Thursday, May 8, 2014

Why Mexican Drug Cartels and the DEA Are Now Both on the Same Side of the Drug Legalization Debate

The East Bay Express reports:
For the first time in generations, farmers in central Mexico have stopped planting marijuana.
Due to ample supplies up north, courtesy of medical and recreational cannabis legalization, cartel farmers can’t make any money off pot anymore, they told the Washington Post this week. The price for a pound of Mexican marijuana has plummeted 75 percent from $100 per kilogram to less than $25.
"'It’s not worth it anymore,'" said 50 year-old Rodrigo Silla, a lifelong cannabis farmer. He also told the Post he couldn’t remember the last time his family and others stopped growing mota. “'I wish the Americans would stop with this legalization.'”

For several years we have been writing about how researchers think that domestic cannabis legalization will seriously hurt Mexican drug cartels — who have murdered something like 60,000 people in the last decade. We've reported on how California cannabis has cut Mexican cartels out of the Golden State. That garbage goes east now. Researchers estimate legalization would cost the cartels billions, and a think tank in Mexico said that legalization in just one US state would cut cartels out of the US pot industry. Those days appears to have arrived.
Farmers in the storied “Golden Triangle” region of Mexico’s Sinaloa state, which has produced the country’s most notorious gangsters and biggest marijuana harvests, say they are no longer planting the crop. ... increasingly, they’re unable to compete with U.S. marijuana growers. With cannabis legalized or allowed for medical use in 20 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, more and more of the American market is supplied with highly potent marijuana grown in American garages and converted warehouses — some licensed, others not. Mexican trafficking groups have also set up vast outdoor plantations on public land, especially in California, contributing to the fall in marijuana prices.
So now we have both the DEA and cartel farmers both screaming bloody murder about legalization — sounds like we're on the right track.

11 comments:

  1. My very conservative, very Christian family used to end up yelling at me for suggesting drugs should be legal.

    20 years later, all of them support marijuana legalization-- some now support full de criminalization.

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  2. " Due to ample supplies up north, courtesy of medical and recreational cannabis legalization, cartel farmers can’t make any money off pot anymore, they told the Washington Post this week. The price for a pound of Mexican marijuana has plummeted 75 percent from $100 per kilogram to less than $25.
    "'It’s not worth it anymore,'" said 50 year-old Rodrigo Silla, a lifelong cannabis farmer. He also told the Post he couldn’t remember the last time his family and others stopped growing mota. “'I wish the Americans would stop with this legalization.'”"

    DUH!! What have libertarians been saying for YEARS. Ok social conservative morons, eyes open yet?

    Some people are as thick as a damned brick!

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  3. That makes sense : the Mexican Drug Cartels and the DEA are the ones who benefit the most from illegal drugs

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  4. When a monster is killed, it lashes about furiously and dangerously in its death throes. The WarOnDrugs is a monster now under attack. It is still thrashing about. Expect more from it, not less. It is dying, but no where near dead. What drives it is not medical or safety or legal opinions, but the kind of spiteful bigotry that used to be aimed at negroes in Georgia and Alabama. The numerous Americans who used to smile at the lynching of a "nigger", then later smiled at the cop-beatings of "long-haired hippies", now grin at the SWAT team attacks on "druggies". These are the hate-filled, bible-thumping, government-educated, television-informed morons who rule in the voting booth and worship government gun-slingers, whether pigs or grunts.

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    Replies
    1. What's driving it these days is power and MONEY more than anything else. It allows governments to erect police states and also allows police forces to seize people's property at their whim.

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  5. The problem is, and has always been, America. America provides the demand, in the first instance, but the demand of users on the streets of US cities and towns, even the demand from middle and upper ranking local suppliers, means nothing when compared to the revenue made available by prohibition to those able to access it.

    We know now, for a fact, that the CIA actively flooded US ghettos with crack cocaine in order to fun its illegal war in the south, selling cocaine to fund weapons for the contra's. Do we now assume that those same people, now far higher up in the chain of command, have decided against the use of this vast, vast revenue stream to fund whatever illegal activities will not pass through the House?

    And then there are the banks - yes, I know, the banks, the banks, always with the banks. I know we are all tired of hearing about how the banks are responsible for this, and the banks are responsible for that; but the fact is the HSBC bank made untold millions, and laundered untold millions more of drug money from South America for years. Nobody is in prison, nobody has been punished.

    When you consider what 'we, the people' are told about the illegal trade in narcotics, by those self same people known to have illegally traded on an industrial scale; that drug money filters through to all kinds of other crime, including racketeering and terrorism, is it not pertinent to ask whether the HSBC had any indirect role in the funding of the 9/11 attacks? After all, that organisation laundering millions in drugs, weapons, people smuggling revenue too passed through their books if I recall.

    So, the problem starts with America and American drug users are a handy scapegoat for the authorities which have access to untraceable in the amounts of GDP of many nations. If you want to kill the beast, cut off its head, you don't trim its toenails.

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  6. Please also point out to social conservative relatives that they can (and should if they think they must) create and move to a Christian-based private community with private roads and schools where no drugs or thugs would be allowed in.

    It's obvious that opponents of AnCap support debauchery, isn't it?

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  7. Since we still have public schools and non-discriminatory neighborhoods (and welfare), I do not think it is absurd for average non-ideological people to fear living next door to meth cookers who send their kids to the same public schools as their kids if drugs are "legalized". Liberatarians almost always fail to present the simple AnCap alternative as the solution to social problems. "Legalizing" drugs while everything stays the same is not a complete solution.

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  8. The question for "social conservatives" is the same question for all economics-denier interventionists: Explain why private property and the free market cannot resolve "the drug problem". Where EXACTLY is the market failure that requires violent intervention and violent aggression?

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    1. The free market is a failure because it's no fun for the sadistic busy bodies who love to attack the innocent. Until libertarians fully understand that what drives their opponents is not mistaken ideologies, but pure sadism, they will continue to be at a disadvantage.

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  9. @Anon 9.12 pm

    Oh, you got that too? That's my problem with paleolibs.
    They do not understand the left. Not really.

    There is no good will among most of them. It's only the will to power - the end result of a hypertrophied will to power is sadism.

    That's why they have these public, ritual outings and shaming of people. This kind of branding. They would have stoned Hester. Today they stone political dissent or race realism, labeling it falsely.

    You can hear the totalitarianism in their desire to hound people completely out of the blogosphere . What they cannot win through debate, they win through ideological terror, shaming, name-calling. They claim to speak for people, but they hate ordinary people. They love dysfunction because it gives them an object to patronize.

    Big business teams up with them, because they use them to take out their sadism and envy on the kulaks - - and on any traditional belief that negates their futile hedonism.

    Read the Russian intellectuals before the Revolution. Read Fathers and Sons and Smoke. The mentality is all there.

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