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“So the Mexicans who sell marijuana today will NOT be selling marijuana through legal channels tomorrow?”

If we legalized marijuana I bet Mexico would also legalize and try to participate in our legal marijuana market. The Mexican government has played with the idea of marijuana legalization for years now. They'd like to reduce the power of organized crime. The problem is that the vast majority of the marijuana produced in Mexico is sold in the U.S., so legalizing it there really wouldn't help them much with the problem of organized crime. If we legalized it I bet they would too. I don't know that all the same people would be involved, but I bet that we'd see Mexicans trying to participate in our legal market for marijuana if we were to legalize it.

“And the Mexicans who sell cocaine (because they also sell marijuana) will stop selling cocaine tomorrow or suddenly forget how their distribution network works?”

No, but I do think it would be harder for them to move their product. There are so many people involved in the black market for marijuana. You have the big cartels and the armies of people who help bring their product to consumers who in most cases aren't even really part of their organizations. The cartels get the marijuana in the country and get it distributed all over America. They move their cocaine and other drugs through the same channels. They'd still be able to do this without the marijuana business, but where they'll really be hurt are at the lower levels. Imagine a pyramid. A drug cartel is at the top and at the wide bottom are all the thousands of people selling their pot at the retail level. What they are going to lose are the people at the bottom of that pyramid, the middlemen toward the bottom and the retail sellers they supply. These are people that today they tap to sell their other drugs. When people start buying their pot from the pot store, we aren't going to have our neighborhood pot dealers anymore. These aren't generally professional drugs dealers. These are more often than not people who buy a little more than they use and sell the rest to friends so they can get free smoke and maybe a little extra cash. They're also people who are tapped to sell other drugs. When they are gone, before long it will start getting harder and harder to find people to sell the other drugs. Today, all they have to do is offer these drugs to people already breaking the law, people already selling one illegal drug. These people are a pretty safe bet. Even if they say no to the other drugs, they aren't likely to to the police or anything because they are already breaking the law. IN the future when we legalize marijuana a cocaine seller can maybe tap his cokehead customers to sell more coke for him, but those are often going to be completely unreliable coke addicts who are trouble and will bring trouble to the people supplying them. They could also go out and try to recruit people not involved with the drug trade but of course the danger in that is that there isn't much stopping these people from turning in those who try to get them to sell drugs. I don't know how many there are, but there are many many thousands of low level middlemen and retail pot sellers at the bottom of the heap who are an invaluable asset to the drug cartels at the top of the heap trying to move drugs other than marijuana. If marijuana was legal they'd still sell their other drugs, but it would be a lot harder without all the people at the bottom of the heap selling their marijuana today.

“And if we “tax the hell out of it”, the ATF will become the ATMF as they go “revenuing” to knock on your door and make sure that you are up on your tax stamps for pot seeds.”

I don't have any pot seeds. I do brew beer though and the ATF hasn't knocked on my door yet. Most people don't brew their own beer though and most wouldn't grow their own pot either. It's much easier to go to a store and choose from a wide variety of quality product. Look at those “medical marijuana” dispensaries in California that do gangbusters business selling super expensive pot to people with medical marijuana cards who are allowed by the state to grow their own. We could regulate it, and we could tax it. In fact, we'll have to tax it if we want to keep prices anywhere close to where they are today. When all the risks are gone and the government isn't seizing thousands of tons of marijuana and farmers start growing it out in the open on a huge scale like they grow other crops, the price of pot will drop through the floor. We'd have to tax the crap out of it to keep prices in the neighborhood of where they are today.