Imagine Coca-Cola getting clearance for importing coca leaves for flavoring but then instead sells it to a third party who processes it for something else.
And like many rules, it's not necessarily about stopping 100% of everything all the time, but about preventing enough of it so that we don't have some problem.
In the universe in which you agree X is fine but Y is not, and that there is some sort of proof that Coca-Cola knows what is going on, it seems really obvious that Coca-Cola is responsible!
I'm not somebody who really loves rules and regulations and I'll be the first person to say that America's "war on drugs" has been an utter disaster in multiple ways.
But, generally speaking, flooding a country with cocaine is not what most of us would call beneficial to society.
If you don't think that we should have a society and/or laws, cool, that's another discussion. But if you accept the premise that we should have laws, controlling the flow of industrial quantities of coca leaves seems like the good kind of law.
I mean, I guess we could just let Coca-Cola import metric tons of coca leaves, sell them to whoever the fuck they want, and then just... prosecute the people who do bad things with them? I think we would find that orders of magnitude more work and orders of magnitude less effective. There would be a large cost to society, and nobody wins except Coca-Cola, really.
Yes? Basically?
(1988)
"Workers at the Stepan Co. plant, the nation’s only legal importer of cocaine, must undergo strict background checks, and agents from the federal Drug Enforcement Agency frequently visit, said plant manager John O’Brien.
DEA spokesman Milton Smilek in Newark said there haven’t been any security problems at the plant just west of New York City. He said it processes hundreds of tons of cocaine each year."
This is where Coca-Cola is said to get its flavoring from.
At worst, you can imagine selling a full nuclear bomb to Al kaeda, then being surprised pikachu when they use it to blow up IAD
