War on Drugs

How making drugs - and anything else - illegal produces violence.

"Illegal markets are doubly and probably triply affected by theft pressures. First of all, they are affected by normal theft that tries to find its way into all industry. Secondly, they are affected by a reduced ability to track who the thieves are versus the real market actors, since state pressures make market participants anonymize themselves. This increases the efficacy of normal theft pressures. Then, finally, there is the government sponsored theft. The government wants to deprive the "illegal" industry of its inventory, profits, infrastructure, and capital for reinvestment. These three theft pressures cause a turn in the industry towards a concern for security. Security expenditures increase, even though entrepreneurs would prefer that they didn’t. Sometimes the pressures are slight and the security expenditures are small. Sometimes the pressures are immense and the security expenditures are large. "

And all this security attracts people who believe the ends justifies the means, just like with government, creating more violence on both sides.

"Prior to alcohol prohibition, consumers preferred the lower alcohol content in such products as beer and wine. During and after alcohol prohibition, which encouraged concentration for concealment purposes, consumer preferences shifted towards more concentrated products which had become standard fare during prohibition. Whiskey and white lightning moonshine came into common usage along with other more potent products like gin and vodka. If an alcohol importer was going to incur the risk of bringing a truck across the border from Canada into the U.S., the importer could get more of the valuable commodity imported for his buck if the product was nearer to 100 percent alcohol than 6 percent or 12 percent. "

That's another danger created by government.

"This brings us to a seldom seen grand use of force against illegal markets that appears to be exclusively in the realm of U.S. funding and influence. The enforcers may bring to bear military style mechanized warfare against the market using such things as military equipped troops using explosives, belt-fed machine guns, mortars, and helicopter mounted gatling guns to conduct search and destroy missions. Wholesale death and destruction against the market may be rained down from the skies and sprayed across the land by air, ground, and naval forces. Producers may have entire crops taken from them via eradication by chemical spraying, mechanical cutting, and burning. Sometimes, as has happened in Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Mexico, Thailand, and Afghanistan, the militarized government anti-drug operations, which exert a theft pressure on the industry, become so huge that they produce a similar large security response by the illegal enterprise. Market prices go up causing more entrepreneurs with lower visibility and lower security expense to enter the market to reap the higher profits which brings prices back down. This befuddles the government which sees many new market participants after a particularly bloody series of scorched-earth raids which were supposed to send shockwaves of fear through the illegal market, discouraging participants. Taking merchandise from the market and removing people from the market by killing or imprisoning them, if it does anything, only makes prices go up temporarily which encourages the entrance of more participants in the market to reap the rewards."

"The other never chosen option would be for participants to abandon the market in a wholesale fashion, due to fear caused by state terror, with no further involvement by any participants. As long as demand exists, potential profits would escalate if supply is reduced by any participants choosing to exit. The remaining participants, and new participants, would be willing to continue to develop methods to keep merchandise flowing around and past thieving influences due to the huge profits to be made. "

I think everybody in government understands this. They just pretend they don't.

"Market responses continually apply themselves to mitigate force, i.e. thievery, and to move towards peaceful trade where low prices and good quality allow producers to preserve and increase market share. The government’s participation aggravates against this and pushes the participants toward security actions. In cases where illegality is not enforced, as is the case in many third world open air markets where no one pays taxes or obtains state licenses for their activities, quality improves and prices diminish. This is due to the ability of individual producers and vendors to identify themselves and to associate themselves with a solid reputation due to their continued presence in the market. In this case, the government has given up on enforcing regulations and prohibitions that remain on the books. Widespread peaceful economically viable trade ensues. The activity may remain illegal officially but, the lack of enforcement effort reduces security expenditures in the industry and allows market participants to come out of the shadows and to serve the public with a closer connection between the entrepreneurs and their reputations. This can occur even in the United States when large ethnic districts develop that have customs and language barriers that the regime does not want to deal with. The lack of enforcement in these markets can cause a great increase in product quality and value for the money. This is due to a diminished need to pay layers of parasites in the government or to focus on security expenditures to dodge the thieving actions of the state. "

This article explains more about the market than just the war on drugs.

