Stem the violence, make marijuana legal.
Imagine you had a really smart bomb – a genius bomb – that could blow up the leaders of every drug cartel in Mexico.
By the time the smoke cleared, a new pusher would be sitting in every cartel’s big chair and the distribution networks would continue satisfying the demand of every junkie and recreational-drug user in America.
Mexico’s drug cartels would continue to be, in the words of the Justice Department’s National Drug Threat Assessment for 2009, “the greatest drug-trafficking threat to the United States.”
Now, imagine a different weapon.
Consider the impact of eliminating the most profitable product the cartels sell.
All we have to do is legalize marijuana.
Some argue that if you legalize marijuana there would still be a black market. They say that because the product is so cheap to produce, the black market could underprice legal pot and sell to kids. But consider what we know about alcohol.
- First, Prohibition didn’t work.
- Second, even though alcohol sales are regulated, back-alley or school-yard sales of moonshine is not a billion-dollar problem.
- Third, alcohol, like its addictive killer-cousin tobacco, is taxed, which helps cover its costs to society.
Not so with marijuana.
More and more editorials are appearing in the pages of the mainstream media calling for legalization of marijuana. It’s no longer taboo to bring it up. The wall is about to fall, people!
I personally am leaning towards the legalization of marijuana/cannabis. A huge debate over whether the we should legalize pot is raging in states all over the world. Many people think pot should be legalized. There are many pros for legalizing pot, and many cons against legal pot as well. An interesting site I have found on this subject is http://LegalPot.com.
The argument that “the black market could underprice legal pot” is fallacious.
Illegal suppliers take a risk of getting caught that legal suppliers don’t take, and they need to be compensated for taking this risk or they’ll cease to take it.
That means legal suppliers will always be able to undercut illegal suppliers prices.
It will not be illegal suppliers that’ll set the price in an open market, it’ll be legal suppliers. They have the flexibility to change their methods of production in order to lower their costs and they aren’t burdened with having to conceal everything they do or with having to be compensated for taking this risk of getting caught.
Legal suppliers will lower the price of marijuana until they’re able to produce it like Coca cola.