![]() Related Reading: For a look on the opposite side of this article, check out Cracked's investigation into the real facts of life as a street-level drug dealer. It's filled with guides to recreating ancient drug-fueled debauchery! Robert Evans's first book A Brief History of Vice is available for pre-order now. As long as people like doing drugs, these guys aren't going anywhere. ![]() Your lone action hero isn't going to make much of a dent, no matter how much he refuses to play by the rules. These organizations are formidable enough that entire countries have failed to take them down. So, yeah, the next time you see a movie about a renegade cop going off on his own to take down the cartels single-handedly, Punisher style, keep that in mind. Maybe that sounds crazy, but they do have a multimillion-dollar radio network that stretches across three nations and seems almost impervious to disruption. Rumor has it that the cartels paid a former spec ops communications expert to set it up. It's incredibly high-tech - they use constantly evolving encryption and a repeater network with little stations stuck on top of mountains across the U.S. The cartels also have a radio network that crosses Mexico and the United States in a truly awe-inspiring feat of guerrilla engineering. From the cartels' perspective, it's worth it to shotgun cheap drugs like pot out onto the streets because it costs them almost nothing and they don't take on any risk. For example, marijuana is cheap to produce, so if you walked into a bar in Mexico and lied about your smuggling skills, a cartel might just front you a thousand pounds of weed to see if you live up to your own hype (and that is a shitload of weed). And unlike the drug barons you see in movies, actual cartels know that loss is a part of the game, and that drugs are the one thing they will literally never run out of. They're closer to being their own countries than gangs. The cartels are very sophisticated, especially in Mexico. John Moore/Getty Images News/Getty Images That's like finding a Polaroid of one of your co-workers in a serial killer's lunchbox. Deas was caught when a hit man in Mexico was busted with a picture of an informant that had come from one of our files. This woman had direct access to confidential informant files - people whose lives depended on keeping their identities secret. If we started using a new program to catalog our investigations, she'd quickly become an expert in it and gain admin status, and so on. You can learn the whole story here, but the short version is that she was a model worker who constantly volunteered to take on more tasks and thus gained more access to sensitive information. Most of us didn't know anything was wrong until the FBI came to the office to seize her computer, and that shit is terrifying. She was assigned to work with the Border Patrol, and she spent years feeding drug cartels information about our operations and our informants. "Hello, I would like to apply for the Good Guys America #1 team, please." What do you think would happen if that revenue stream suddenly dried up? Would all drug-related violence in Mexico come to a complete stop, or would the cartels start fighting for control of the entire country? These people aren't going to shrug it off and get day jobs - it would be like the last scene of Scarface, only spread across all of Mexico. According to the DEA, as much as $10 billion of that is shipped across the Arizona/Mexico border alone. It's estimated that legalization in Colorado and Washington will cut around $3 billion from annual cartel profits, so in a very real way, legal dispensaries are a powerful weapon against the cartels.īut before you start talking about legalizing everything, keep this in mind: The cartels are currently on the receiving end of up to $30 billion in annual drug sales to the United States. This is where many of you immediately start talking about legalization, and it's true that, as we've learned from states where marijuana has already been decriminalized, consumers prefer to buy their drugs from people who aren't psychopathic murderers.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |