Will Legalizing Marijuana in US Open the Door to the Mexican Cartels? Tony Castro - VOXXI
go to original November 1, 2012

Will Mexico’s drug cartels soon be operating in Denver, Portland and Seattle and throughout any U.S. state legalizing marijuana - and will that mean an import of beheadings and other narco-trafficking violence?

That’s what opponents of ballot measures seeking to legalize marijuana in Colorado, Oregon and Washington are suggesting - and a new study by a think tank in Mexico City has given credibility to those fears just days before the Nov. 6 election.

According to the respected Mexican Competitiveness Institute’s study on legalizing marijuana released this week, the drug cartels would move into operating in those states to protect their $6 billion a year industry from U.S growers who could make the drug at cheaper prices and higher quality than Mexican marijuana smuggled across the international border.

The cartels could lose up to 30 percent of their profits if legalizing marijuana ballot measures in those states pass, the report said. A RAND Corp. study of a measure that would have legalized marijuana in California in 2010 said passage could cut cartel drug income by 20 percent.

“It could be the biggest structural blow that (Mexican) drug trafficking has experienced in a generation,” said Alejandro Hope, a security expert with the agency presenting the report.

But the report overlooks the marijuana phenomenon that has occurred in California over the last several years with the rise of medical marijuana dispensaries—which critics say are just a legal ruse to sell the drug legally and cheaply for recreational use.

In Los Angeles alone, there are some 750 marijuana dispensaries that local officials unwitting helped create with a badly written 2007 ordinance whose loopholes permitted the growth of more than 10 times the number originally allowed.

Opponents of legalizing marijuana are seeking additional regulations on those industries with initiatives in next year’s city elections.

Meanwhile, in the five years since the rise of marijuana dispensaries in Los Angeles, law enforcement officials concede they have not seen any documented Mexican drug cartel involvement either in the sales or production of marijuana sold in those California shops.

“If the (drug) cartels are behind the dispensaries or operating behind the scenes, I think we would have seen it,” says a local law enforcement officer who is not authorized to speak for his agency. “Anyone who thinks that’s the way the Mexican drug cartels operate doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”

Read more at VOXXI

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