In the wake of states legalizing marijuana across the country, low-quality, demand for Mexican weed has taken a nosedive.
The Washington Post is reporting that since 2011, U.S. federal, state and local officers have seized 37 percent less cannabis crossing the border with Mexico. Mexican cartels have responded to cheaper, better quality American-grown by moving out of the marijuana business and into meth and heroin production.
Washington Post Nick Miroff frets, “Mexican traffickers are sending a flood of cheap heroin and methamphetamine across the U.S. border.” However, gradual cannabis legalization is, and will continue to be, an unmitigated success for both the US and Mexico. Not only that, but the success we’re seeing should provide a roadmap for exactly how legalizing meth and heroin will have the same effects.
Ending the Drug Wars
The primary positive effects of US cannabis legalization are two-fold.
First, the drugs are better — no more seedy brick weed from Mexico. As I predicted for Townhall, “Prices will continue to drop as American growth flourishes. Get ready for cheap, high-quality weed. And as prices drop and the supply side moves into the white market, cartels will get out of the game. And just as ending alcohol prohibition greatly diminished the size, influence, and brutality of organized crime, so will legalizing weed diminish the size, influence, and brutality of Mexican cartels.”
Far more importantly, however, cartels are no longer incentivized to control US cannabis markets through violence.
In 2011 the DOJ’s now-shuttered National Drug Intelligence Center found that the top cartels controlled the majority of drug trade in marijuana, heroin, and methamphetamine in over 1,000 US cities. With marijuana no longer profitable, they’re focusing instead on heroin and meth.
As violent as the US heroin and meth trade might be, the violence Americans are familiar with pales in comparison to life in Latin America.
Every single one of the 20 cities with the highest murder rates in the world are in Latin America. Half of the top 10 global kidnapping hotspots are Latin American countries.
Time magazine reports that the violence in the murder capital of the world, San Pedro Sula, Honduras, is due to the influx of Mexican drug cartels that funnel U.S.-bound drugs through the country. The cartels are also responsible for an increase in “atrocious crimes” like decapitation, usually used against rival gangs. The 200-percent growth rate of the illegal drug market between 1994 and 2008 explains roughly 25 percent of the current homicide rate in Colombia, according to recent data from international affairs think tank LSE IDEAS. This data were published in the report, Ending the Drug Wars.
That means Colombia sees about 3,800 more homicides per year on average associated with the war on drugs!
This is entirely predictable. Black markets mean that producer countries experience more violence than consumer countries. In fact, the global war on drugs is a UN scheme to shrug drug war costs off rich countries’ shoulders and onto poor Latin American countries, with horrifyingly violent results.
When drug prices are high
Ending the Drug Wars describes drug prohibition as “a transfer of the costs of the drug problem from consumer to producer and transit countries.” It references a report called Drugs and Democracy: Toward a Paradigm Shift by the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy, headed by former Latin American presidents Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Cesar Gaviria and Ernesto Zedillo. It found that Latin America’s willingness to cave to first-world pressure has had horrific results, including:
- A rise in organized crime caused both by the international narcotics trade and by the growing control exercised by criminal groups over domestic markets and territories
- A growth in unacceptable levels of drug-related violence affecting the whole of society and, in particular, the poor and the young
- The criminalization of politics and the politicization of crime, as well as the proliferation of the linkages between them, as reflected in the infiltration of democratic institutions by organized crime
- The corruption of public servants, the judicial system, governments, the political system and, especially the police forces in charge of enforcing law and orders
When drug prices are high, cartels will step up and produce. When drug prices drop, cartels will move to more profitable pursuits.
VICE News asked retired federal agent Terry Nelson whether legalization was hurting the cartels.
“The cartels are criminal organizations that were making as much as 35-40 percent of their income from marijuana,” Nelson said, “They aren’t able to move as much cannabis inside the US now.”
That’s exactly what we’re seeing with weed. And that’s what we could see with heroin and meth.
Unfortunately America, the United Kingdom and other wealthy states use their drug prohibition policies to keep heroin and meth prices high. Not only that, but they use the UN to bully producer countries to do the same through moves such as the United Nations Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances of 1988 or the US annual certification process.
By keeping demand for meth and heroin high, but supply low, the US in essence forces the Latin America economy to revolve around drugs. Under prohibition, there is no more profitable export. And of course violence proliferates in illegal industries. So in countries where the dominant export is illegal, violence will be endemic.
Five Nobel Prize-winning economists recently released a UN report recommending that countries end their war on drugs and then also the US must stop using the UN to pressure producer countries into supply-based drug prohibition.
Prohibition doesn’t work. Legal markets do. But the way it doesn’t work varies greatly depending on whether a state is primarily a producer or a consumer of illicit substances. Stopping international pressure on producer countries is the first step to a fairer, more effective international approach to drugs.
