Police seem to only want to manage the war on drugs not defeat it, as was explained to me by a friend who's a cop and became totally disillusioned, just counting out his days until retirement. This means working with one criminal group to help arrest the other groups. Of course by interfering in the drug dealing free market by propping up various mid level street gangs and arresting the others they create an extremely dangerous powder keg where these targeted groups go to great insane lengths to survive, and the propped up group is often dismantled and arrested by police whenever they become too confident and do something stupid like their untouchable gang members terrorizing too many innocent people. The demise of the dominant group once propped up by police means a power vacuum forms and streets become a warzone as all fight to take over the dominant position of police protected status.

I'm pretty sure that without police 'managing' these mid level street gangs, they would just exist as smaller decentralized crews that would be much less violent as we would stop creating Tony Montanas and instead just have disorganized criminal activity on a smaller income scale since honest police would be able to easily disrupt these networks into bankruptcy. Instead we get police helping to form supergangs, with multi millions to spend on weapons and corrupt all aspects of a city with criminals getting into mafia-like construction industries to influence city tenders, bribe city employees or unchecked extortion of local business. Either legalize it all or end the strategy of selective enforcement, which means we likely need to double police budgets as cost is a major factor in this strategy of enforcement that relies on criminal cooperation.