The legalization of recreational marijuana in Colorado has led to some interesting developments in the war on drugs. According to a video segment on Fox News, seizures of marijuana flowing out of Colorado into neighboring states has risen from 58 in 2008, to 394 in 2015. This indicates Colorado has unwittingly become an exporter of legal weed, found to be illegal in many adjoining states. Sitting in for Fox News’ Shepherd Smith, Gregg Jarrett asked FNC reporter Alicia Acuna if neighboring states were fighting a losing battle. Acuna responded by saying 8 states already have recreational marijuana, and another couple dozen states have some form of medical marijuana at work. Mason Tvert, of the Marijuana Policy Project, told FNC, “If anything, what’s happening is no different than it was before. People are still using marijuana, it’s just that they’re more likely to be using marijuana that didn’t come from a Mexican drug cartel.”
According to FNC and University of San Diego professor David Shirk, that fact has now been confirmed. It seems, as marijuana proponents asserted, the Mexican cartels are getting out of the illegal marijuana trade. Shirk says the cartels are turning their backs on marijuana in favor of other “more predatory criminal activities” such as, “kidnapping, extortion, larceny…stealing petroleum from petroleum lines,” Shirk stated.
FNC reported what proponents have been saying for years. If you make marijuana legal, the illegal, criminal elements, such as Mexican drug cartels, will find other means to sustain their income. However, it is important to note that the reason these cartels exist in the first place is because of the drug war. Attempting to claim we need the war on drugs to keep the cartels from kidnapping people is like saying we need people to murder each other so police can have a job to do.
Had drugs not been illegal in the US, the cartels would have been extremely hard pressed to amass the money and power they now have. Rest assured, however, that kidnapping and larceny are not nearly as sustainable as the drug industry as it is much easier for politicians to look the other way on drug smuggling than it is for them to ignore children being stolen from parents. That’s why, rather than kidnap people, the Mexican cartels are still capitalizing on the American drug war.
One such way the Mexican drug cartels have reportedly upped the ante is to produce a drug which is much more addictive than just heroin alone. They mix heroin with Carfentanil, which “is a synthetic opioid so strong that just a few granules the size of grains of table salt can be lethal. Since mid-August, roughly 300 people in at least four states have overdosed on heroin linked to Carfentanil and the less powerful compound fentanyl,” Time reports.
If heroin were decriminalized in the US, overdoses would plummet and so would its use. This is not an assertion, it is fact.
One positive coming out of Colorado’s legalization of marijuana is the fact that the drug task forces which were previously engaged in going after marijuana, can now turn their attentions to going after the organized criminal element such as the cartels, which have no regard for the patient seeking medicine for whatever ails them.
FNC concluded their marijuana segment by saying President-elect Donald Trump doesn’t seem to have a problem with medicinal marijuana but added he does not approve of recreational marijuana. Whether or not Trump will allow the continuation of progress in the legalization of marijuana is yet to be seen. Certainly, Colorado will put up a fight if the newly named Attorney General Jeff Sessions seeks to overturn CO’s legal weed business as it’s now providing millions of dollars to help fund the educational system in that state.
The FNC segment confirms what TFTP has been saying for months now, legal weed does more to stop the cartels than the official war on drugs. As we reported to you in March, “in the past seven years (seizures of marijuana at the Mexican-American border have dropped) from 4 million pounds in 2009, to just 1.5 million pounds last year.”
Poster Comment:
Another ancillary benefit of legalizing marijuana.
Who would've thought it?
