David Usborne considers the impact of Colorado cannabis on the cartels:
A 2012 research paper by the Mexican Competitiveness Institute in Mexico called ‘If Our Neighbours Legalise’, said that the legalisation of marijuana in Colorado, Washington and California would depress cartel profits by as much as 30 per cent. A 2010 Rand Corp study of what would happen if just California legalised suggests a more modest fall-out. Using consumption in the US as the most useful measure, its authors posit that marijuana accounts for perhaps 25 per cent of the cartels’ revenues. The cartels would survive losing that, but still. “That’s enough to hurt, enough to cause massive unemployment in the illicit drugs sector,” says [fellow at the Mexico Institute at the Wilson Center David] Shirk. Less money for cartels means weaker cartels and less capacity to corrupt the judiciary and the police in Mexico with crumpled bills in brown envelopes. Crimes like extortion and kidnappings are also more easily tackled. …
Mr Shirk puts it this way. If you ask enforcement folk how large a dent their interdiction efforts – seizures, arrests, helicopter raids and so on – actually have on cartel earnings, they will say between 5 and 10 per cent. But just few states embracing legal cannabis may end up robbing them of two to five times that amount.
Zack Beauchamp digs into the RAND study:
There are some questions as to whether reducing drug revenue would actually reduce terrorist violence.
The RAND researchers, for instance, suggest Mexican cartel violence might actually increase in the short term as gangs struggled over scarcer resources. However, the best historical analogy RAND could uncover — the American mafia post-prohibition — suggests the long-term reduction in violence could be enormous. Like cartels, the mafia engaged in all sorts of profitable illegal enterprises beyond the illegal intoxicant racket, the loss of alcohol revenue was seemingly devastating for the mafia. Homicides declined rapidly after the repeal of prohibition; “plausibly,” RAND’s researchers write, “a large share of that decline was accounted for by fewer killings in the bootlegging trade.”
Previous Dish on the topic here. Meanwhile, Nik Steinberg writes about the tremendous power of drug cartels in Mexico and the epidemic of people who simply “disappear”:
[T]here is no single explanation for why so many people have gone missing in Mexico’s drug war, or for what has happened to them. I have spent over three years investigating more than 300 disappearances across 11 Mexican states for Human Rights Watch. I’ve found that, if these disappearances share anything in common, it is that the government has done almost nothing to try to find the missing. And it has consistently failed to pursue the obvious lines of evidence that, in case after case — including Israel Arenas Durán’s — point to collusion between the cartels and the very soldiers and police sent to combat them.
Recent Dish on the drug war’s devastating violence here and here.
The Dish 