Reddit reviews Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel

Le Mexique, c'est le capitalisme sauvage. Je lance mon entreprise multinationale et je suis actionnaire. Je met en place une stratégie marketing et je recrute des financiers pour gérer les investissements. Chaque année je surveille mon bilan et mon compte de résultat. Je recrute aussi des auditeurs pour vérifier les comptes. En cas de concurrence qui fait baisser mes marges, je les élimine.

Lire le fascinant ouvrage Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel.

Même le capitalisme déclaré est particulièrement dégueulasse dans ce pays. Prenons l'exemple de Coca-Cola. Le taux d'obésité est hallucinant dans ce pays. L'entreprise a vidé tout l'eau du pays, fais de la pub dans les écoles, et elle a pris le contrôle du gouvernement Mexicain :

>Mexique : un pays colonisé par « Coca-Cola »

>Le Mexique est le premier pays consommateur de Coca-Cola dans le monde et représente à lui seul plus de 40% des ventes de la marque en Amérique du Sud. Diabète, obésité, hypertension mais aussi assèchement de certaines régions, les conséquences négatives pour le pays sont nombreuses. Julie Delettre, réalisatrice de : « Mexique, sous l’emprise du coca » témoigne de cette implantation, aux airs de « colonisation ».

>Au Chiapas, il y a une réserve aquifère au pied du volcan Huitepec mais l’usine Coca-Cola s’y est installée pour puiser le plus possible, elle est en effet très gourmande : pour 1L de Coca, il faut 6L d’eau. Ils ont reçu l’autorisation de la Commission Nationale de l’Eau pour pomper 500 millions de litres d’eau par an ! Cela assèche les villages alentour, ceux raccordés au réseau n’ont plus rien au robinet et ceux habitués à vivre de l’eau des puits les voient se vider de plus en plus.

https://www.publicsenat.fr/article/societe/mexique-un-pays-colonise-par-coca-cola-75712

C'est juste dramatique. Alors le pays fait face a une crise environnementale et une crise de santé hallucinante et que la population est gravement malade, les membres d'une association ont appelé a une taxation des boissons sucrées pour financer le système de santé. Ils en ont payé le prix. La aussi, le comportement de Coca n'est pas loin de celui des cartels.

Ils ont été attaqués par des logiciels très sophistiqués.

Spyware’s Odd Targets: Backers of Mexico’s Soda Tax

>That same week, Luis Manuel Encarnación, then the director at Fundación Mídete, a foundation in Mexico City that battles obesity, also started receiving strange messages with links. When he clicked, Mr. Encarnación was ominously redirected to Gayosso, Mexico’s largest funeral service.

>The messages Mr. Encarnación received were identical to a series of texts sent to Alejandro Calvillo, a mild-mannered activist and founder of El Poder del Consumidor, yet another Mexico City organization that has been at the forefront of battling childhood obesity in the country.

>What the men had in common was this: All were vocal proponents of Mexico’s 2014 soda tax, the first national soda tax of its kind. It is aimed at reducing consumption of sugary drinks in Mexico, where weight-related diseases kill more people every year than violent crime.

>The links sent to the men were laced with an invasive form of spyware developed by NSO Group, an Israeli cyberarms dealer that sells its digital spy tools exclusively to governments and that has contracts with multiple agencies inside Mexico, according to company emails leaked to The New York Times last year.

>The discovery of NSO’s spyware on the phones of Mexican nutrition policy makers, activists and even government employees, like Dr. Barquera, raises new questions about whether NSO’s tools are being used to advance the soda industry’s commercial interests in Mexico.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/11/technology/hack-mexico-soda-tax-advocates.html?mcubz=3

Le Mexique est ce qui se passe quand le Capital - légal ou illégal - prend le pouvoir sur l'Etat.

La plupart des gens ne le savent pas mais derrière la Syrie c'est désormais le conflit le plus violent au monde.

On a tous vu Breaking Bad, on a tous entendu parler de la grande violence dans ce pays. Sauf que c'est de pire en pire. On a atteint un niveau de crise sans précédent. La situation est totalement hors-de contrôle.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/world/americas/mexico-drug-war-violence-donald-trump-wall.html?mcubz=3

There is a really good book on this (I actually think the author is doing an ama on /r/books soon, maybe today!) called narconomics

Good drug empires ARE a business:
https://www.amazon.com/Narconomics-How-Run-Drug-Cartel/dp/1610395832

The kingpins deal with the same sorts of things as any other business, procurement, logistics, staffing, HR, risk, PR, marketing, etc and its all about supply and demand.

