121–130 of 160 posts
This story collapses a lot of popular narratives. That peoples in USA buying drugs are the drivers of violence in Mexico. That legalizing drugs would make the cartels and the violence disappear.
Recommended movie: Elite Squad and especially the sequel Elite Squad: Enemy Within . It's about BOPE, the special operations unit of Rio de Janeiro police. The first is about the military anti-gang exploits, the second is a good hard look at what corruption looks like. The drugs aren't going away if you break up a cartel, neither is the money.
I'd certainly add City of God and City of Men to that list. Along with Elite Squad, these movies are simply amazing. Wagner Moura. the main character in Elite Squad, also stars as Pablo Escobar in Netflix's original series Narcos. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0609944/?ref_=tt_cl_t1
Recommended movie: Elite Squad and especially the sequel Elite Squad: Enemy Within . It's about BOPE, the special operations unit of Rio de Janeiro police. The first is about the military anti-gang exploits, the second is a good hard look at what corruption looks like. The drugs aren't going away if you break up a cartel, neither is the money.
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This is xenophobic nonsense. I have travelled extensively all over Latin America (a massive and heterogeneous place by the way) for the last 20+ years and literally none of this rings true at all. I mean are you extending this “age of violence” theory to Chicago, or Orlando nightclubs, the Las Vegas strip, or a typical American public school? Or do you confine your contempt to brown people who speak a different langu…
Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. It's possible, and much better, to correct misinformation without attacking someone for being wrong. Even if you don't owe that person better, you owe it to the community you're participating in. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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The Russian mob did that with the rail distillery McCormick. They dyed the vodka blue and would ship it as window cleaner in 55 gallon drums. Then remove the dye to avoid taxes.
Shitty vodka is so cheap and easy to make, you would think it would be better to just produce the vodka as close to the point of sale as possible
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Many US truck drivers are owner-operators. They pay their own taxes and only have to keep driver logs. They are audited as often as the average American. Buying stolen gasoline is a no brainer.
Sure, but do you think the number of taxi and truck drivers is larger than the number of drug users? Also, do you think the profits are so big that gangs would fight for territory to be able to sell illegal gasoline? I seriously doubt it.
This story collapses a lot of popular narratives. That peoples in USA buying drugs are the drivers of violence in Mexico. That legalizing drugs would make the cartels and the violence disappear.
A while back, Canada drastically raised the prices of cigarettes, and drive by shootings started up between the cigarette smugglers. It went away after quickly lowering the price again.
Drive by shootings also appeared during WW2 with gas rationing, and went away when rationing was ended.
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If heroin and morphine were legalized, it could revitalize the Midwest farming economy and prevent deaths from adulterated drugs. Clearly there is a big market for these drugs, so that commerce might as well be part of the local economy instead of the international black market
> If heroin and morphine were legalized Addiction and abuse rates would skyrocket, though. With an availability similar to alcohol, that would begin a plague that would envelop the country with astonishing speed. The problem with those drugs now is already a big problem, but if you put them within reach of every single adult you could bring a country to its knees. Yes, legalizing them would be a boon for commercial i…
That's quite an assumption. For example, I don't have thoughts like "I wish heroin was legal, because I want to be a junkie!" Somehow, I'm not an alcoholic nor a smoker, despite them being readily available.
I do love my coffee, however :-)
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For illegal gasoline? Yeah totally. Buying illegal gasoline only makes sense for some individuals in transportation because in Mexico there is no fiscalization on a large portion of the economy (street vendors for example). Big transportation companies couldn't do it. They need to justify expenses, get invoices, etc. A couple of years back it was easy to get fake invoices since everything was on paper, but there was…
Many US truck drivers are owner-operators. They pay their own taxes and only have to keep driver logs. They are audited as often as the average American. Buying stolen gasoline is a no brainer.
This story collapses a lot of popular narratives. That peoples in USA buying drugs are the drivers of violence in Mexico. That legalizing drugs would make the cartels and the violence disappear.
Drugs are much different from gasoline. Gasoline is available everywhere and legal.
The cartels moving to gasoline is like the mafia moving from liquor during prohibition to other trades like racketeering, extortion, etc.
It perhaps signals that drugs are not so lucrative anymore.