Can Black Market Pot Compete With Legal Industry? Kathleen Caulderwood - IBTimes.com
go to original December 23, 2014

Remnants of black-market marijuana networks remain in states where pot is legal, but as time goes on, they're slowly disappearing. (Reuters/Lucy Nicholson)

The decades-long push to legalize marijuana hasn’t been just about allowing more people to get high. It’s also a way to de-escalate the so-called war on drugs, advocates say. Supporters insist that government-regulated pot will drive customers to legal retailers and away from the black markets, which funnel money into violent gangs and Mexican drug cartels. Now, with legalization spreading rapidly, evidence suggests that legal sellers are becoming viable competitors to illicit networks.

“To say that [black markets] haven’t been affected would just be crazy,” said Mason Tvert of the pro-legalization Marijuana Policy Project, in a phone interview from Denver. “Obviously we’re not going to see a complete elimination of an underground market that’s grown over the last 80 years within the course of the past 11 months. But it’s clearly having a major impact, not only at the state and local level but internationally as well.”

Competition within the growing marketplace of sanctioned sellers is helping to bring the price of legal weed closer to black-market rates.

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