#DRUGWARS

[its-suanneschafer-author]

My June 2024 books reviewed. The best of these: #DivineMight by #NatalieHaynes, a look at the women in Olympus; #MollyMolloyAndTheAngelOfDeath by #MariaVale, an intriguing look at angels, heaven, and romance; and #ThePoppyField by #CarolineKellems, a genre-breaking women’s fiction/thriller that oozes menace.

[txmskiofficial]

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[propicsmedia]

PROPICS CANADA PRESENTS: TRUE CRIME & JUSTICE WITH James Cousineau Strea...

[renatoferreiradasilva]

The Convergence of Economic Interests and Drug Trafficking: Lessons from Prohibition and the U.S. War on Drugs

The prohibition of drugs in the United States, a policy widely contested for its social and economic consequences, finds historical parallels in the Prohibition era (1920–1933). During Prohibition, the production, distribution, and sale of alcoholic beverages were banned in the U.S. Like today’s drug prohibition, Prohibition was driven by moral and public health arguments but resulted in a parallel economy of illegal activities and an increase in organized crime. This economic history essay aims to draw parallels between Prohibition and current drug policy, highlighting how prohibition simultaneously benefits large corporations, organized crime, and ultimately shapes global geopolitics and economic structures.

1. Prohibition: A Moratorium and the Growth of the Black Market

Prohibition in the United States was enforced by the passage of the 18th Amendment and the creation of the Volstead Act. Its declared purpose was to improve public health, reduce crime, and boost societal morality by eliminating alcohol consumption. However, the economic effect of Prohibition was the opposite of what its proponents envisioned. Far from eradicating alcohol, the ban fostered the creation of a lucrative black market, managed by mafia groups that saw opportunities to enrich themselves through the illegal sale of alcohol.

Entrepreneurs of the illegal market, such as Al Capone, quickly amassed fortunes by exploiting the continuous demand for alcohol, demonstrating that the criminalization of widely demanded products tends to create highly profitable underground markets. The rise of organized crime, the bribery of politicians and law enforcement, and the violence associated with territorial control among gangs were some of the most visible consequences. The black market became an essential part of the parallel economy, moving significant amounts of money and directly influencing politics.

Similarly, the international drug trade that flourished under drug prohibition has replicated many patterns established during Prohibition. Today, drug cartels operate in ways comparable to the organized crime bosses of the 1920s, profiting immensely from prohibition while perpetuating networks of corruption, violence, and political instability.

2. The Dual Benefit: Corporations and Organized Crime

During Prohibition, large corporations were not directly involved in the illegal alcohol trade, but other sectors of the economy benefited from the ban. A notable example was the pharmaceutical industry, which retained exclusive access to alcohol for medicinal purposes. Medicinal alcohol, legalized under medical supervision, was widely sold in pharmacies and distributed by doctors who prescribed "alcohol treatments" for a range of ailments.

Thus, the pharmaceutical industry found a way to profit from Prohibition by controlling access to a still-demanded substance that was now heavily regulated. The monopoly these companies held on medicinal alcohol offered them a chance to profit through exclusivity at a time when recreational alcohol consumption was outlawed.

This model is clearly reflected in today’s drug policy. The prohibition of recreational drugs, such as cannabis or even cocaine derivatives, provides large pharmaceutical corporations with a monopoly over controlled substances that might otherwise be produced more cheaply and widely. Through patents and stringent regulatory processes, these companies dominate the market for legal treatments for pain, anxiety, and other conditions, often utilizing opioid derivatives and anxiolytics that are sometimes more dangerous and addictive than the recreational drugs targeted by legislation.

This convergence of interests—between corporations that benefit from prohibition and criminal organizations that profit from the black market—creates a complex economic structure resistant to reform, as both sides have economic incentives to maintain the status quo.

3. Drug Trafficking and the Control of the Drug Market

In the absence of government regulation and competition in a legal market, international drug trafficking emerged as the primary supplier of recreational drugs to the United States and other global markets. Prohibition creates artificial barriers that drive up the prices of these substances, generating disproportionately high profit margins for those who control supply.

