As your links establish, they had plenty of help - there's no reason to think that keeping them illegitimate would have stopped like-minded persons from doing the same things.
Yeah, we need more criminal minded people to gain power and control in business and government instead of stomping on them when they are little cockroaches.
You persist in the delusion that we do or can stomp many of them and that they aren't quickly replaced when stomped.
And you persist in the delusion that this patty cake game we've been playing with them is a "war on drugs." If we had fought it as an actual war, we would have gotten it over with a long time ago.