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Two Mexican drug cartels came to dominate America’s fentanyl supply

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Re: Two Mexican drug cartels came to dominate America’s fentanyl supply

#31

Post by joe_the_user »

nimbius wrote: post #15
irthomasthomas wrote: post #5

Quoted post unavailable.

as someone who vacations regularly throughout mexico (tijuana, rosarito, mexico city, chihuahua and baja amongst the destinations) i find these sorts of comments silly at best. there is no "mexican civil war" there was the Cristero, the reform, and the revolutionary war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Civil_War while organized criminal homicides are rising, it is nowhere near sixty-thousand. it has never been…

The first line in your link says: It is often not clear what deaths are part of the Mexican drug war versus general criminal homicides, and different sources give different estimates. Which should be a clue that the actual casualties are very plausibly higher than those officially attributed to organized crime.

The total Mexican murder rate listed Wikipedia is 36,579/year. Given Mexico once had a fairly low murder rate, attributing much of this to organized crime seems plausible. Not 60k/year but the violence has gone up and down. Moreover, the "rate of disappearance" is substantial and I believe disappearances aren't counted as official murders of any sort.

And my point would be that all this is unknown. Given the cartels have corrupted and subverted local authorities and that their murders are kept as secret as they can manage, glib certainty about the extent of cartel murders seems unwarranted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

Re: Two Mexican drug cartels came to dominate America’s fentanyl supply

#32

Post by erdos4d »

vorpalhex wrote: post #17
erdos4d wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the US actually started using its military to hit these guys, what would stop them from sending a thousand guys into a large chemical or nuclear plant and creating a disaster that wiped out a city, or more? I find this sort of jingo rhetoric disturbing because the US has never faced an enemy with thousands of troops inside the US and the funding of a nation state. I can imagine an idiot like Trump actually startin…

The same thing that prevents any enemy from sending a thousand guys to any other sensitive site - men with guns (and intel and air support and armor). Occasionally the cartel and Texas guard do exchange fire.

You think that if a thousand cartel guys showed up at a nuke plant with the intention of melting it down that armor and airstrikes would help matters? I think that would just help them actually.

Re: Two Mexican drug cartels came to dominate America’s fentanyl supply

#33

Post by wudangmonk »

julienreszka wrote: post #3
gardenfelder wrote: post #2

You cannot have dominant players in a supply chin if there is no demand

What are you suggesting exactly.

I think we are all tiptoeing around the issue to be honest. What is the actual problem here and what can be a possible solution?. The problem is obviously that these cartels from MEXICO are taking away high paying jobs away from AMERICAN drug dealers. One of the possible solutions is to intervene so that those jobs come back to America.

Re: Two Mexican drug cartels came to dominate America’s fentanyl supply

#34

Post by MichaelCollins »

chasd00 wrote: post #22
ifsothen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "jingo rhetoric." Many of the government leaders south of the border are literally in cahoots with the cartels to commit thousands of murders a year, either directly or through peddling fentanyl, in the US. The rest of them have decided to go along with it out of fear. That is an act of war. The US should respond wisely and carefully, but people should remember these are literally ongoing acts of war committ…

a war with Mexico (or any significant military intervention) means 1000x more people stream over the Southern border compared to now.

And the practicalities of a war would necessitate an effort to stop that, to prevent the spread of enemy combatants behind the front line. Even if you search everybody passing through the border for weapons.. ...it's America. They can get weapons here.

The inevitable result is a massive human rights disaster, that makes the present status quo look like paradise.

Re: Two Mexican drug cartels came to dominate America’s fentanyl supply

#35

Post by mysecretaccount »

mminer237 wrote: post #27
voisin wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not op but legalizing drugs to purify the supply chain, collect taxes, and give people a safe place to do the things they would otherwise do anyways seems like efficient allocation of resources with the benefit of starving the cartels.

I don't think legalizing fentanyl is a good idea at all. Look at how many people were killed by easy access to Oxycodone. It's said that one use of heroin will turn someone into an addict, and something like 2% of opioid addicts die per year. Legalizing drugs may make things safer per person, but it will also increase the number of users. Legalizing fentanyl would just flood the streets with something even more poten…

There are steps that can be taken to provide addicts with legal access to their fix in a way that removes cartels from the supply chain and does not equate to "legalizing fentanyl".

