In the unlikely event that marijuana is legalized by federal legislation in the U.S., the Mexican cartels will continue to exist and thrive because there will still be an American demand for illicit drugs and any monetary losses the cartels may sustain will be made up through a greater effort to profit from other crimes. While trafficking in drugs brings great wealth to the cartels, drugs are not the real problem.
The real problem is the deep socioeconomic chasm that divides Mexican 'haves' and 'haves not.'. Our southern neighbor has a small number of extremely wealthy people and a small middle class. The overwhelming majority of Mexicans are dirt poor and live in abject poverty. Whenever any country has a divide between the poverty-stricken masses and a small well-off ruling class, it will have an insurgency – in Mexico it’s in the form of gangs and in other countries it’s Marxist militias.
So, until Mexico’s socioeconomic chasm is bridged, it will continue to be plagued by deadly gang warfare, corruption, kidnappings and by the killings of office holders, judges, police officials and news reporters. Drugs are not the real problem and the Mexicans are not smart enough to realize that the legalization of drugs probably won’t make a peso’s worth of difference.
WHY MEXICO IS ROOTING FOR U.S. POT LEGALIZATION
Making marijuana available north of the border could cut off revenue for drug trafficking organizations to the south of it
By Tim Fernholz
The Atlantic
November 6, 2012
Mexico and the U.S. are tightly entwined economically -- and this is as true of the illegal economy as the legal one. If popular ballot measures to legalize marijuana in Colorado, Washington and Oregon pass on November 6, a respected Mexican think tank says that it will hit the cartels where it hurts: In the pocketbook, to the tune of several billion dollars. While tough police and military operations on both sides of the border have largely failed to slow the cartels, legalization would be "the biggest structural shock suffered by drug trafficking in Mexico since the massive arrival of cocaine in the late eighties," the researchers wrote.
The report from the Mexican Center for Competitiveness (IMCO) (in Spanish) is based on an earlier study by the RAND Corporation, which determined that a 2010 ballot proposal could cut the income of Mexican drug dealers by 20%. The updated research suggests that cartels earn $6 billion each year from marijuana sales in the United States. If Washington, the state most likely to pass its ballot measure, does so, IMCO reports it will cut the cartels' income by $1.37 billion, or about 23% of their revenue (though some cartels will be hit harder than others). Legalization in Oregon and Colorado would result in similar declines.
This would happen, the report assumes, because the infrastructure created by these ballot initiatives would result in cheaper and higher-quality domestic production of marijuana, which would also have less far to travel to reach its customers. That would drive Mexican pot purveyors, who face the costly challenge of crossing the border with their goods, at least partly out of the market.
But the development of a locally-regulated marijuana economy in an American state--and one vibrant enough to impact international competitors, at that--is the federal government's worst nightmare. While the Obama administration came into office in 2009 promising to keep federal prosecutors off the backs of citizens following state guidelines for legal use of pot, all that changed when they saw states licensing growers and enterprising potrepreneurs shipping the stuff lucratively--and illegally--over state lines. The feds soon launched a legal campaign against not just marijuana distributors, but also the local lawmakers trying to build a regulatory framework for the marijuana economy.
IMCO cautions that a federal crackdown following legalization in these states could significantly limit the damage to the cartels. Given the Obama administration's record and Mitt Romney's campaign-trail policies, federal pressure on citizens operating in the new legal grey areas will be intense. If markets are to do what soldiers could not, and cripple drug smuggling operations, it will take a national policy change.
If that seems like another bridge too far, analysts like UCLA Professor Mark Kleiman caution that even a massive push for legalization won't solve the public problems that come with drug use. He urges policymakers toward more pragmatic compromises between prohibition and legalization that might be more politically feasible for now.
1 comment:
Uh... about 50 to 60 percent of Mexicans are considered "middle class". While our poverty rate has been growing over the course of the present (Calderón) administration, the only connection that has to the so-called "cartels" is that the deepest pockets of poverty are in rural areas, devastated by NAFTA agricultural rules (which favor corporate farmers, as opposed to the small dirt-farmers more common here) making marijuana and opium poppy production a viable agricultural product. ... The U.S. is a narcotics consumer nation, while Mexico has a narcotics usage rate of less than 2 percent of the general population. Use is considered socially unacceptable (and "decadent" by both Catholics and leftists) and there is very little support of legalization beyond personal necessity usage (something on the books for several years now). There is very little political or social support for legalization, outside of that think tank that no one ever heard of, and, it appears, some Los Angeles based writer for The Atlantic.
Post a Comment