Its a really fascinating insight into the real world of the drug trade & while some of it is straight up how you'd expect it be/hollywood gets right (turf battles. e.g. Finite number of shipping territories and border towns to move product through in Mexico, especially lucrative places to sell, etc) a lot of it get wrong. E.g. they almost never kill someone for losing a shipment, because spillage is just part of the biz and cultivating new people and new clients is tough.

Likewise tattoos at the "street" level are meant to promote loyalty. At the top level they are about limiting staff mobility. If people can jump from your organisation easily to other organisations, they'll do it when the perks or money are better. Sure you could potentially hurt them, but that attracts police and the government which is bad for business. Its much harder to take a "better offer" and go work for a startup or rival cartel when you're covered head to toe in your current employers branding.

tl;dr: Tech unicorns should start getting their employees face tattoos to manipulate the labour market.

Can you please provide your sources for this information?

FactCheck's site digs into this a bit deeper and shows it isn't so cut and dry



> Increased marijuana use also leads to more stupid people. Obviously, marijuana use harms the brain, especially after extended use.

From Drugabuse.gov:

>The ability to draw definitive conclusions about marijuana’s long-term impact on the human brain from past studies is often limited by the fact that study participants use multiple substances, and there is often limited data about the participants’ health or mental functioning prior to the study. Over the next decade, the National Institutes of Health is funding the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study—a major longitudinal study that will track a large sample of young Americans from late childhood (before first use of drugs) to early adulthood. The study will use neuroimaging and other advanced tools to clarify precisely how and to what extent marijuana and other substances, alone and in combination, affect adolescent brain development.


If your point that increased use leads to more stupid people as a result of adolescents using it, then that is already being controlled by imposing an age limit. Now you could argue that underage people can still get it; yes, but they can with alcohol as well.


To provide another viewpoint as well... Keeping it illegal is forcing people to go to shady sources, or into a legal market of questionable chemicals that are getting more and more dangerous (spice and its alternatives). The product quality and consistency is highly varied; you don't know how the material was treated; is there something else on it? Individuals have to take that risk because the government can't regulate the industry.


Furthermore, if you really want to get into the grit of this subject, an interesting book to read is Narconomics. Now, I'm no expert on all of the intricacies surrounding this controversy, but within this book he makes a good point that the risk of consumers dying to the products has gradually decreased (though maybe not for stuff like heroin, can't remember), but that doesn't mean a life is not affected. Despite all these drug busts, seizures, arrests, etc... The prices stay relatively consistent; a result of the loss being shifted onto producers (farmers, etc). So while a consumer can be relatively safe, livelihoods of at-risk individuals in the supply chain can be affected.

It's a detailed look investigation into the way in which drug cartels operate and how they survive and thrive despite the legal measures employed against them. This is a pretty good blurb.

The Zetas basically obliterated their old competition for it. They were originally not their own cartel, but rather the enforcement (read: military) arm of the Gulf Cartel. They split and went independent, as their membership was primarily former Mexican special forces and commandos, with old military connections that allowed them some serious combat hardware.

Basically they sent out envoys all over Mexico, telling local gangs they could turn Zeta-- rep Zeta colors, call in Zeta support if things go bad, etc. all in return for a cut of their profits. The idea was to let criminal operations be run by the people who actually know the locals. And boy did it work. Really, really well.

It just got out of control, especially around 2010 or so when they had what was essentially a civil war.

I'm not 100% up to date on them now, but I can recommend a book by the name of Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel. As the title indicates, it's a study in organized crime from the perspective of an economist. It shows how and why destroying 300 acres of coca plants in Colombia fails to affect the price of cocaine in the US by even a tenth of a cent-- and how law enforcement artificially inflates the value of the product they seize by using retail rather than wholesale price.

I can't recommend it enough. One of my favorite analogies ever came from that book. Imagine the combined force of every first world government on earth was focused on stopping the purchase of million dollar paintings instead of drugs. What they're doing now would be the equivalent of trying to make oil paints more expensive in order to reduce the profits on paintings. It just makes no sense.

This added-value chain is explained in the first chapter of Narconomics.