It’s no secret the Mexican drug cartels do not want competition from legal marijuana sales. But the cartels are not the only ones who want the experiment now under way in Colorado and Washington state to fail.
Let’s admit it. There are tens of billions of dollars involved in the “drug war” on both sides of the border, and there are profits at stake in the U.S. as well as Mexico.
Billions in illicit profits south of the border are matched by tens of thousands of jobs and billions in government expenditures on the war on drugs north of the border. And powerful organizations on both sides of the border are hoping this experiment fails – and making plans to help it fail.
The cartels woke up on a November morning in 2012 to see a potential loss of 22 to 30 percent of their profits from drug sales in the U.S. market if legalization spreads across the nation. That estimate of the magnitude of their potential loss comes from the Mexican Competitiveness Institute. No one knows the exact size of the illicit U.S. market, but the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has estimated marijuana sales in America from cross-border smuggling to be in the tens of billions of dollars annually.
The Mexican cartels will adapt to marijuana legalization by engaging in extortion and violence to maintain a piece of the action. They will try to muscle into the legal trade by setting up fronts and trying to intimidate legal shops into selling their product. And, yes, the cartels will use violence and intimidation to fight the competition. The cartels have distribution networks in both states, and they will not give up this lucrative business without a fight.
But we need to pay equal attention to the groups and institutions within the U.S. that also hope legalization will fail. Drug enforcement and incarceration for possession or sale of illegal drugs provide employment for thousands of people. Like fighting wars abroad, fighting the war on drugs at home is big business.
In 2012 in the U.S. there were over 1,550,000 arrests for involvement with illegal drugs. Of that total, 749,825 were marijuana related, and of that total, 658,231 were for possession only, not for selling the drug. Thus, over 42 percent of all drug arrests in 2012 were for mere possession of marijuana. Even if most arrests for mere possession do not result in jail time, the arrest and prosecution of these victimless crimes involves an immense investment of law enforcement personnel and other resources.
Now, you might expect that law enforcement agencies would see marijuana legalization as an opportunity, not a threat: they can now refocus their efforts and spend those billions on the fight against addictive drugs that are truly destructive, like meth, heroin and cocaine, along with prescription drug abuse. But unfortunately, too many of the field marshals in the war on drugs cannot see the forest for the weed.
Besides the taxpayer monies spent on the war on drugs by federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, an amount in excess of $50 billion nationally, you have to add the millions in federal and local law enforcement agency revenue obtained from the confiscation and sale of all kinds of real property belonging to persons convicted of drug crimes.
So, we have to recognize that powerful institutions on both sides of the border have a financial interest in the failure of legalized marijuana to live up to the expectations of the voters who approved it. Instead of trying to make it work, many groups will be working to help it fail.
How could the Colorado and Washington experiment with legalized marijuana be sabotaged by the anti-marijuana forces? That’s easy: They can make sure the regulatory framework set up by each state for the sale and possession of small amounts of marijuana is totally unworkable. For example, they could set the excise and sales taxes on the product so high that legal marijuana does not replace the black market in illegal marijuana. They could fail to establish effective safeguards against sales to minors – and then use horror stories of minors’ access to marijuana as an excuse to attack its legal availability for adults.
The citizens of Colorado and Washington state decided last November that the campaign against drug abuse should be directed against truly dangerous drugs, not marijuana. Public officials who try to sabotage this experiment are the cartels’ best friends.
Media wishing to interview Tom Tancredo, please contact [email protected].
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