In the case of cocaine trafficking, for instance, growing coca in Latin American countries such as Colombia and Peru is extremely inexpensive. However, prohibition and the risks associated with international trafficking inflate the price of cocaine in consumer markets like the U.S. and Europe. Just like the crime bosses during Prohibition, drug cartel leaders have become powerful figures, controlling territories and wielding influence over local politicians and law enforcement.

The economic model of drug trafficking is, therefore, similar to that of organized crime during Prohibition, with a lucrative parallel economy based on illegality. Violence and territorial control are essential to securing market access and ensuring the continuity of illegal operations. Moreover, just like in the 1920s, political corruption and the complicity of local authorities are key elements that facilitate the persistence of these activities.

4. Trump, Drug Prohibition, and Economic Interests

Amidst this scenario, Donald Trump’s position against the legalization of drugs is a clear example of how the prohibition economy benefits both large corporations and criminal organizations. Although Trump has adopted tough rhetoric on combating drug trafficking and illegal drugs, his resistance to legalization or decriminalization policies reflects deeper economic interests.

On the one hand, Trump’s stance protects the profits of large pharmaceutical corporations, which rely on the exclusivity of controlled substances. The legalization of drugs like cannabis could threaten these profits by opening the market to new competitors who might provide natural, more affordable alternatives. On the other hand, by keeping the black market intact, his "law and order" policy ensures that drug trafficking profits remain high, much like the profits of organized crime during Prohibition.

The economic logic behind these policies suggests a "double game" in which the interests of different groups are protected at the expense of a more effective and socially beneficial solution. Drug law reform, focusing on legalization and regulation, has the potential to drastically reduce drug-related violence, dismantle corruption networks, and open the market to new businesses that could provide safer and more affordable alternatives for consumers.

Conclusion

Prohibition and the current drug ban share many similarities in terms of their economic and social consequences. Both periods witnessed the rise of lucrative black markets, the strengthening of organized crime, and the protection of large corporate interests that control legal markets. Prohibition, in both cases, creates artificial barriers that benefit those who hold monopolies over controlled substances, whether in the pharmaceutical industry or in drug trafficking.

Donald Trump’s stance against drug legalization, far from being a mere reflection of moral or public health concerns, can be seen as a manifestation of broader economic interests. Both large corporations and international drug traffickers benefit from maintaining prohibition, creating a vicious cycle that resists reform and perpetuates a system of violence, corruption, and inequality.

The economic history of Prohibition offers valuable lessons for today’s debate on drug legalization. Just as the repeal of Prohibition reduced the power of organized crime and created a regulated market for alcohol, drug policy reform has the potential to weaken drug cartels and create a legal market that benefits society as a whole.

[lg5]

Instead of treatment & housing, Gavin Newsom is sending in the CHP & National Guard? If we know anything, it's that extreme over policing solves the drug war and has no negative consequences. London Breed and Brooke Jenkins will really appreciate Newsom making their failures his to own.

[crimemore]

Three Philippine police officers who went into hiding after being implicated in the 2020 killing of a Spanish surfer during former President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war have voluntarily surrendered, the justice department said Wednesday.P

[bixonlaw]

So there have been some recent policy changes to marijuana by the feds. It appears as though the DEA is going to push for marijuana to be reclassified as a schedule 3 from a schedule 1 drug.

On the upside, any shift towards legalization is a good thing. This policy definitely reflects that. On the downside, it doesn't really change much.

This policy is really going to affect federal law. The reality is that the feds have not really been aggressively prosecuting marijuana cases. On the other hand, they are still happy to investigate and arrest individuals, they just let the State prosecute them.

This brings us to the bigger problem. This policy does nothing to affect how the states classify marijuana. My guess is that we will see a few more states move to full legalization before the feds remove it as a controlled substance altogether.

