[AFAIK]

One option would be to legalise drugs in a commercial manner and offer an amnesty to current cartels. I wonder how many would attempt to go legit and how many would diversify their logistics, infrastructure, etc. to other criminal commerce.

Or you could attempt to usurp the cartels' markets by legalising drugs and passing regulations requiring production by individuals, co-ops and other small actors locally.

This is an interesting topic, I'll try to read up on the end of alcohol prohibition although that isn't very analogous because various forms of alcohol were legal during prohibition and only USA outlawed it whilst most other countries in the world maintained production and consumption openly.

[Rugoz]

Where there is demand there is supply. Illicit drug trade is a $320bn market. If you crack down on suppliers they will just be replaced with others, probably more violent and ruthless ones.

I suppose Mexico is mostly a transit country, so its not their war to fight.

In general:
- Make hard drugs freely available to addicts, prescribed by doctors.
- Crack down on hard drug trade, but only with the goal to hide it from the public such that people don't have easy access. Maybe at some point in the future it can be made legal but heavily regulated.
- Legalize soft drugs.

[cheers100]

In general:

- Make hard drugs freely available to addicts, prescribed by doctors.

Are there any doctors with professionism who could subscribe drug to addicts, instead of weaning them off it?

- Crack down on hard drug trade, but only with the goal to hide it from the public such that people don't have easy access. Maybe at some point in the future it can be made legal but heavily regulated.
- Legalize soft drugs.

It doesn't seem practical for me. Why would Mexican drug lords concede to soft drugs?

The drugs lords have bribed police.

[Angelamerkel]

Drug lords will not compete with legal marihuana sales. It's not that profitable if it's legal. And if they sell it through legal channels they will be known as business lords.

[ThirdTerm]

Drug gangs in Latin America have infiltrated the police and local governments and the 43 college students of Ayotzinapa are the casualties of the drug war in Mexico, who were initially arrested by the police and handed over to gang members to be executed in order to prevent their planned anti-government protest. America and Canada should bear the responsibility for the predominance of drug cartels in Latin American societies and the drug trade between Latin America and North America is thriving because of North American countries' loose anti-drug policies. The Obama administration unveiled a new drug policy strategy that looks at drug addiction as a treatable disease rather than a crime, without imposing heavy prison sentences for illicit drug use. There are hardly any drug addicts in Asia because many Asian countries impose the death penalty for drug trafficking and North American countries need to eradicate drug culture by eliminating the supply of drugs from Latin America, which would in turn weaken drug cartels by depriving them of their financial resources.

The recent disappearance of 43 college students in the Mexican state of Guerrero has sent thousands of protesters into the streets of Mexico City and other towns and cities, demanding an end to what is seen as collusion between corrupt local governments and drug cartels. Since President Felipe Calderon declared war on the country's drug cartels on Dec. 11, 2006, there have been more than 100,000 deaths and more than 22,000 disappearances in Mexico. Yet in February last year, Canada added Mexico to an official list of "safe countries" whose citizens will be given less consideration when making refugee claims. Mexico was added to the list along with Norway, Japan, Israel (not counting the occupied territories), Iceland, Australia, New Zealand and Switzerland. Many Mexicans have come to believe that the lines between police and criminals, always blurred, are being erased. In Iguala, it was the police, acting under orders of local Mayor Jose Luis Abarca Velazquez, who turned over dozens of now missing students to the killers of the Guerreros Unidos cartel, after they had themselves shot and killed five innocent people.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/should- ... -1.2845541

A PENSIONER facing life in an Asian jail for ice smuggling may have been duped into a doomed drug run by African money scammers. Emails show 78-year-old Joerg Ulitzka from Brighton in Melbourne was convinced he had big money coming from shadowy Ghanaian contacts in the period before his shock arrest in Hong Kong last month. Mr Ulitzka was about to leave Hong Kong International Airport when he was intercepted by customs drug investigators on June 24. They allegedly found 2.31kg of methamphetamine with an estimated street value of $940,000.
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/austra ... 7002509290

[cheers100]

In his prison scrawlings, Félix Gallardo argued that fighting poverty would be the best way to stop young people from joining the ranks of cartel foot soldiers. "Today, the violence in the cities needs a program of national reconciliation. There needs to be a reconstruction of villages and ranches to make them self-sufficient. There needs to be assembly plants and credit at low interest, incentives for cattle and schools," he wrote. "Violence can be fought with jobs ... We must remember that in the mountains of Mexico, the people are forgotten ... There are no medical clinics, roads or security. Only repression."

http://content.time.com/time/world/arti ... 04,00.html

Callardo is a convicted Mexican policeman-turned drug lord. He wrote about his thoughts on drug war in his memoir.

