Reducing wars caused by crime, especially drug crime

This post continues the series of posts looking at the causes of wars across the world. 

Today we are looking at wars caused by crime. In order of magnitude we have :

    Mexican Drug War (since 2006, deaths 127-400K)

    Favelas of Rio de Janiero (since 2006, deaths 14,000)

    Haiti (since 2020, deaths 5,000)

    Columbia (since 1964, deaths 4.5K)

Taken as a whole, these wars centred around criminal gangs are a bewildering maze of violence, murder, control, money, drugs, power, poverty and politics. They represent partially failed states, where normal life finds its limit in no-go areas dominated by gangs. These no go areas are usually deeply impoverished, where belonging to a gang is the most promising career on offer to a young man. In Rio, repressive policing has only reinforced this tendency.

In some ways, there is an overlap between these gangs and the wars centred on militias, and so one approach to damping criminal violence down would be to focus on identifying the transport and caches of ammunition, using sniffer dogs, protected by competent groups of soldiery, to detect inward consignments of ammunition.

Illicit drugs are often the feedstuffs for the trade of these criminal gangs. There is a strong case to be made for the decriminalisation of drugs, so as to convert cannabis to being a normal, if closely regulated, item of merchandise, with more addictive drugs such as cocaine and opiates being bought up by state authorities and medicalised. There is a massive need for morphine in Africa, where there is a presumption against its use in controlling pain, with the result that millions of Africans die in unrelieved agony from cancer and other conditions.

Decriminalisation of drugs is a massive topic that cannot be covered here. What is certain is that the "war on drugs" is, like all other wars, enormously expensive in terms of human life and in terms of money; governments are on the losing side of the war; and decriminalisation is taking place, slowly but steadily (see here for places where cocaine has been decriminalised). It is also certain that serious politicians should start looking at all the costs of the war on drugs, and of the benefits of decriminalisation beginning with the cessation of crime wars that have cost up to 423,000 lives already.