If we seriously wanted to shut down the dope trade we could do it over night. Not by executing drug dealers, but by indicting and prosecuting money launderers. Cartels build the cost of criminal prosecutions into dealer's compensation. Legal pressure on distributors just chains the margins, the cartels give the dealers another 10% for the risk. On we go.
This is not the case with money laundering, or political, corporate and academic elites who engage in the activity. It is far more difficult to prosecute such cases, as they are legally fortified, and hardly worth the trouble when the sentences in the unlikely event a conviction is obtained are minimal.
Executives at money laundries, at banks and big businesses, have never been prosecuted. If they were subject to life sentences or execution for their critical role in the drug trade, there would be no drug trade.
The real 'king pins' of the drug trade are running commercial banks, major 'entertainment' companies, Purdue and Mallinckrodt . Innumerable multi agency federal drug task forces have exposed networks from the Clinton Bush operation in Mena AK and dozens of others.
America's business is dope.
& we find the most destructive elements of that trade not at the bottom of our social hierarchies but at the top.