Study: Legalizing pot won't hinder Mexican cartels

[bemildred]

SANTA CRUZ, California — Mexico's drug traffickers are likely to lose customers in America's largest pot consuming state if California legalizes marijuana, but they won't lose much money overall because California's residents already prefer to grow their own, according to a study released Tuesday.

That means the proposal on the state's November ballot to legalize marijuana also will do little to quell the drug gangs' violent and sophisticated organizations that generate billions of dollars a year, according to the study by the nonpartisan RAND Drug Policy Research Center.

Californians, who make up one-seventh of the U.S. marijuana market, already are farming marijuana at a much higher rate than in neighboring states and tend to buy domestic rather than smuggled marijuana, the study found.

Tuesday was harvest day on a medical marijuana farm in Northern California, where dozens of volunteers cut, trimmed and processed hundreds of shopping bags full of freshly snipped buds.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iIz5eweh0zPW2wZeSSFFXdbdX3jQD9IQEJQG0?docId=D9IQEJQG0

[frylock]

1. it will when other states follow suit..

did rand even consider a domino effect, or should we all just throw our hands up and say fuck it?

[bemildred]

2. It's sort of a red-herring.

It should definitely lead to fewer grows in the national forests and what have you, and it certainly won't help the Mexican Cartels, and it should definitely relieve some of the stress on our courts and police departments, and it will make the whole business more professional, so to speak, some of us might consider that to be a good thing.

But you already got the drift here, this is not a pro-19 editorial.

[Caliman73]

3. Agreed

Legalizing marijuana is not a panacea. It won't eliminate the gang problem and it won't solve he budget problem. The thing is as you said, it will definitely not cause all the problems that the opponents say it will, and it will take some of the sting out of he cartels, it is a source of revenue, and it will ease the overcrowding in our prisons.

Opponents of Prop 19 are worried that they will lose a cash cow. They won't be able to justify their bloated budgets made from prosecuting the "war on drugs".