Mexico's drug traffickers would lose some customers but not much money if California voters approve the marijuana-legalizing Prop 19 on Nov. 2, concludes a study by the nonpartisan RAND Drug Policy Research Center.
That's because Californians mostly grow their own already.
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Proponents of Prop 19 have pointed to undercutting the power and violent ways of Mexican drug cartels as among the reasons the initiative should be supported at the polls.
But the study finds legalization's impact in California will be minor on Mexican cartels and the violence associated with them. That's because the foreign cartels are minor players here without legalization.
Of course, if Mexican cartels are not the boogeymen Prop 19 backers make them out to be, they also are not the boogeymen that seal-the-borderists like Jim Gilchrist and Barbara Coe make them out to be–at least not in Alta California.
The study finds:
- Mexican drug trafficking organizations
generate only $1 billion to $2 billion annually from exporting marijuana
to the United States and selling it to wholesalers, far below existing
estimates by the government and other groups.
- The often-cited claim that marijuana
accounts for 60 percent of gross drug export revenues of Mexican drug
trafficking organizations is not credible, finding 15 percent to 26 percent as being a more credible
range.
- With California accounting for about 14 percent of the
nation's marijuana use, marijuana legalization only influences the California market, cutting total drug export
revenues by perhaps 2 to 4 percent.
- The only impact legalization might have on Mexican drug trafficking
organizations' bottom line is if California-grown pot is smuggled into other states that rely on Mexican crops.
On that last point, the statement says, “After
legalization, if low-cost, high-quality marijuana produced in
California dominates the U.S. marijuana market, then the Mexican drug
trafficking organizations' revenue from exporting marijuana could
decline by more than 65 percent and probably closer to 85 percent. In
this scenario, results from the RAND study suggest the drug trafficking
organizations would lose roughly 20 percent of their total drug export
revenues.”
Ah, one more reason to pass the Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010. Thanks, RAND.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.