http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/022208dnintdrugs.3a98bb0.html
Medina-Mora was right when he said that there is little hope of eradicating the drug trade and ending the violence entirely as long as the demand for drugs persists. He says said the best they could hope to do was fragment and diminish “the power that these criminal groups have accumulated throughout the years, and transform it from a national security problem …to a police problem, to a public security problem.” He's right about that too. Just look at Colombia. The violence has diminished considerably. The threat to the government from drug cartels has diminished considerably, yet the cocaine still flows from Colombia just as it did before. All that has happened is that the Colombian cartels have allowed the Mexicans to take over distribution and let them fight over all of that. The Colombians focus on production in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, and sell it to the Mexicans and let them sort out who makes the smuggling and distribution profits.
The USDOJ in their 2009 Drug Threat Assessment said that Mexicans produced about 15,500 metric tons of marijuana in 2007 and most of it came here. That is a staggering amount. It's 15.5 billion grams of marijuana and most of it came here. If you add up all the cocaine, meth and heroin they smuggle in, according to our government the total will be in the hundreds of metric tons, not thousands. It is their cash cow. In the article I linked you to above you will see where the head of the ONDCP, John Walters, said “marijuana, not heroin or cocaine, is the ‘bread and butter,’ ‘the center of gravity’ for Mexican drug cartels that every year smuggle tons of it through the porous U.S.-Mexico border.”
Americans consume more marijuana than all other illegal drugs combined. It is easily available everywhere in this country. We couldn't make it much more easily available. It is also cheap on a per use basis, cheaper than beer in most cases. Despite all our best efforts we can't make this stuff hard to find or too expensive to buy. We are stopping precious few from using it with our laws. All we are doing is blowing a fortune trying in vain to keep up the ban and enriching organized crime to the tune of many billions of dollars a year and causing lots of other problems along the way. It is time to regulate the production and sales of marijuana, take most of the money from these drug cartels and let law abiding tax paying Americans make it.
If we only legalize marijuana there will still be cartels and there will still be an illegal drug trade, no doubt about that. But the cartels will have far less money to work with and the black market for drugs will shrink down to something much more manageable since most of the black market for drugs is just a black market for marijuana. The cartels will lose most of their income and it will be hard for them to move their much more dangerous drugs because there won't be all the countless marijuana sellers at the bottom end up the distribution chains who will often sell the the hard stuff too. This will reduce the exposure of marijuana smokers to drugs like cocaine and meth and heroin because licensed marijuana retailers will be no more likely than liquor stores to offer these other drugs. Organized crime and the black market in general will be smaller and easier to contain. We should have done this a long time ago.
I agree this is a good option rather than prohibition and interdiction.