And the cartels gain even more power and influence every time the cops kick down a grandmother’s door and drag her to prison for a bit of home-grown weed to help her glaucoma.
“And the cartels gain even more power and influence every time the cops kick down a grandmother’s door and drag her to prison for a bit of home-grown weed to help her glaucoma.”
This is such a misunderstanding of the problem. The cartels make the vast bulk of their money on hard drugs—not pot. Pot legalizers need to understand that to make much of a dent in the Cartels, they have to legalize heroin and cocaine too.
Estimated US sales in 1999:
$37 billion on cocaine,
$12 billion on heroin,
$10.2 billion on marijuana, and
$4 billion on other drugs.
Much of that pot is home grown, not imported. So legalizing it would slow down the rate of cartel sales for a few years and hardly make a dent after that. That’s it.
If you want to make the “take down the cartels with legal pot” argument you have to be willing to add cocaine and heroin into the legalization mix.
Are you willing to do that? If so, you have a principled argument—not sure I agree with it, but it’s principled. If you aren’t willing to campaign for cocaine legalization along with pot legalization, then I suspect you just want your doobies and are running the cartel argument up the flagpole to see if anyone salutes.
We actually put some effort into controlling our borders.
And part 2, a bullet between the eyes of people convicted of manufacturing or selling of hard drugs such as cocaine or meth.