Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

Legal Pot In The U.S. May Be Undercutting Mexican Marijuana
NPR ^ | December 01, 2014 | John Burnett

Posted on 12/03/2014 12:03:43 PM PST by ConservingFreedom

Made-in-America marijuana is on a roll. More than half the states have now voted to permit pot for recreational or medical use, most recently Oregon and Alaska. That number also includes the District of Columbia. As a result, Americans appear to be buying more domestic marijuana, which in turn is undercutting growers and cartels in Mexico.

"Two or three years ago, a kilogram [2.2 pounds] of marijuana was worth $60 to $90," says Nabor, a 24-year-old pot grower in the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa. "But now they're paying us $30 to $40 a kilo. It's a big difference. If the U.S. continues to legalize pot, they'll run us into the ground."

Nabor declines to give his surname because his crop is illegal. The interview takes place on a hillside outside Culiacan, Sinaloa, located in Mexico's marijuana heartland. We stand next to a field of knee-high cannabis plants, their serrated leaves quivering in a warm Pacific breeze. The plot is on communal land next to rows of edible nopal cactus.

He kneels and proudly shows me the resinous buds on the short, stocky plants. This strain, called Chronic, is a favorite among growers for its easy cultivation, fast flowering and mood-lifting high. Nabor, who says he has grown marijuana since he was 14, says the plants do not belong to him.

"My patrón pays me $150 a month, but I have to plant it exactly the way he wants," he says. "He provides the water pump, gasoline, irrigation hoses, fertilizer, everything."

An Army Of Small-Scale Growers

There's an image of Mexican traffickers with shiny pickups, fancy boots and shapely girlfriends. But Nabor says most people who grow marijuana for the Sinaloa cartel are just campesinos like him.

He drives a motorcycle, and supports a wife and two kids. He says he grows pot to supplement his other work, which consists of collecting firewood and raising cactus. He says everybody plants a little marijuana here. Marijuana plants in Culiacan, Sinaloa, in Mexico's marijuana heartland. Prices are about half of what they were a few years ago, according to some growers.

"This is dangerous work to cultivate it and to sell it. If the army comes, you have to run or they'll grab you. Look here, we're only getting $40 a kilo. The day we get $20 a kilo, it will get to the point that we just won't plant marijuana anymore."

The slumping economics of Mexican marijuana was not unexpected.

Two years ago, the Mexican Institute of Competitiveness, in a study titled "If Our Neighbors Legalize," predicted the drug cartels would see their cannabis profits plummet 22 to 30 percent if the United States continued to decriminalize marijuana.

At one time, virtually all the weed smoked in the States, from Acapulco Gold to Colombian Red, came from south of the border.

Not anymore.

"We're still seeing marijuana. But it's almost all the homegrown stuff here from the States and from Canada. It's just not the compressed marijuana from Mexico that we see," says Lt. David Socha, of the Austin Police Department narcotics section.

Socha's observation is confirmed by the venerable journal of the marijuana culture, High Times Magazine.

"American pot smokers prefer American domestically grown marijuana to Mexican grown marijuana. We've seen a ton of evidence of this in the last decade or so," says Daniel Vinkovetsky, who writes under the pen name Danny Danko. He is senior cultivation editor at High Times and author of The Official High Times Field Guide to Marijuana Strains.

U.S. domestic marijuana, some of it cultivated in high-tech greenhouses, is three or four times more expensive than Mexican marijuana. Vinkovetsky says prices for Mexican weed continue to slide because it's so much weaker.

He says American cannabis typically has 10 to 20 percent THC — the ingredient that makes a person high — whereas the THC content of so-called Mexican brickweed is typically 3 to 8 percent.

"Mexican marijuana is considered to be of poor quality generally because it's grown in bulk, outdoors; it's typically dried but not really cured, which is something we do here in the U.S. with connoisseur-quality cannabis," he says. "And it's also bricked up, meaning that it's compressed, for sale and packaging and in order to get it over the border efficiently."

Reversing The Flow

To service the U.S. market, police agencies report some Mexican crime groups grow marijuana in public lands in the West.

And there's a new intriguing development.

DEA spokesman Lawrence Payne tells NPR that Sinaloa operatives in the United States are reportedly buying high-potency American marijuana in Colorado and smuggling it back into Mexico for sale to high-paying customers.