"The government routinely proclaims that monopolies, cartels, and cartel heads exist in industry or a sector of an industry even though these are inventions by the government to justify enhanced use of force. In the case of the drug war, it is the crisis within the crisis that the government wants us to swallow. It is the presumed nexus of truth that is, in actuality, total fiction. The assertion of private monopoly tendencies within the illegal industry is one of the deceitful elements of a grand fabricated crisis invented by the court intellectuals that justifies the use of state force against the kingpin target within an illegal industry that everyone can love to hate. If you pull this "kingpin" piece out of the complicated machinery, the whole machine will shut down and fall apart. Yes, without Pablo Escobar and the Medellin cartel, the Colombian cocaine trade was supposed to stop or be severely hampered. Without Osiel Cardenas, the Gulf Cartel was supposed to die and drug trafficking stop in eastern Mexico. Links to the du jour cartel become the reporting mandate within federal law enforcement and funds are not appropriated for investigations if they don’t create a link to a cartel. These links are sent up to Washington where they are consolidated and forwarded to Congress to show how a dastardly violent cartel is dominating the drug trade in a certain broad geographic area. Whole sectors of federal law enforcement are told to link all drug seizures to the appropriate geographic cartel so that funds can be procured. The links are made easily via a box checked on the report. The current federal drug enforcement notion being sold to Congress is that the drugs cannot be stopped except by chopping off the head that controls everything. This worn out theory has been used over and over. It never turns out to be true but, it is still accepted by Congress as a reason for more funding. "

The centralized government wants to fight a centralized enemy, that's what the people in government understand, so it promotes that fiction, the myth of the kingpin.

"The government can’t possibly eliminate an entire sector of the economy that is desired by the public, so it focuses on a few individuals and invents a concept that promises to declare future victory in the drug war when those individuals are captured, killed, or driven into hiding. Government paid informants, witnesses, agent provocateurs, and line agents are instructed to attribute all drug activity to them. Paid informants learn what government interviewers want to hear. When asked if a seized load of drugs pertains to the John Doe cartel, the informants initially respond that they have no idea who John Doe is. But, after a while, they realize that the government interviewers all try to attribute drug loads to John Doe and that they will be paid more money more often if they finagle explanations about how individual loads are or could be tangentially related to the John Doe cartel. The cartel connections become such vague things as the route used, the ethnicity of an arrested smuggler, or the modus operandi, e.g. "he used a tractor trailer through the Brownsville Port of Entry which is the preferred technique of John Doe’s cartel." The cartel names become very prominent because of mandated linkages in government reporting. Soon, every witness learns that the infamous Kingpin John Doe is the donkey that the tail should be pinned on. "

"Of course, you need an organization before you can designate an evil monster "leader" for targeting and prosecution purposes. Al Qaeda was a fictional invention of the FBI created for sentencing purposes since an organization was needed so that "leaders" could be designated for enhanced sentencing purposes. Federal law enforcement hierarchy and Assistant U.S. Attorneys pressure federal agents to come up with organization names when a new case is opened. There is pressure to designate all new cases with special federal organized crime labels such as "Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force" (OCDETF) category cases or "Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization" (RICO) category cases. Meetings are had with the U.S. Attorneys Office kicking around possible organization names. How about the "Westside Boys?" No, wait a minute, the "Westside Connection" sounds better; more like The French Connection. Yeah, let’s go with that. "

That's how they promote the fiction.

"These criminal "organization" cases get a lot more funding. The case agents and prosecutors can receive significant funds from special congressional pots of money if their cases are designated as such. They use the money to pay overtime, travel, fund communications intercepts, and purchase new gadgets like Ipads and spy gear. Most proactive cases are put in the pipeline to receive organized crime designations for funding and sentencing purposes. These designations require an operation name against such-and-such organization. Organizations are drawn up such as Al Qaida, the Cali Cartel, the Medellin Cartel, the Sinaloa Cartel, and the Gulf Cartel. "Kingpins" like Pablo Escobar, Chapo Guzman, the Rodriguez-Orejuela brothers, and Osama Bin Laden are targeted along with associates who are also designated as "kingpins" or "leaders."
The New York Mafia’s "Five Families" that supposedly "controlled most organized crime" in the entire U.S. is another example of this fiction. It fit the FBI’s desire to gain funding for themselves and enhanced sentences for "leaders" under RICO and other statutes but, the claimed scope of criminal influence of the families was laughable. The super exaggerated mafia concept allowed federal agencies to get enhanced funding by creating a crisis that needed to be dealt with by new specially focused law enforcement sections. After all, how could you do telephone intercepts on Martin Luther King, Jr. "looking for mob connections" if you didn’t have mafia organized crime funding to pay for them."

They also get higher profile coverage for promotions. Organization names and leaders make it easier to push propaganda in the press. As always, the motive is personal interest.