Ultimately I would make it a licensed commodity like alcohol. Then the government would be happy because they would make billions in taxes from it. And there would be no pot buyers for the Mexican cartels.
There is still meth and heroin and cocaine, but I would not want to see those legalized, even though that would be the end of the cartels. They are just too harmful.
Yes, that alone would cut off most of their revenues. Marjuana is the big ticket item for the Mexican cartels:
John P. Walters, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, 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. Of the $13.8 billion that Americans contributed to Mexican drug traffickers in 2004-05, about 62 percent, or $8.6 billion, comes from marijuana consumption.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/022208dnintdrugs.3a98bb0.html
There is still meth and heroin and cocaine, but I would not want to see those legalized, even though that would be the end of the cartels. They are just too harmful.”
I agree. Some people think we should legalize those other drugs as well, but they are too harmful both to the people who use them, which doesn't concern me much, and more importantly to innocent people and society as a whole. They are so addictive, and people addicted to these drugs us cause a lot of problems. Very few actually use them now, so a relatively small number of new users (a few million) could put us in the position where we would soon have several times as many hard drug addicts to deal with. That wouldn't be good at all. With the exception of older folks sixty and older, most American adults have already tried marijuana. We couldn't see the number who try it even double, and I doubt it would come anywhere close to that because there are a lot of good reasons for not smoking pot that will still exist even if it was legal. We probably wouldn't have that big of an increase in the number of pot smokers, and pot smokers really aren't that big of a problem for us to begin with. If there is a big fad and the number of pot smokers jumps considerably, it wouldn't really be that big of a deal because when the fad wanes most people would just quit. It's not that addictive. If you have a heroin use fad or a meth fad with an explosion of new users not so many would quit when the fad waned because that stuff is so addictive and a lot of these people wouldn't be able to quit. I think it would be a good idea to legalize pot because we are causing more harm than good trying to keep up the ban. It would be a big mistake to legalize those other drugs though.