[AFAIK]

There are hardly any drug addicts in Asia because many Asian countries impose the death penalty for drug trafficking and North American countries need to eradicate drug culture by eliminating the supply of drugs from Latin America, which would in turn weaken drug cartels by depriving them of their financial resources.

There is widespread drug use in Asia. The golden triangle in Thailand, Laos and Burma produces significant quantities of opium and heroin as does Afghanistan. Methamphetamines are also widely used and not just for recreation but often to allow blue collar workers to complete 24 hour or 36 hour shifts. The populations and gov'ts of various countries are deeply concerned about drug use and regularly force users to attend mandatory rehabilitation camps and other poorly designed programs that suffer high relapse rates. Thaksin Shinawatra oversaw the extra-judicial killing of thousands of suspected drug addicts during his war-on-drugs.

First, the global number of amphetamine-type stimulants (ATS) users now exceeds that of heroin and cocaine users combined. While seizures of heroin and cocaine grew by 50% and 65% respectively during the past decade, a 300% boost was observed for ATS, a surge largely attributed to the growing numbers of users in East and Southeast Asia, which now has the greatest number of ATS users in the world and produces half of methamphetamines seized internationally.

The continued increase of opium poppy cultivation in the world since 2009 is another cause of concern. Last year, the total cultivation area was 207,000 hectares, three times the size of Singapore. Accounting for 63% of the surface cultivated, Afghanistan is the leader in global opium production, but Southeast Asian fields are expanding rapidly. Since 2006, opium poppy cultivation has doubled in the region. Myanmar and Laos now account for a quarter of the global cultivated area, and there are more households involved in opium cultivation in Myanmar than in Afghanistan.
http://sea-globe.com/a-drug-free-asean/

[Raez]

Well my solution is to raising the standards of living but I doubt anyone is willing do that solution since it require a lot of dough. so other way would be legalization
If you are living in poverty and you are mostly likely do anything to get rich.
The Gangs may taken advantage of the migration toward US.

[Old_Hat]

Mexico should tell the US to fuck off, legalise and tax all drugs and execute the cartel leaders and their families.

[Joe Liberty]

Decriminalize it all. There are three general groups who support the illegality of drugs: politicians, police, and drug cartels. That's because it's the illegality that enables their power. The collateral damage from the war on drugs (militarization of police forces, over-stuffed prison system, laws piled upon laws piled upon silly laws) is far worse than the alleged ills it was supposed to cure.

[The Sabbaticus]

Hire several multi-million dollar PR firms and advertising agencies in the USA and have them develop an effective anti-drug strategy. The pathological culture of narcotics abuse in the USA needs to be deconstructed, its members rigorously humiliated. Decriminalization will have to follow in tandem (in various forms), but foremost the message needs to be:

"You're a loser if you take drugs."

This should take care of the demand side. They you can deal with the Mexican drug cartels, which are a recent phenomenon, having sprung up in the last decade.

[Bosnjak]

a funny one, legalize the production , trade and prostitution ... like Blacklives matter want, black reserevates, so the profit stays in country.

The Cartells could be hired as bordermilitia... because they are many, they are armed and a wall means higher price to justify.


because a wall should be the last solution because a wall is associated with Gaza, Wes-Berlin it is somehow a enemous monument...

[Suntzu]

Making drugs illegal created the problem. The solution is obvious. It worked with alcohol, it will work for marijuana. Currently in the U.S., no one has died from a marijuana overdose, that's zero, nada. About half the drug deaths in the U.S. are from legal drugs.

[Potemkin]

They you can deal with the Mexican drug cartels, which are a recent phenomenon, having sprung up in the last decade.

Actually, the cartels have been around since the 1970s. And in their present form, since the power vacuum caused by the arrest of Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo in 1989. Things got so bad by 2006 that President Calderon felt the need to effectively declare war on them. If he hadn't, there was a real danger that they would have captured state power in Mexico. The drug cartels are assuredly not a recent phenomenon. Just because you haven't read of something in the newspapers yet doesn't mean it doesn't exist, Sabb; it just means you don't know about it yet. Do you think the contents of a room only come into existence when you walk into it, or that a table stops existing the moment you turn your back on it?

[Nattering Nabob]

How long before Mexico finds their own version of Rodrigo Duterte?

[Drlee]

Rugoz said:

In general:
- Make hard drugs freely available to addicts, prescribed by doctors.
- Crack down on hard drug trade, but only with the goal to hide it from the public such that people don't have easy access. Maybe at some point in the future it can be made legal but heavily regulated.
- Legalize soft drugs.

I largely agree with this, offering only one addition. Making effective, free, government funded, rehab available by prescription from the same doctors who prescribe supportive hard drugs.

