There is a war over drugs. Since 2006, over 10,000 people have been killed in drug related fights in Mexico alone, the primary country for the drug trade. This $400 billion dollar buisness (pbs.org) focused on peoples’ addiction to illegal drugs has spun way out of control, way past the relatively simple tobacco dependency of the early American colonists. The general public’s knowledge of the harmful effects of drugs on the body are well-known, however there is a lack of knowledge in how the drugs actually create wars.
Drug cartels are mostly made up of gang members and mafia men. Remember the movie, “Goodfellas”? In the movie, an Italian mafia family’s income consisted of the drug trade, where the prominent leaders in the family would oversee the drug business from the development to the shipment to the customers. There is a lot of money to be made in the drug business and that is why many do it, including the family from “Goodfellas”.
However, due to high protest against drugs and the effect drug cartels create on a country’s economy (sometimes they pratically “run” it alone), many are opposed to the trade of illegal drugs (which, another fact might be because they are illegal). This creates fights not only between rival drug cartels, but between the government and the drug cartels. More recently, however, civilians have been killed in the drug war, just for being in the way of a drug trade.
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This is a really interesting topic, since so much money is involved in the black market for drugs, there is lots to be learned about how this trafficking effects so many people on a global scale.