
Might be dated at this point, but a chapter in Freakonomics was about the economics of being a gang affiliated drug dealer in the US. The analysis there was that outside the top couple guys, the actual pay wasn't much better than just working as a fry cook or whatever, while the risk of being arrested or shot was much, much higher.
So even in criminal enterprises, I think you have to move up the distribution chain a ways to see the big $
> get a job in IT security. It pays better, comes with zero stress.
I beg to differ. All IT jobs have stress, but security by definition stresses you about things that haven't happened yet. If you have zero stress doing IT security, you're doing it wrong. Still immensely better than crime, though.
You could benefit from reading this sociologist's account: "Gang Leader for a Day":
<< Sudhir Venkatesh never imagined that as a result of this assignment he would befriend a gang leader named JT and spend the better part of a decade embedded inside the projects under JT’s protection. From a privileged position of unprecedented access, Venkatesh observed JT and the rest of his gang as they operated their crack-selling business, made peace with their neighbors, evaded the law, and rose up or fell within the ranks of the gang’s complex hierarchical structure. >>
The line between being willing to take enough risk to get involved in drugs and being risk averse not to get in trouble from being involved with drugs is a very thin line.
You can get rich from drugs very easily but getting rich from drugs while minimising your risk enough to live out your days comfortably is hard.
The smart way for a nerd to get rich from drugs is to formulate a short-term high risk plan that utilises the dark net to acquire and sell drugs before moving on very quickly. The problem is, if you’re making a lot of money very quickly... can you give it up? What’s one more day? What’s another week? You’ve been going 6 months — what’s 7?
Drug dealing groups are not a carefully designed and well oiled machine, there’s no knowledge passed down from generation to generation: there’s a group of people who haven’t yet been caught out by their mistakes. The people mentioned in this article made a mistake by using this app, and that mistake finally caught up to them.
The whole drug industry is predatory, the smartest people involved in drugs are the most predatory because minimising risk for yourself means offloading that risk onto others using violence and coercion.
There’s no romantic art to drug dealing: if you’re smart and willing to hurt others, you can be a millionaire before the year is out.
You may be interested in the book “Wiseguy”, a very interesting, informative, and often hilarious book about Henry Hill, a member of the mafia in New York.
It explains in great detail how he got into the mob and how the mob works. I would assume many organized crime groups follow similar paths. Essentially young kids with problems with authority meet hoodlums who can vouch for them, they get into the lifestyle, and start learning how to hustle. No one rats because doing so means death.
This book is also what the superb movie Goodfellas is based on, which is a fairly close portrayal of the book.
However those are exactly the sort of people that a well run criminal organization would keep at a distance. The opportunities one gets from dodgy people are dodgy opportunities.
The recruiting of violent, power seeking, poor impulse control people was one of the major factors in the decline of the five families. When better opportunities existed for 2nd and 3rd generation Italian-Americans, many took those better non-criminal opportunities. An organized crime life is a pretty hard life. This dramatically hurt the number of good candidates that organized crime could recruit from. The candidates they did recruit often placed their individual desires over the needs of the organization. This destroyed the internal trust which was a major enabler of their success.
Have you heard of the podcast Darknet Diaries? Jack Rhysider (the host) does a pretty remarkable job of documenting the answers to your questions by interviewing guests (in story format) who often come from the more murky areas of the internet.
In particular I recommend the episode freakyclown or OxyMonster as that seems to fit what you're looking for.
>Le Roux was sentenced to 25 years in prison in June 2020 after agreeing to cooperate with authorities in exchange for a lesser sentence and immunity to his most serious crimes.
Surely he will have to serve his sentence in solitary because I would imagine cooperating with the authorities makes you rather unpopular in prison.
Some people are exceedingly good at working out ways around the law to make a lot money. Here is how I think their story works in many cases (I have no formal expertise):
I expect these days in developed countries most of them start with credit card fraud in their teens and usually go to prison. At that point they either reform (I know of two such individuals by name, one is a friend sysadmin/CTO now and the other is Stephen Fry) or they get recruited in prison into an existing criminal org. From then on they acquire knowledge on how to crime from people who have the experience.