There is little to gain by turning doctors in to pushers and drug companies into dealers. It eliminates the "criminal" element of the problem and replaces it with retailers. Not a half bad deal but only a half good one really.

Here is a more serious issue. Right now we only interdict about 13% of the hard drug trade between Mexico and the US. (For trade it is in every sense of the word.) The remainder of that trade (some +$30bn per year) flows into the Mexican economy. Take that away and our southern friends have just lost 3% of their GDP. Gulp. Now consider that the drug trade transfers more American wealth to Mexico than does all of the remittances by Mexican/American workers (legal and illegal) to Mexico (About $26bn per year) and Trump wants to dramatically reduce that also. We are on-track to well and truly fuck our southern neighbor. Add to this that Trump wants to gut NAFTA and we could very well have a very hostile country with which we share a very long border.

Of course we should NEVER consider the illegal drug trade as economic assistance. Nor should we countenance the export of US dollars by illegal workers. Having said that, we should definitely be mindful of the effects of our actions.

[Suntzu]

I'm for anything that fucks Mexico.

[XogGyux]

I believe the single most effective way to deal with this is to legalize some/most drugs. We had a trial of banning alcohol once and it resulted in heavy crime and the booming of the mafia in the US and perhaps that would be acceptable if it prevented people from using alcohol or getting drunk. Yet neither of those goals were achieved and all that money only worked to strengthen organized crime.
Today people still get their drugs rather easily and drugs is a rampant problem. When i was in medschool the hospital I used to work at southwest chicago would receive at least 2-3 drug related admissions every day and it was a tiny hospital!
I dislike drugs, all of them (although im guilty of using caffeine) but the reality is that if your argument is that legalizing them will make their use worse, you are wrong. If your argument is that they are dangerous... although it is true, it is not a reason to make them illegal. Alcohol is more dangerous than any other drug and in today's world an alcohol prohibition would never even get close to passing, nor would it make any difference in its usage at all.
Legalize them, make companies compete to make them safer, regulate what it is put into them (e.g. no more talc, flour, etc) that scumbag dealers put in their drugs to sell more volume. Collect tax on those drugs, use that money to anti-drug advertisement, education programs, rehabilitation programs. Stop putting somone in jail 20years for selling a couple bags of marijuana. The average cost to keep someone in prison is 30k/year. So even when you catch one of those delinquents you end up paying what would otherwise be considered a reasonable income to keep that delinquent in prison.... To put that in perspective the average inmate cost more than the average US worker wage (around $25k/year).
I am not saying criminals dont belong in jail, they do and whatever is worth to keep them there is a good price. But this should not be a crime to begin with. If in this society you are free to put alcohol in your body you should also be free to put marijuana and yes also cocaine and heroine.

At the end of the day we not only pay for the war on crime, we pay for the healthcare of all those morons that become addicted and we also pay for those who contract HIV/AIDS from drugs and we also pay to put the ones that deal/sell in jail. I just think if instead we can refocus and did what we did before (legalize but heavily regulate and tax alcohol) we would have less crime and more income to deal with those that fall into drug problems.

Please understand legalizing drugs it is not a solution to eliminate them. There is no solution to eliminate drugs, people like it and people will go to extremes for acquiring it. Even if you had a 50 miles high wall between mexico and the US, there is so much money in drugs that a solution will be created. They will move to canada (good luck making that wall!) or send them using boats or hot air ballooms, or make them here in the united states, or sending them to space and recovering it from there, or put tiny cocaine sacks in the legs of migratory birds or have bees carry them. Something, they will come up with some workaround, some solution. THERE IS MONEY IN DRUGS A SOLUTION WILL ALWAYS COME. Most/all that use IV drugs know they are risking catching HIV or hepatitis yet they continue to do it. If that is not enough deterrent why do you think the threat of jail/fines will make any bigger impact? This is not a solution, this is instead a compromise, a way to allow those in our society that feel like destroying their life to do it in a safer environment without dragging the rest of us with them.

[Saeko]

The only way is to execute the suppliers.

[Potemkin]

The rise of the Mexican cartels was caused by a nexus of factors which all came together to create the perfect storm: a weak, corrupt government which does not respect its own laws, widespread poverty and lack of social mobility, a vast territory which is difficult to administer or control, a huge market for hard drugs in the USA just to the north, and the collapse of the Colombian cartels following Pablo Escobar's death which led to Mexico becoming the main route for hard drugs flowing into the huge US market from South America. Any viable solution to the Mexican drug war must address all of these factors simultaneously. Simply killing cartel leaders or burning piles of cocaine will not do the job; for every cartel leader who is violently sent to his maker, a hundred or more guys who are willing and able to take his place spring up. Just like the War on Terror, this is a war which has no end....