"It makes sense," Payne says. "We know the cartels are already smuggling cash into Mexico. If you can buy some really high-quality weed here, why not smuggle it south, too, and sell it at a premium?"

The big question is whether the loss of market share is actually hurting the violent Mexican drug mafias.

"The Sinaloa cartel has demonstrated in many instances that it can adapt. I think it's in a process of redefinition toward marijuana," says Javier Valdez, a respected journalist and author who writes books on the narcoculture in Sinaloa.

Valdez says he's heard through the grapevine that marijuana planting has dropped 30 percent in the mountains of Sinaloa. But he says the Sinaloa cartel is old school — it sticks to drugs, even as other cartels, such as the Zetas of Tamaulipas state, have branched out into kidnapping and extortion.

"I believe that now, because of the changes they're having to make because of marijuana legalization in the U.S., the cartel is pushing more cocaine, meth and heroin. They're diversifying," Valdez says.

Back in the hills above Culiacan, Nabor is asked, if prices for marijuana continue declining, what will he do?

"My dream is to get a good job, a regular job," he says, "where I don't have to do such dangerous work; a job that pays me a living wage."

When the interview is over, and the recorder is turned off, and we're about to drive back to the highway, Nabor quietly says he thinks he's done with marijuana. He's considering planting opium poppies, because that's where the market is going.


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Extended News; Government; Mexico; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: bust; cannabis; marijuana; pot; wod
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-2021-4041-6061-8081-88 next last
To: familyop
How China got rid of opium

With "street committees" and "re-education" - that is, with communism. Is that what you're advocating for the United States of America?

41 posted on 12/03/2014 1:21:47 PM PST by ConservingFreedom (A goverrnment strong enough to impose your standards is strong enough to ban them.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 32 | View Replies]

To: Zhang Fei
Wright also stated that "one of the most unfortunate phases of smoking opium in this country is the large number of women who have become involved and were living as common-law wives or cohabitating with Chinese in the Chinatowns of our various cities".

We can't have that.

42 posted on 12/03/2014 1:24:01 PM PST by ConservingFreedom (A goverrnment strong enough to impose your standards is strong enough to ban them.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 27 | View Replies]

To: ConservingFreedom
I have yet to hear a good argument from the pro-criminalization side.

You don't think the ever-increasing destruction of our constitution, and the accompanying loss of respect for the law and civil society is a good argument for the pro-criminalization side?

How about all the money and power it brings to the ever expanding police state? It's a real good deal for those profiting off both sides.

Shouldn't everything not specifically spelled out in the hundreds of thousands of pages of the Federal Register as being legal for americans to do be criminalized?

43 posted on 12/03/2014 1:25:38 PM PST by zeugma (The act of observing disturbs the observed.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 21 | View Replies]

To: familyop
The Chinese solution was a good one.

After finishing up here in the US, we can extend the solution with cruise missile strikes on Mexico
44 posted on 12/03/2014 1:27:26 PM PST by indthkr
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 32 | View Replies]

To: ConservingFreedom

exactly

sobriety is preferable


45 posted on 12/03/2014 1:27:46 PM PST by LeoWindhorse
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 15 | View Replies]

To: ConservingFreedom

Communism is not necessary for taking out the trash, and some of the methods prescribed would work even more effectively in a free, representative republic.


46 posted on 12/03/2014 1:36:31 PM PST by familyop (We Baby Boomers are croaking in an avalanche of corruption smelled around the planet.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 41 | View Replies]

To: forgotten man

They might make more per job, but the number of human smugglings compared to how much marijuana is sold is very miniscule.


47 posted on 12/03/2014 1:38:20 PM PST by Jonty30 (What Islam and secularism have in common is that they are both death cults)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 8 | View Replies]

To: indthkr
The Chinese solution was a good one.

As his link shows, the Chinese solution was "street committees" and "re-education" - that is, communism. Is that what you're advocating for the United States of America?

48 posted on 12/03/2014 1:39:21 PM PST by ConservingFreedom (A goverrnment strong enough to impose your standards is strong enough to ban them.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 44 | View Replies]

To: A_perfect_lady

It’s alot harder to get people interested in the harder drugs than marijuana.


49 posted on 12/03/2014 1:40:15 PM PST by Jonty30 (What Islam and secularism have in common is that they are both death cults)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 7 | View Replies]

To: familyop
With "street committees" and "re-education" - that is, with communism. Is that what you're advocating for the United States of America?