This is an interesting aspect of the criminal system I don’t often see discussed - for a lot of kids who are dabbling in crime and get caught sending them to prison is how their criminal network grows. It doesn’t help “reform” the edge cases so much as it allows the edge cases to be easily recruited by existing criminal operations.
It's great news that these crims have had their just desserts. It's even better the quantity of drugs taken out of circulation, and hopefully the decimation of the network.
I'm well grasped of the difference between the two, and for the most part I think white collar crime is worse. It's pure greed and the same kind of exceptionalism that's been growing and growing for the last 50-60 years. Blue collar crime is as old as civilisation, white collar crime is as old as deregulation.
I don't think we can compare feudalism with financial crime.
One was the system of governance for millennia, the other was enabled by the naivety of a failed ruling class who handed the power of states to the fraudsters of global finance.
Everyone understood (at a local level) how feudalism worked, I doubt many people could tell you what Wirecard were doing.
Not to mention the drugs. One has to feel some sympathy for the street level thugs. They're body-men for the elite organisers, of whom we seem to only catch one every 10 years, and they often get off lightly and/or escape.
> To be clear, my question is: how is the knowledge necessary for such operations preserved? I'm a programmer. I learned it from the internet. Where do they learn? And these aren't street dealers. It's an organized, carefully designed, well-oiled machine. How does this machine work? How does it survive the loss of so many members?
This is what anthropologists call an "oral culture". You have to be told it verbally, because those involved are strongly deterred from writing it down. For the deeper secrets you probably have to be part of the right family.
In the rougher neighborhoods you'll find plenty of people who know how the system works, if only so they know what and who to avoid getting caught up in it.
(The interesting thing about the internet is how we've developed an "oral" culture that actually does get written down, because we do so much socializing through text! IRC channels and the like.)
It's ostensibly a study of the specialized language of pickpockets, but actually goes in to great detail on how pickpocket gangs work.
Before reading this book, and knowing nothing about the subject matter, I had somehow assumed pickpockets worked alone and were just bottom-of-the-barrel amateur opportunists. I couldn't have been more wrong, as it turned out they work in highly organized units.
Fortunately, probably through the ubiquity of video surveillance, such gangs don't seem to be as widespread as they used to be.
At least in the States, pickpocketing has almost disappeared. Part of this is probably part of the general trend of falling crime rates, but also because people carry much less cash around and cel-phones etc. are difficult to fence.
Your either born a hustler or born into it. In the last few decades the hustlers do need IT help, especially online gambling, money laundering, etc. But it does come with risks, you don't want to be the IT guy who recommended this cracked app.
> I wish it were possible to go observe the system in action as a spectator.
Barring a time machine or wonder viewer that would make this possible I highly recommend this documentary from 2006 [1] “Cocaine Cowboys” its a tell all of the inner workings of the largest drug importers and follows the rise and subsequently fall of the cocaine trade in Florida which ultimately culminates in the major construction and modernization of Miami Florida.
I know in Mexico/other parts of South America they'd kidnap/abduct radio infrastructure workers for setting up/managing comms. Give them a fairly nice life too, except for the whole you're stuck in this position and we'll kill you and your family if you try to leave.
So, basically, go down there with a sign stating what you can do and hope to get kidnapped...
If my local neighbourhood drug dealers are any indicator they recruit by word of mouth. A friend knows a friend who knows a friend who has a few attractive job offers so if there's somebody to vouch for you, a meeting is arranged.
They usually have some front business. "My guys" had a small logistics operation(obviously) - a single tractor trailer. Apparently the local liquor store was involved as well because it was run by the same people.
How do I know all this? Some of their trades, meetings and even disagreements happened out in the open. Nobody dared to be too curious about this. Also my friend's ex boyfriend was a drug dealer so she had a few stories to share.
I still vividly remember this one time when I saw one man handing out brick-shaped packages which were inside a car trunk to another man. At first I didn't know what I was looking at, but seeing how my eye contact made them uncomfortable I stopped staring and went on my way.
>>If you wanted to get into the criminal drug trade, how would you start? Is there a guide somewhere I can follow?
You would start from the bottom. Going around saying you want to part of the business, is a sure way to end up dead as a snitch.
