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Tom Johnston's avatar

Let's go further back to 1898 when the drug company Bayer was promoting heroin as the new miracle cure for all kinds of ailments for adults and children! Even Sears Roebuck sold the Bayer's "miracle drug". By 1924 there were over 200,000 heroin addicts in the United States alone. Maybe you can call the pharmaceutical industry the first real drug cartel and still continuing that fine tradition today.

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Shaggy Snodgrass's avatar

I always heard, from reliable sources who were around in the 1970s (+ even 1960s) that the reason the Italian/Sicilian outfit lost its hold on crime was not because the Feds broke it up, but because the bosses stopped "making" new soldati; preferring instead to send their sons to college and into legitimate, less brutal businesses. The sons with no other options were a pretty poor lot, for many reasons; and had less of an exclusively "ethnic" community to extort and live off. They got into drug trade heavy, but were bad at it; and wound up busted, addicted, or dead in disputes with outside competitors and their own suppliers. The other, newer, hungrier ethnic outfits supplanted them easily. It's my belief that "Mafias" in America are a stage in the development of immigrant cultures; formed first for community self-defense, then expanding into lucrative "rackets" where their tools of force are useful. The prosperity they generate springboards their second or third generation into American upper-middle-class identity, and they leave the rackets behind where the next group takes up. It worked for the Irish, Jewish, and Italians; and the Russians, Albanians, and various Latinx ethnicities have it now.

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