The nation building challenge for any country trying to do it is that when the dictator is removed the void is filled by others who may be more violent.
That same theory seems to apply to the removal of drug kingpins. Alexis Garcia at Reason.com asks this question: Will El Chapo’s Arrest Make the Drug Trade More Deadly? Excerpt:
The U.S. and Mexican governments have declared Guzmán's capture a major win in the drug war. Harvard economics professor Jeffrey Miron thinks his story better demonstrates the folly of prohibition.
"When we interfere on the supply side with the drug trade by taking out kingpins and other ways, we tend to lower the prices partially because we're making the market more competitive," says Miron, who's also the head of economic studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. "Where there's demand, there's going to be supply."
The capture of kingpins doesn't just tend to make cartels more competitive in the marketplace. It can also increase violence as rival factions battle to fill the power vacuum.
A 2015 research brief conducted by Miron and his Cato colleagues Jason Lindo and Maria Padilla-Romo shows that capturing a leading drug trafficker "in a municipality increases its homicide rate by 80 percent" over a 12-month period. In neighboring municipalities, the homicide rate rises 30 percent in the six-month period after a kingpin's capture.
Here's a link to the Cato report: Kingpin Approaches to Fighting Crime and Community Violence: Evidence from Mexico’s Drug War.
Prohibition didn't work in the war on alcohol and doesn't seem to yield an ideal outcome in the war on drugs.
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1:06 PM 4/21/2018
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