Yes, as a matter of fact, it would have... again, see below.
"but many of the beer and liquor drinkers would decide to substitute legal wine"
I seriously doubt that.
Oh. So it's your contention that, if the population which preferred to consume alcohol in the form of beer were offered the following choice:
...the total number of people who'd prefer the latter choice would be zero?? I know you're smarter than that.
Economists call it the theory of "substitute goods": goods which are not exactly the same, but nevertheless whose markets are intertwined. A Ford Taurus is not a Nissan Altima... but if the supply of Tauruses goes up (and hence the price decreases), the demand for Altimas goes down. Even if most of the people who prefer Altimas to Tauruses would continue to do so, at the margins there are some who'd switch.
If the price of Macs goes up, the demand for PCs increases. If the supply of pens goes down, the demand for pencils goes up. And if the supply of wine goes up, the demand for beer goes down.
But even if this weren't true, even if every single beer drinker and every single liquor drinker would continue to stick with dangerous, expensive, and illegal alcohol rather than switch to safe, cheap, and legal wine... legalizing only wine would still have put a dent in the revenue of bootleggers. You see:
(Demand for beer + demand for liquor)
is less than:
(Demand for beer + demand for liquor + demand for wine)
...as long as the demand for wine is nonzero.
For about eight months prior to the enactment of the 21st Amendment, 3.2% beer was legalized. Do you think that had absolutely no impact on the size of the market for illegal alcohol? If so, do you believe that a) nobody bought 3.2% beer, or b) people who otherwise wouldn't drink at all decided to start buying illegal alchol, once 3.2% beer was legalized? Or do you have another alternative in mind?
Gangs will simply focus on all the remainging illegal drugs, both hard and soft, to make up the difference.
Make up the difference how? The gangs don't just get to decide how much revenue they bring in. There are two sides to that coin: supply and demand. If demand for illegal drugs falls (thanks to a large portion of the market suddenly shifting to legal drugs), revenue from illegal drugs will necessarily fall as well, unless the gangs have some way of repealing the laws of economics.
What did the article say, a 50% drop in revenue?
Which may be attributable to people smoking less (which is after all the purpose of punishing cigarette taxes), or getting cigarettes from other legal sources.
Plus buyers may also get the cigarettes from lower tax states, the internet, or from Indian stores.
Yes... an option which is open to them thanks to the legal market in cigarettes in other jurisdictions, and which brings none of the crime and other general scumminess brought about by having shady pushers standing on street corners.
My point is, legalizing marijuana and "taxing the hell out of it" may not produce the revenue expected.
How much do you suppose prohibition inflates the price of illegal drugs? What happened to the speakeasies and the bootleggers when alcohol prohibition ended? Are they still bringing in as much revenue as they did during Prohibition? How much is added to the cost-of-goods by the necessity of evading detection, of the lack of typical marketing and distribution channels, of the need for weapons and enforcers to maintain networks? The whole purpose of your woefully misguided drug laws is to restrict supply... which, as I hope you remember from Economics 101, increases price. Eliminating all those extraneous costs would leave plenty of room to tax the bejeezus out of marijuana (as the bejeezus is taxed out of alcohol and tobacco) and still force out the street trade as hopelessly price-uncompetitive.
Stick with drugs.
What's the matter, you can dish it out but you can't take it? This is my analogy, so you have to work with me. I want an answer: if the number of deaths to sweet innocent precious adorable little babies would be twice as high or three times as high if guns were legal than if they were banned, would you support banning them? Or are you in favor of child-murder? Or would you prefer to admit that your original question (oh won't somebody please think of the children!!!!1!) was stupid?
And we’re talking about legalizing them, not banning them.
Try to follow me here: legalization is the complement of banning. You're hypothesizing that X kids would use drugs with them banned, while 3X would use them with them legal. I'm offering the alternate hypothesis that Y kids would die with guns banned, while 3Y would die with them legal. When deciding policy, the situations are exactly parallel.
Or, if you're going to insist on the irrelevant distinction, here's the analogy reworded for you: it's currently illegal for police to burst into homes and seize private firearms. If legalizing such a procedure would reduce child mortality from guns by 50%-66%, would you favor it?
Yeah, heroin users will switch to legal marijuana.
"Make up the difference how?"
It's only 15%. They'll figure it out.
"and still force out the street trade as hopelessly price-uncompetitive."
Who wants cheap marijuana? Seriously. Other than marijuana users, that is. And they're only 6% of the population.
Do parents want cheap marijuana? Law enforcement? Employers? Teachers?
CAN it be cheap? Of couse it CAN. But why do you think it WILL?
"Try to follow me here: legalization is the complement of banning."
Then let's do the analogy the same way. If legalizing unlimited and unlicensed full-auto Tec-9s would result in the doubling in the number of deaths to sweet innocent precious adorable little babies, would I support legalizing them? My answer would be no.
But, you have no basis for any of your analogies. I do for mine.