Rising domestic pot production threatening Mexican drug gang profits

(Washington Post) ARCATA, Calif. — Stiff competition from thousands of mom-and-pop marijuana farmers in the United States threatens the bottom line for powerful Mexican drug organizations in a way that decades of arrests and seizures have not, according to law enforcement officials and pot growers in the United States and Mexico.

Illicit pot production in the United States has been increasing steadily for decades. But recent changes in state laws that allow the use and cultivation of marijuana for medical purposes are giving U.S. growers a competitive advantage, challenging the traditional dominance of the Mexican traffickers, who once made brands such as Acapulco Gold the standard for quality.

Wait, are you telling us the limited legalization of marijuana has put more of a hurt on Mexican drug gangs than all that law enforcement expenditure on arrests and interdiction?  Are you telling us that the best way to battle a supply and demand problem is to legalize the supply to satisfy the demand?

While the trafficking of cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine is the main focus of U.S. law enforcement, it is marijuana that has long provided most of the revenue for Mexican drug cartels. More than 60 percent of the cartels’ revenue — $8.6 billion out of $13.8 billion in 2006 — came from U.S. marijuana sales, according to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

The exact dimensions of the U.S. marijuana market are unknown. The 2007 National Survey on Drug Use and Health estimated that 14.4 million Americans age 12 and over had used marijuana in the past month. More than 10 percent of the U.S. population reported smoking pot once in the past year.

There is no better marijuana on the planet than American-grown marijuana.  We’d be more than happy to put Mexican growers out of business.  Just let us grow our own!  In addition to the elimination of 60% of violent drug gangs* revenue, we’d also create many new jobs right here when we are in an unemployment slump.  It would also drive demand for all the stuff growers need, like lights, fertilizer, timers, air conditioning, air filtration, growhouse construction, and so on.  Then there are the payroll taxes and sales taxes we’d raise from legal marijuana.

So many who oppose this common-sense solution fear that we’d be sending the message that it’s OK to smoke pot.  Well, the messages we’ve been sending so far haven’t convinced anyone to not smoke pot, so are we just funding violent Mexican drug gangs out of stubbornness?  Forget about “messages”; people smoke pot, period.  Accept the reality that millions of us like to use cannabis responsibly and that the only harms to society from that use are due to its prohibition, not the cannabis.

*By the way, it’s “drug gangs” not “drug cartels”. Cartels are economic units of cooperation, like OPEC, where all the members work together to fix prices and control production. Cartels don’t fight amongst each other and decapitate their rivals.