#marijuana #law #bixonlaw #criminaljustice #drugwar #criminallaw #atlanta #lawyer

[propalahramota]

Stay tuned for my new YA adventure "Eagle and Stars". It tells a story of a young girl called R'eagan Drugwar.

Am I the only one here who is so damn angry about the fact that a large portion of the Slavic representation on the Western media is either Russian, Russian-coded (e.g. the Grisha Universe by Leigh Bardugo) or copies the narratives about other Slavic nations that exist in the Russian discourse about them?

[hattersgonnahats]

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[blazehedgehog]

How did you learn to code?

I ramble for a while, so rather than have people scroll past a novel on their Tumblr dash, I’m hiding the full story behind a “Read More” tag.

The short answer is: I taught myself.

I took some computer science stuff toward the end of middle school where I learned TURTLE or whatever it was called, on the old Mac II’s they had. Then, I can’t remember if a computer science class in my Freshman year did some light programming or if I actually saw another kid doing it (making basically a “Hello World” equivalent) in BASIC, but I understood the rough idea of what was going on there.

From there, my Mom had taken a computer correspondence course back in 1988 or so -- she wanted to become a legal secretary. She got a computer and a bunch of software with it, this big Hyundai PC. No hard disk, not even support for color graphics. But it came with GWBASIC. Around high school I ended up getting a 33mhz Windows 3.11 machine (the first computer that was purely my own) with QBASIC, so I used my Mom’s GWBASIC manuals to goof around in QBASIC, since they were so similar. the first program I tried to write was a Pokedex, but I got stuck trying to figure out how to get it to draw graphics. Displaying text was easy, displaying simple geometric shapes (circles, etc.) was easy, but I wanted to have it draw, like, PokeBalls and stuff, but couldn’t figure it out.

High school meant we had to get graphing calculators, usually of the Texas Instruments variety, many of which come with their own programming language called TIBASIC. Most of my friends had TI-83s, I had a TI-82. So most of their games wouldn’t work on my calculator because the software was incompatible. With what I knew of GWBASIC and QBASIC, I ended up figuring out enough TIBASIC to start making simple text adventures. I called them “MovieGames” and usually it was a choose-your-own-adventure short story based on whatever I was thinking about at the time; Men in Black, Jurassic Park, Independence Day, etc. So you’d get a scene, like

A dinosaur is chasing you! Where do you go?

> Jungle> Plain

Perhaps for teachers doing tests, TIBASIC actually had a whole system built in for these kinds of multiple choice questions, so it was really as simple as making it print text, bringing up a multiple choice, and then branching the story from there. I did 4 or 5 of those.

Finally, I found another kid who had a TI-82, and had games he could share with me over the link cable, so I ended up with INDY500 and DRUGWARS. Both were my first real experiences with game logic. DRUGWARS (sometimes known as “Dope Wars”) was mostly a text-based game, and probably one of the most famous games out there, given how it’s been ported to everything under the sun. It even formed the basis of the drug minigame in GTA Chinatown Wars. The idea is that you buy drugs from one place, resell them at another, and make money by traveling around dealing to the right people and dodging the police.

The second game, INDY500, was a “real” game. It had scrolling and very basic graphics -- it used ASCII text to represent cars on a race track. So you’d drive down the course, going from left to right, avoiding cars down a straightaway as things got faster, and faster, and faster, trying to go as far as you could. Simple stuff, but a TI-82 didn’t have a lot to work with.

The TI-82 came with a massive instruction manual, most of which was a very detailed glossary for all of the TIBASIC programming functions. So basically, what I ended up doing with these two games, is go through them, line by line, looking up every single function in the instruction manual’s glossary. I’d mess with their parameters, see what they did, and basically ended up deconstructing both games and putting them back together again -- that was literally the case with INDY500, where once I understood how the game worked, I essentially re-wrote the entire game from scratch by memory.

