Drug trafficking has little to do with the border issue, since you cannot really do anything about it when you have thousands of miles of border to secure. The issue here is how much corruption exists in the US and how little it does against the really big criminals who control traffic.
The justice system concentrates only on putting small vendors behind bars (usually black people), but they're not the ones making real profits. I guarantee you don't know any big drug traffickers operating inside the US that were sent to jail. When you hear about big bosses it is always some guy outside the US, but the ones operating inside the country are all protected in one way or another. They're all laughing and buying mansions all over the country. This corruption is what the US should be concentrating on if they want to stop drug trafficking.
I don't see corruption, I see supply & demand and "enterprising" people.
The war on drugs has shown that focussing on the supply side has done little to solve the problem. There will be new ways to smuggle or new drugs to catch in the drag net while the demand remains.
The question then is, why is the demand for drugs so high?
>The question then is, why is the demand for drugs so high?
Because they (at least opioids) make people feel great. Better than sex, better than achieving a lifelong goal, better than a lot of things. The second half of the story is after 5 or so years, the effect isn't nearly as strong. After 10 years you don't get the high, you just don't feel like shit. That along with a likely police record, takes people completely out of society.
I remember the crack epidemic in the 80s, and it was pretty much over by the late 1990s. I've heard it's because people saw what crack did to other people and didn't want that to happen to them. That's honest marketing.
Nothing wrong with some honest marketing about what drugs really are. Nothing like DARE, just make some good, honest commercials and play them. Drugs are great to start with, but this is what will happen. You think it won't happen to you, but it probably will.
This doesn't get at why people decide to do drugs. You have to know, talk to, and hear the pains that addicts are running from to understand the drug problem.
They aren't doing it to feel good, they are doing it to escape what they feel all the time.
>They aren't doing it to feel good, they are doing it to escape what they feel all the time.
There's lots of reasons, boredom, a friend talks you into it, a doctor prescribes pain meds, getting drunk at a party and trying it, take a little mental vacation from the stress of life, and as you mentioned, despair. Lots of people with good lives get hooked on them as well.
Thousands of miles of border isn’t actually the issue here. How many people are crossing the Korean DMZ each year without South Korea noticing?
Adjusted for population size and it’s roughly half the length of the US/Mexico land border and it’s designed for military incursion via tanks not just people in a pickup truck.
Similarly the amount of money spent on inspecting imports is well under 1% of the total value of said imports. It’s possible to inspect literally every package crossing the border, we just don’t want to.
There is no commerce crossing the DMZ. There are no tourists crossing the DMZ. Hundreds of millions of people cross the southern US border every year. You cannot compare these two borders in any realistic way.
They do have cross broader trade and movement of people. I think SK is NK’s 4th largest trading partner right now, but there’s also some movement of people.
But that stuff is independent of length which is why I mentioned trade separately.
I do not think it makes sense to scale national borders based on population size. It is what it is, you can choose to invest resources on the entire length, but there is no mathematical averaging out.
For anyone else that was curious, the Korean DMZ is 150 miles long. US Mexico border is 1950.
Again, not the same due to the very low amount of goods that have to be smuggled. I'm aware of the rules of thumb for frontline warfare, those are intended for sizeable or sustained troop movements.
For something like fentanyl where a single success is enough for a single trafficker over a long time, the fact that sections are 100% independent is exactly why scaling is exponential - only one section has to fail for the goal to be achieved.
My model is pretty simple, just like yours we cut up the borders into segments. Certain of these segments will have higher or lower probabilities of interception for various reasons, and drug traffickers are able to estimate this probability somehow. Only one of these segments needs to be vulnerable for the traffickers to succeed, and they will assess essentially the whole length of the border. It's then clearly exponentially more likely for the traffickers to succeed as the border is longer, as the likelihood for at least one segment with acceptable probability increases exponentially with the number of segments.
If you assume that drug traffickers can't estimate the likelihood of success or that every part of the border is consistently just as secure at every point in time as any other then you'd be right, but those aren't reasonable assumptions in my opinion.
You just commented a minor logically fallacy here.
People are unwilling to accept infinite risk and the question of if a segment of broader is secure depends on the risk of crossing that segment.
They might have better targets, but if a given segment isn’t secure that’s an inherent issue even if people happen to choose somewhere else.
In the other direction, if some segment is effectively impossible to cross that’s irrelevant. You don’t need other segments to reach an arbitrarily high standard just high enough to either get people to give up on the idea or fail often enough you’re dealing with the issue. IE one guy with a backpack per decade isn’t failure.
> People are unwilling to accept infinite risk and the question of if a segment of broader is secure depends on the risk of crossing that segment.
People are, in practice, given a commensurate reward, willing to accept arbitrarily high risk, and market dynamics are willing to provide the rewards in this case.
>I guarantee you don't know any big drug traffickers operating inside the US that were sent to jail.
Feel like putting forward a source for that claim, or did you simply decide it's true because you think it sounds true?
Just to name a few examples: The Flores brothers, Frank Lucas, the five families of NYC, George Jung. All of these were heavily prosecuted and if they weren't major drug traffickers in the U.S, then no one is.
The justice system concentrates only on putting small vendors behind bars (usually black people), but they're not the ones making real profits. I guarantee you don't know any big drug traffickers operating inside the US that were sent to jail. When you hear about big bosses it is always some guy outside the US, but the ones operating inside the country are all protected in one way or another. They're all laughing and buying mansions all over the country. This corruption is what the US should be concentrating on if they want to stop drug trafficking.