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Name ten liberal democracies in Africa!
Seriously, just because the US and Canada sabotaged their rail infrastructure and refuse to deal with their drug problems, it doesn't mean that it's impossible to do those things. You really can just send the drug addicted violent layabouts to prison, or shoot them if you want to be cheap. The US is supposedly a global superpower, supposedly capable of simultaneously suppressing China and Russia. If your country can't control its own core urban heartlands and protect taxpaying citizens from idiotic, barely organized drug addicts, how can you show your faces on the world stage, what do you have to offer in terms of moral leadership or strength?
Russia has excuses for its massive drug problem. Outside Moscow, the country is fairly poor. Russia has the world's longest land borders, so it's hard to police. They're right next to Central Asia where the drugs are produced. State capacity is fairly low, there's a great deal of corruption. The effects of the disaster in the 1990s are still being felt.
What excuse does the US have? The US is rich and fairly stable. Their borders are small and easily policeable. They had decades of complete freedom of action on the world stage to invade countries and wage undeclared wars as they see fit. They completely squandered every advantage. For example, the US military occupied the world's biggest opiate producer and opiate production doubled under their shambolic rule!
US drug policy is so catastrophically bad, it's unbelievable. They declare a 'war on drugs', do nothing correctly and assist the enemy in Afghanistan (or fail so abjectly and laughably that they might as well be working with the poppy merchants). All the US needs to do is switch tracks from 'wreck their own country and the rest of the world with insanely bad policy' to 'improve the situation'.
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Maybe this is the exact strategy? I'm reminded of something written around the time of the Civil Rights Movement of the 50's/60's, how poor Whites were supposedly made to feel as though they were still above the Black man despite their crushing poverty. Perhaps a hypothetical Based-American-Exceptionlism-Yes-Chad would indeed say that even the richest Chinese or Russian oligarch is worth less than even the most pathetic American drug addict who has one foot in the grave.
But uh, to get away from the crazy ideas for a bit: maybe drug enforcement is just legitimately harder than we realize/appreciate. Sure, you can just jail or shoot any addicts and dealers you can get your hands on, but that's an ongoing effort and cost. Stopping things at the source would be more effective, but you're fighting a full-on cold war at that point, as the enemy will be an organized and motivated force that can employ subterfuge and guerrilla tactics to stay out of your reach. It took the mobilization of an elite military unit to finally bring down Pablo Escobar back in the 80's/90's.
Well at least Russian and Chinese oligarchs are made to disappear by their superiors in the security forces, that's normal and reasonable. US oligarchs get murdered by randoms on the street! Just today Bob Lee got stabbed to death on the streets of San Francisco - the guy made a product worth $40 billion, Cash App. Anyway, my point is that while it would be impressive if drug addicts in the US are treated better than Chinese oligarchs, it's actually that drug addicts are privileged above the American middle and upper class!
The Taliban seemed to do a good job of it in 2000-2001 and they have roughly a thousandth of the resources the US can wield. Is there some secret knowledge hidden in the Koran that gives +10,000% to reducing drug production? Or is the US just very incompetent? I've always maintained that if drug-addled idiots can find a dealer, professionalized, organized bureaucracies can as well. Furthermore, there are open-air drug markets in many US cities, they're clearly not trying to shut down the drug trade.
As for getting rid of drugs at the source - organize military coups and get the locals to do all the work. Back in the Cold War the US faced a far stronger opponent than a few drug cartels, with a much more powerful ideology. The US didn't want to get bogged down in every third-world country, so they arranged for anti-communist coups. They provided arms, funds, legitimacy and training to generals in Indonesia: Sukarno the communist sympathizer went out and Suharto the military dictator was in. 500,000 to a million dead in the purges but it was all Indonesians killing eachother. This is a much better solution than fighting directly. The US propped up dictators in the Phillipines, launched coups all across South America. Just use the media to whitewash everything and decry any dissent as fake news. The US somehow managed to sweep the rampant pedophilia and grotesque corruption in the Afghan army under the rug for decades.
Coups are cheap and easy, wars are hard and expensive. Wars only need to be fought against strong opponents with great power backers (Vietnam had the Soviets and China behind them). But there is no great power backing drugs and no great power capable of intervening in Central or South America.
The same thing could be done today. If Mexico or whatever country isn't sufficiently anti-drug, then it's time for regime change. Find a puppet leader, one who'll be totally reliant on the US for funding and legitimacy and rule through him. Rig the elections, launch coups and then accuse the other side of rigging elections and launching coups. Then have the puppet use their own troops to suppress the drug trade. They take on all the costs and complaints and death toll, while their leaders are paid off by the US.
Bukele is basically doing this right now but he's an enemy of the US, the US has been (ineffectually) trying to suppress and undermine him! The real problem is that the US on the wrong side, they are choosing not to tackle the problem.
Was that really random? He was involved in crypto and the government has clearly been making moves against crypto lately. SFs street crime provides plausible deniability.
This is an extreme claim. I don't think the USGov needs to resort to murder and black-bag tactics to torpedo crypto. Hell, it does that on its own anyways (see the claim that Musk changed Twitter's icon to the Doge meme to cover up him being potentially on the hook for over 200B in a lawsuit over him hawking Dogecoin).
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