With DRUGWARS, I ended up taking what I learned about the multiple choice selector in my “MovieGames” and turned it in to a sprawling text-based RPG based on Final Fantasy. It had a very basic story (loosely based on Final Fantasy VII), you could travel between towns, you’d get in to random battles while traveling, level up, learn spells, fight bosses, and even equip Materia for summons. It was so big and complex, if you played it for too long, the TI-82 would actually crash with an “OUT OF MEMORY” error because I’d used up all the system RAM -- with a text adventure.

At that point, I hit kind of a crossroads. I started making a real, actual, complex game on the TI-82 -- a side scrolling shooter that was based on Star Fox, but held more in common with Gradius. The TI-82 had a “graphing” mode that let you use a smaller font so if you were using ASCII graphics, you could fit more on screen, and using per-pixel precision (as opposed to per-row precision). Around this time, I also discovered Corel Click & Create, aka The Games Factory, aka Multimedia Fusion, aka Clickteam Fusion.

The problem with coding on a TI-82 is this was before the days of rechargeable batteries being in everything, so if the two AA’s inside the thing went dead, you lost all of your programs and everything else on it. Even just changing batteries, if you weren’t fast enough, the memory would eventually be erased. Three or four times over the course of a year or two, I lost everything I’d written on my TI-82, and by that point, I was learning enough about Click & Create that the TI-82 was looking less appealing by the day. CnC was simply more flexible, and faster to work with, and I had access to full-color graphics.

So I almost exclusively switched over to Click & Create from then on.

I did still keep up with programming a little bit here and there; I taught myself mIRC scripting, which at one point, I used to make an IRC-based MUD. That was, and maybe still is, the most complex thing I’ve ever programmed, and couldn’t even really be run because it’d spit out so much text it’d trip the flood protection on most servers.

Something else I started coding with mIRC scripting was a chat bot. For some reason I got it in my head that it’d be funny to prank my friends by writing a bot to detect when I’d been AFK and chat for me like I was still at the keyboard (I was a weird highschooler.) It started by spitting out pre-programmed messages, sort of like Eliza, but eventually I started to think about what would happen if I could record text from the chat, break it down in to individual parts, and then reassemble it back in to a coherent sentence. As it turns out, I had, completely by accident, stumbled upon the concept of a Markov Chain. (For the record, I also had never heard of Eliza, either).

So let’s say you’d submit a message to the chat that was like “Hello, everyone! How are you doing today?”

My mIRC script would break that down in to a bunch of separate pieces:

“Hello, everyone! How”“How are you”“you doing today?”“today?”

The script would take the last word of any given piece and try to match it to the first word of any other piece. In theory, this would correctly reassemble the sentence “Hello, everyone! How are you doing today?” -- but what it actually ended up doing was creating hilarious nonsense like

“Hello, everyone! How is it possible to be like Turtles in Time!”

The code was simple enough that many years later, I figured I could use this chat bot (which I called Gilliam, after the robot in Outlaw Star) and port it over to C++. Friends had been telling me for weeks how easy it was to make games in C++ using Allegro, so I figured it’d be a good way to get back in to “real” programming and get away from Click & Create.

Unfortunately, even just getting text to render in Allegro proved to be massively difficult for me as any given sentence longer than a certain length would cause huge memory overflow errors. I banged my head against it for a week, got nowhere, and eventually got so depressed and frustrated at my inability to grasp C++ and Allegro as easily as I did BASIC that I deleted the whole thing and have never touched “real” coding ever again. I’ve stuck to Clickteam Fusion almost exclusively, because it’s what I’m good at.

[kijikmultimedia]

Up now on our @ScreenHeatMiami podcast is producer, filmmaker and entrepreneur @alejoper, producer of the hit “Drug Wars,” series one of the biggest for Fusion TV, “Paraiso Travel,” and PMI-Americas, along with all the latest Industry buzz with our co-hosts @kijikmultimedia & @jlmartinez17! Check it at ScreenHeatMiami.com #ScreenHeatMiami #TV #DrugWars #Podcasts #fintech https://www.instagram.com/p/B9PKL9WAfyt/?igshid=11rgfyqslfrgf