I wrote a long rambling post that turned into an essay about how narco capital works. It was far too long so here's a condensed version:
Basically, in a commercial society, the only thing going on is making money. Instead of accepting the pointlessness of existence, in recent years we've tried to organize an entire ideology around enjoyment. Enjoyment is supposed to be the purpose of life, and in many quarters, its the only permissible value and questioning gets you viciously attacked by aggressively passive sneering idiots.
You read something like Vice magazine, they are desperately trying to push this kind of consumer existentialism based around drug taking. There's a constant drive to hype the intense heights of hedonism (instead of comfort). Like its heroic. It's as if we have a religious duty to mask our despair with hedonism, I think this works because we are all fascinated by our own degradation. Most drug users are feeling thought, but they can never truly escape it.
It's a consumerist religion. It functions by this weird kind of disavowed nihilism, like, consuming commodities is the true purpose of life, because enjoying them saves us from nihilism. I think the idea is we don't have to face nihilism if we keep consuming and perform our selves as consumers who have this supernatural power to change their reality through positive thinking. Who can attain this sense of self through hyper consumption and become celebrities. I'm theory wanking a bit here, it's probably just all appetite driven chaos.
The last society that made enjoyment its core value was the Roman Empire, right on the way to their pinnacle of decadence and before they got invaded and blood poured down the aqueducts. I guess because we have drones it won't happen to us, although I live in hope.
Enjoyment is a very stupid principle to try and organize a society around, because its basically covering over the harvesting of human brains, particularly proletarian ones, to turn them into rats moving coins around. They are exhausted and used up in over consumption. Recovery and work become moral issues, and the recovery industry is itself massive. The ideal citizen is one who is smoking and trying to quit at the same time. The managers of these addictions make a decent living, and of course the cash ultimately flows upwards.
For an organism addicted to oxygen, death is the only sobriety. So we are all being harvested by SOME commodity just to survive, things like food, the need for transportation and energy to live and clean yourself and get to work. If you've ever eaten a bag of crisps, you've consumed a slightly psychoactive substance.
Drugs are a commodity that literally implants itself like a software code into our brains and has an extreme influence on our behavior. No matter what hobby you have or what you love in life, no one will put the sheer effort and work into getting their rocks off as much as a drug addict. No matter how much it destroys you, you will still do it, at all hours of the day and night with all resources available to you.
I could go into a long detailed ramble about how narco capital functions, suffice to say that no one who has the power to stop the influx of drugs has any interest in doing so. The funds all get scrubbed and recycled into 'legitimate' assets, and become untraceable. In the 08 crash an analyst claimed to have discovered that 70% of the global economies assets were criminal - either tax avoidance or crime - which is basically code for drugs.
Drug dealers are like popstars, there's a new one every month and everyone loves them and claims to be their friend, then they get busted and a new one comes along. Cops mainly go after low level dealers, who are replaceable. Once you start going up the chain, you will eventually run into dock workers, transport workers, and eventually government officials and high capital. Without aiming to be condescending, obviously the law has to be imposed by a specific group of people with limited time and resources. Court rooms don't magically appear over night. A rookie cop is not going to be any match for the higher levels of narco capital, who have the funds and lawyers to make pursuing a case a shortcut to a lost career and being counter sued for defamation or whatever. Also, many cop evidence lockers are like candy stores for cops who come in and grab a bottle of seized vodka or a bootleg carton of cigs or a 9 bar of hash for their own personal pleasure. Cops need justifications for their budgets, they make their careers out of getting tax money to 'stop' (usually people on welfare) spending the tax money they were given on drugs. All they are really doing is keeping a lid on it when it threatens the smooth functioning of commerce and maybe helping the middle classes to stay a bit safer. In America the laws basically created an entire industry that sucks up massive budget slices to fight the war on drugs, which they neither win or do much good against.
The cops will periodically take down a supplier and do a photo op with a nice big table of drugs. But all seizure does is ramp up the price by destroying stock and making new gaps in the market. This is what maintains the high profit margins.
The suppliers, who are one level above the dealers, just pay off the tax man. Without wanting to get myself shot, come take a drive around the countryside near here and you might just come across a few mansions and sports cars. The law is like that for the rich, you just pay off whoever. It almost functions as an industry in itself. At best it puts away a few scumbags for a while.
I think because drugs alter human neural functioning so much, we have an incredibly difficult time rationally dealing with them. They derange and addict us. We don't have the kind of control we think we have over them. However, it is necessary to wage some sort of prohibitory battle against them for the sake of society, even if this battle is never ultimately winnable.
IMO its possible the reason we don't have holocausts anymore is narcotics. It's far more economically advantageous to sell the consumer to the substance itself. This is why any kind of materialist, technical or scientific understanding of drugs and other commodities has to be obfuscated by the hedonic culture and the constant repetition that there is an almost supernatural illicit mystique of this stuff. The technical, rational and scientific knowledge of how the brain and these substances function does exist within the society but it is only permissible to mention it as a way to explain the power of the hedonism. You don't want to be nerd now do you! Smoke crack! Authority figures don't want you to so it must be good! There's been more than a few destroyed lives because of this shit.
If anyone wants to try and verify my hypothesis, go see how many people you can find that don't get unconsciously hysterical and/or angry when you question the concept of enjoyment too much.