Re: Two Mexican drug cartels came to dominate America’s fentanyl supply

#36

Post by edgyquant »

wavefunction wrote: post #25
ifsothen wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And a lot of that violence spills over the border into the US. Bloody cartel murders, extortion, and such are common in the southwest US and beyond. The Mexican government and politicians are all somewhere in between being controlled by the cartels and too scared to do anything about them. That is casus belli , legal grounds for war, by any reasonable understanding of international law.

Common? That's some outrageous hyperbole. Claims about casus belli against Mexico, America's largest trading partner? Now you've indicted your own intellectual capabilities.

It’s not hyperbole if you’re at all familiar with Mexican-American history. The US has invaded Mexico before for almost this exact same reason.

Re: Two Mexican drug cartels came to dominate America’s fentanyl supply

#37

Post by teddyh »

erdos4d wrote: post #29
teddyh wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the US actually started using its military to hit these guys, what would stop them from sending a thousand guys into a large chemical or nuclear plant and creating a disaster that wiped out a city, or more? I mean, yes, they could , but would they? What would be the realistic result of such an action? Would the US then stop and go “Well, I guess we’ll have to stop antagonizing the cartels.”. I would guess that s…

I'm talking about if the US already was at war with them and hitting them hard. I don't see what would restrain them at that point.

Military actions have purposes, which do not include acting out your nightmare scenarios and being as horrible as possible. There’s a reason regular armies don’t do that kind of thing; it does not aid their purpose. And I don’t see how such an action could ever aid the cartels.

War is not a game where each side gradually loses their “restraint”. Instead, each side carefully considers each possible action and its consequences, and then does whatever action seems to lead to the best end result.

Re: Two Mexican drug cartels came to dominate America’s fentanyl supply

#38

Post by edgyquant »

erdos4d wrote: post #32
vorpalhex wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same thing that prevents any enemy from sending a thousand guys to any other sensitive site - men with guns (and intel and air support and armor). Occasionally the cartel and Texas guard do exchange fire.

You think that if a thousand cartel guys showed up at a nuke plant with the intention of melting it down that armor and airstrikes would help matters? I think that would just help them actually.

Do you think a thousand people will make it that far? Intelligence services will detect and stop them before they reach such a size.

This isn’t something the government hopes doesn’t happen: it’s something they actively work hard at everyday to ensure doesn’t happen.

Re: Two Mexican drug cartels came to dominate America’s fentanyl supply

#39

Post by joe_the_user »

ifsothen wrote: post #8
irthomasthomas wrote: post #5

Quoted post unavailable.

And a lot of that violence spills over the border into the US. Bloody cartel murders, extortion, and such are common in the southwest US and beyond. The Mexican government and politicians are all somewhere in between being controlled by the cartels and too scared to do anything about them. That is casus belli , legal grounds for war, by any reasonable understanding of international law.

And a lot of that violence spills over the border into the US. Bloody cartel murders, extortion, and such are common in the southwest US and beyond.

One might imagine that but one would do well to actually investigate whether it's true.

I visited El Paso, Texas a few years ago. It has one of the lower murder rates for cities of it's size in the US. It's directly across the border from Cuida Juerez, a city with one of the highest murder rates in the Western Hemisphere.

It's actually quite remarkable how contained the horrible violence in Mexico is.

12th lowest here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

Re: Two Mexican drug cartels came to dominate America’s fentanyl supply

#40

Post by lotsofpulp »

MichaelCollins wrote: post #28
teddyh wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the US actually started using its military to hit these guys, what would stop them from sending a thousand guys into a large chemical or nuclear plant and creating a disaster that wiped out a city, or more? I mean, yes, they could , but would they? What would be the realistic result of such an action? Would the US then stop and go “Well, I guess we’ll have to stop antagonizing the cartels.”. I would guess that s…

> I would guess that such a thing would instead be a Pearl Harbor moment, and I think the cartels know this, too. What else might that war teach us? There are 10 million Mexican-Americans by birth in America, and 37 million by ancestry. If America went to war with Mexico, I fear there would be efforts to intern Mexican-Americans as Japanese-Americans once were. Such a war is a horrible idea for everybody. It would cr…

Interning 47M people out of 333M, especially when those 47M represent a large portion of younger, working age people, does not seem like it would go well.
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