Communism is not necessary for taking out the trash,

But that's how China did it - if you're not advocating communism, you should find a noncommunist example.

and some of the methods prescribed would work even more effectively in a free, representative republic.

Such as?

50 posted on 12/03/2014 1:41:20 PM PST by ConservingFreedom (A goverrnment strong enough to impose your standards is strong enough to ban them.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 46 | View Replies]

To: LeoWindhorse
Why not cut out the middleman and ban leftism?

exactly

How would that work? Any First Amendment issues there?

Time will also show that life long MJ use results in early onset of dementia / senility .

Like regular lifelong drinking.

sobriety is preferable

But not at the point of a government gun.

51 posted on 12/03/2014 1:44:14 PM PST by ConservingFreedom (A goverrnment strong enough to impose your standards is strong enough to ban them.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 45 | View Replies]

To: indthkr
"The Chinese solution was a good one."

Yep. Enough Americans will be getting an education by seeing their loved ones robbed, enslaved and murdered by the pushers, so they won't have any inhibitions about putting the pushers down. The addicts who are not pushers can be cleaned up with plenty of healthy exercise and cheerleading after willingly starting a program to strengthen their minds and bodies. They'll win.

China also has a compulsory draft for service, but enforcement isn't necessary. More than enough gladly enlist. We did the same during the early 1950s and before. Infantry initial training and initial training for some infantry-related specialties would also clean up many of the addicts. It's for the defense and strength of a nation and is not limited to communism.


52 posted on 12/03/2014 1:47:37 PM PST by familyop (We Baby Boomers are croaking in an avalanche of corruption smelled around the planet.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 44 | View Replies]

To: rjsimmon

“Will there next be a pot war? Something they will need to hash out???”

Better to hash it out than to take pot shots at each other.


53 posted on 12/03/2014 1:49:55 PM PST by Magic Fingers (Political correctness mutates in order to remain virulent.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 6 | View Replies]

To: ConservingFreedom
"With 'street committees' and 're-education'"

Apparently, you are against the freedoms of speech and assembly that we'll exercise to turn ruined minds back to the right--the minds that pushers have turned to the left with dope. Obviously, you want those minds to stay to the left.


54 posted on 12/03/2014 1:58:49 PM PST by familyop (We Baby Boomers are croaking in an avalanche of corruption smelled around the planet.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 50 | View Replies]

To: ConservingFreedom

“That’ll lower retail prices and thus the amount of crime committed in order to pay those prices - another piece of good news. “

Dope Head logic.

Gotta love it and laugh.


55 posted on 12/03/2014 1:59:11 PM PST by ifinnegan
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 9 | View Replies]

To: ConservingFreedom
I'm advocating sobriety via due process.

I'm also advocating draconian "controls" on individuals or enterprises (including governments) that enable and profit from the production and sale of products whose sole purpose is mind-altering recreation.
56 posted on 12/03/2014 1:59:32 PM PST by indthkr
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 48 | View Replies]

To: LeoWindhorse

“believe that smoking MJ causes people people to vote ( and think ) Liberal progressive / Leftist”

Absolutely does.

It’s effect on the brain and worldview is the biggest problem with it.


57 posted on 12/03/2014 2:01:30 PM PST by ifinnegan
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 13 | View Replies]

To: ConservingFreedom

Have your way with the drug slaves that you own for now, thanks to the state commies in your pocket. But their families and friends will be with us soon enough. Pride goes before a fall.


58 posted on 12/03/2014 2:01:51 PM PST by familyop (We Baby Boomers are croaking in an avalanche of corruption smelled around the planet.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Jonty30; A_perfect_lady
Young people are generally rejecting drug use across the board.

Teen drug and alcohol use continues to fall, new federal data show


59 posted on 12/03/2014 2:04:14 PM PST by TigersEye (ISIS is the tip of the spear. The spear is Islam.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 49 | View Replies]

To: ifinnegan

Sincerely good and surprised to see your comments here. Review my comments in the thread.


60 posted on 12/03/2014 2:06:09 PM PST by familyop (We Baby Boomers are croaking in an avalanche of corruption smelled around the planet.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 57 | View Replies]


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-2021-4041-6061-8081-88 next last

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson