[stephentmcm]

This is absolutely not going to be the case. Assuming both the US and Mexico simultaneous legalized all drugs, what happens to all the illegal jobs the cartels currently have?

Their people, money and weapons don't vanish and what we see when cartels take a hit income is violence increases and the cartels look to other methods of making income using they're existing tools. Protection rackets and kidnappings are already used as supplemental income, these would only increase.

Now a long approach of gradual decriminalization and legalization may work, with the ability to operate legally the need to utilize violence decreases over time as it's generally bad for business.

[grugagag]

If their main source of income is cut off they will have to immediately downsize or it would all eat into the boss’s accumulated wealth. Reestablishing the cartel on kidnapping and other violent crime is not as lucrative as selling sniffy gold. If they start kidnapping in America is a different thing all together but doing it in Mexico would not yield enough money to keep the current operations - unless they kidnap every Mexican citizen or something like that... Closest move is to get involved directly into politics

[stjohnswarts]

Or they get into the "protection" and kidnapping racket even more than they are currently. Sure their size would probably decrease but the amount of violence would skyrocket. At least for several years. The basically control whole swathes of that. They wouldn't give that up without a fight.

[meowface]

It definitely would not magically get rid of cartels overnight, but it'd cut off a huge source of money for them. If they start multiplying the number of violence-related revenue streams (kidnapping, protection rackets/extortion, murder-for-hire, arms snuggling), their image among people who were neutral towards them may decline, and maybe they'll start to be seen as much closer to nothing but pure terrorist/paramilitary organizations.

I don't know if that would start the process of gradual downsizing and elimination by security forces or if it'd instead first lead to a huge uptick in violence and perhaps civil war, but I feel like in the long-term it'd be much harder for most of them to hold onto as much money and power as they used to.

I'm absolutely not an expert in this area and could be horribly wrong, but I think this idea should at least be considered more seriously.

[ev1]

I'm curious about one thing: I keep hearing weird stories about small police forces and ultra-militarised police forces in the US for example, like tiny towns having surplus tanks and assault rifles.

Why/how are the cartels not just "put down" immediately with some assistance? Is there something deeper, like people being born into it or politicians much rather having drug money than a living population? I don't understand why there even needs to be any form of civil war, unless the cartels have embedded themselves deep enough to be similar to guerilla warfare-esque with innocent actors.

[rexpop]

Wow, your response is literally "let them hold us hostage, it's safer than upsetting the status quo."

[stephentmcm]

>Now a long approach of gradual decriminalization and legalization may work, with the ability to operate legally the need to utilize violence decreases over time as it's generally bad for business.

For the record I'm pro-legalization, but just flipping the status quo overnight isn't going to fly here.

Saying "just legalize all drugs" doesn't solve the problem, someone still has to make the drugs, can we just give all traffickers amnesty for past crimes and make their operations legal? Maybe? But it's not something to hand-wave away.

I don't have the answer but flippant comments about how easy it is to dismantle cartels, is offensive to anyone who has fought to do such and likely a disservice to the intelligence of people running them.

[CamperBob2]

Why didn't all of these things happen when Prohibition was repealed?