There’s not much justice in the world. The Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán will probably die in an unpleasant American prison after being found guilty on 51 out of 53 charges relating to his long and lucrative career in the cocaine business. But his family is safe, and we must assume that much of his immense fortune is, too. That would be regarded as astonishing good fortune by most of his victims. Although we know of few murders that he himself directly committed – one witness testified to seeing Guzmán shoot a suspected traitor and then have him buried alive – he must have ordered countless deaths.

Since his arrest, the multinational and enormously profitable business has continued without him, destroying lives and killing tens of thousands of people every year, some directly in the wars between rival producers and distributors, many among the consumers of his product and their victims. In the last 10 years, 200,000 people have been murdered in Mexico where the government announced earlier this month that there are now 26,000 unidentified corpses in their morgues and a further 40,000 people are missing without a trace; in Colombia, where the coca grows, the male homicide rate is 25% higher than in Mexico. In the US the bodies of young black men are the primary battleground of the drug wars: one in three can expect to be jailed.

Murder and violence are not the only damage caused by the drug trade. There is also the corruption of politics, and of all forms of civic life, by fear and greed. Guzmán’s trial heard testimony that his organisation had paid a bribe of $100m to the then Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto in exchange for the freedom to operate without effective hindrance from the authorities. This has been vigorously denied by Mr Peña Nieto, but it is significant that no one felt it was an accusation too ludicrous to credit. Other politicians, among them an adviser to the incoming president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, have also been pointed out as the recipients of cartel money. Reputable banks laundered huge sums of money for the cartels: in 2012 HSBC was accused by the US senate of handling nearly $7bn in drug profits.

At the local level things are very much worse. The more established cartels, like Guzmán’s, control some areas absolutely and the police operate with their permission rather than the other way round. It is significant that the operation to arrest Guzmán and bring him to the US, after he had twice escaped from Mexican prisons, once on a motorcycle down a specially dug tunnel a kilometre long, involved the cooperation of law enforcement in Ecuador, Colombia and the Dominican Republic – and the complete exclusion of Mexican local law enforcement.

Meanwhile, the trade continues to flourish. So long as demand remains high, it will be almost impossible to stop. Certainly, Donald Trump’s proposed wall will do nothing, since almost all the drugs enter the country by legal routes and they make up a very small part by volume of the enormous cross border trade. In 2015, 70,000 trucks crossed the US-Mexico border every day, but the entire year’s cocaine trade could be fitted into 13 containers.

In the face of such terrible odds and such immense social destruction, there are those who call for a surrender in the war on drugs. This isn’t going to happen. Nor should it. Cocaine, like alcohol, and unlike heroin or marijuana, has no recognised therapeutic role. Society has a clear and legitimate interest in discouraging its use. The war on drugs must be fought, but like most wars it causes most casualties among non-combatants. The strategic objective is not so much the capture of occasional kingpins, but minimising the harm they, and their products, do to their customers, whether by addiction or incarceration.