Yeah there's a LOT of money: cocaine costs as little as $2k a kilo in Columbia and can be sold in EU for close to $100K when accounting for cutting. I guess a lot of it is segmented. For example: one group brings 800kg from Ecuador and sells it to local gangs and so on. If they get caught, other groups fill the void.
You would join an existing organisation, as you'd have no chance setting yourself up as a "startup" - existing gangs would not take kindly to someone trying to disrupt their business.
I don't know if it's insightful to think of this as "pure, unrestrained capitalism".
Imperialistic nation states of the 1700s and 1800s followed this playbook, in a time where the biggest enterprises were state-owned (in Empire of Cotton, Beckert refers to it as "War Capitalism").
But those systems fell apart because they were too volatile. Eventually, an inability to control that volatility compelled the same imperialistic nation states to divorce themselves from private enterprise, and took the monopoly on violence in the settlement; so far, it's been a more stable equilibrium.
Both systems are "capitalist", in that they permit the private accumulation and investment of wealth. I would argue that the main difference is the state-owned monopoly on violence, eminent domain, and regulation of financial sector.
Regions with strong criminal underworlds tend not to to be governed by institutions with such monopolies.
There's an interesting 2012 Ted Talks presentation by Peter van Uhm the then chief of defense for the Netherlands. He discusses the state monopoly on violence as a central point of how and why the military exists.
> By definition trade in capitalism is done willing.
Not by the definition used by the people who named and defined capitalism.
It's true that after that, the conceit that capitalism involved only voluntary, uncoerced trade was adopted by it's defenders as a rationalization of the system, but that was not true of either the specific real world systems for which the name “capitalism” was coined to refer or subsequent real world examples, and certainly has nothing to do with the definition of capitalism.
If you want to distinguish the proposed scenario from capitalism, it would be in that it does not involve private property rights in the means of production, but instead on their forcible seizure and defense, but that's a slippery distinction because commonly such systems evolve into a degree of legitimization and trade with recognized rights between the parties, and the roots of capitalist property also start in forcible seizure which is later legitimized.
> If someone living today called themselves a capitalist would you expect them to be involved in "forcible seizure and defence"?
Given the diversification most capitalists have and looking at what major corporations do globally, yes, though I'd also expect them not to think of themselves that way.
Drug cartel leaders, I'm sure, often have similar self-serving rationalizations of their role.
From related portions of the economy: given the growing use of debtor's prisons, predatory loans, and coercive tactics including armed repossession & bounty hunting dependent on an exploitive for-profit bond regime? Yes. These are not companies rejected by modern capitalism. On a higher economic level private equity's leveraged buyouts are very frequently hostile takeovers that use a company's own resources to seize control of it.
> By definition trade in capitalism is done willing.
The definition of capitalism, and the world in which capitalism operates, are different.
The final transaction between buyer and seller is voluntary.
But all of the backend infrastructure may be highly manipulated in unethical, forceful ways.
A person buying some whale meat willingly pays the merchant at the meat market.
But that whale meat was acquired because one group killed the whale before another group. And that group killed the whale first because they setup groups who threatened other would-be whale hunters, and as this group gained a bit of financial traction they paid off local officials to pass some “coastal safety” ordinances that provide them some level of monopoly on killing whales, and worked out another ordinance that lets them dump toxic byproduct in a local river to place some of their cost into the public that won’t be easily rectified for decades.
So a perfectly ethical capitalist fisherman might well find themselves facing men with guns who forcefully prevent them from competing, when the police show up to enforce the local coastal safety law.
$13M in cash is an impressive amount. It makes me wonder: There must be all kinds of operations happening around us daily, yet nobody knows about them. And those operations need members. Where do they come from?
The inner workings of this stuff is fascinating. To be honest, I wish it were possible to go observe the system in action as a spectator. I'd love to see how the packaging is done, the supply lines, the transport logistics...
(I balance this with a deep hatred for cartels. If you trace these questions far enough, it seems to often lead to "the cartels are at the center of it all." And they're responsible for unspeakable miseries.)
To be clear, my question is: how is the knowledge necessary for such operations preserved? I'm a programmer. I learned it from the internet. Where do they learn? And these aren't street dealers. It's an organized, carefully designed, well-oiled machine. How does this machine work? How does it survive the loss of so many members?