Before the “War on Drugs” in the early seventies, I seem to recall reading a gram of cocaine sold for about a hundred dollars. Two or three cartels controlled the import. They could only import as much as they could import. The way the cartels enforced their monopoly was to murder anyone who tried to import on their own. Ordinary citizens would fly to Columbia, buy cocaine and get reported to the cartels by the seller. They would be murdered. This limited the number of people who could import. The War on Drugs destroyed the cartels. This created an open market, which is much more efficient than a cartel dominated market. Go to the link to find the world price of a gram of cocaine in today’s dollars. It is substantially cheaper than it was when the cartels ran the show.
https://www.statista.com/chart/18527/cocaine-retail-steet-prices-in-selected-countries/
This is one of those things where you chop one head off the dragon and it is replaced by two more. The answer, which nobody wants to hear, is to fix the demand side of the equation. Economic law is, where there’s a demand there will be a supply. I don’t know how to do that, as the drug is available in Saudia Arabia, so chopping off body parts probably won’t work. The answer would be cultural and would take a long, long time to implement. We’d be fighting Hollywood movies the whole time.
How do you eradicate a culture that has been finding ways to get high for thousands of years? Humans have always found ways to indulge in substances to alter their state of mind and that includes just about every culture on earth. Alcohol is the “accepted” and mostly legal substance around the world and marijuana increasingly closing in fast. But opium has been around for centuries and native Americans had/has peyote. Then there is that weed they chew I believe in parts of Africa. So it seems to be human nature to find ways to get high, how the hell do you eradicate that.