Amen
I have a hard time believing that marijuana is more dangerous than the profit and the government that the illegal trade in it creates. And stories like this make it seem no less available than it would be if we ignored it.
And if we legalize it we deprive the cartels of most of their income, and that would make them smaller and much easier to contain. It would make the black market for drugs a lot smaller because it is mostly a black market for marijuana. That would hurt these cartels even more because clearly the same people who bring in all the Mexican marijuana are bringing in a lot of other drugs and sending them all through the same distribution networks. Down toward the bottom of the distribution chain most of the participants in the black market for illegal drugs are the marijuana sellers and marijuana users, because Americans use a lot more marijuana than all other illegal drugs combined. But the other drugs are coming through the same pipelines and that means pot smokers are going to be exposed to these substances a lot more than people who don't smoke pot. We're not going to stop people from smoking pot though. If we sell it through licensed shops these shops will be no more likely to offer them cocaine, or meth or heroin or ecstasy than liquor stores are today. We're going to make it harder for the drug cartels to get these drugs out to end consumers when we take the marijuana industry from them.