The war on drugs is a waste of taxpayer money anyway.
Drugs are criminalized
Cartels make all the money
Cartels use said money to bring in more drugs
It's a self-defeating idea from the start
40% of all criminal court cases in America are non violent drug crimes. This is a waste of taxpayer money and public resources
Just take about 30 billion dollars a year and flush it down the toilet. You will get the same result
When you legalize drugs you get kids dying from vaping, you get the opioid crisis, you'll have coke putting coke back into coke, you'll have doctors giving kids uppers and downers as a way to supposedly help them do better in school.
Criminalizing drug addicts is bad policy. But legalizing drugs is also bad policy.
The problem is that the CIA saw that facilitating drug trade was a way to get money for their black ops.
The FBI also saw advantages in helping drug dealers.
It is the old proverb "sheep spend their whole life worried about the wolves only to be eaten by the shepherds"
It is simple to shut down the drug trade if the system were not corrupt. Our satellites and drones can easily identify fields where drugs are being grown. Two or three years of burning crops will drive farmers to do something that will feed their family. It is easy to track money used in buying drugs to catch those who are doing the money laundry. Suppose instead of handing out needles in the projects you handed out twenty dollar bills that the DEA could track with satellites. Some will go for food or some other necessity, but a lot will go for drugs which will then go to the houses used to bundle them for money laundry. Imagine how terrifying it would be for a drug dealer to actually be afraid to take 5, 10 or 20s from their regular customers.
Not only so but we can blanket public housing with cameras so that the conviction of these guys would be an open and shut case.
Cut off the supply, cut off the money. Do this for two or three years non stop. The money you seize will be part of a RICO trial allowing you to seize 5x this amount once they are convicted. All of this is used to fund the cops who are investigating and shutting them down. As a result with each new bust you add fuel to your effort to shut them down.
I wouldn't waste time trying to flip people. If you arrest and convict the drug dealers, smugglers, money launderers and mules and lock them up for 3 years you will force the drug operation to promote inexperienced and green people who then you can flip because they have no criminal record and are simply cannon fodder for these cartels.