By Dave Anderson:
I just want to quote from the Slate review of Okrent's book on Prohibition for a moment:
Capone was only 25 when he tortured his way to running Chicago's underworld. He was gone from the city by the age of 30 and a syphilitic corpse by 40. But he was an eloquent exponent of his own case, saying simply, "I give to the public what the public wants. I never had to send out high pressure salesmen. Why, I could never meet the demand."
By 1926, he and his fellow gangsters were making $3.6 billion a year�in 1926 money! To give some perspective, that was more than the entire expenditure of the U.S. government. The criminals could outbid and outgun the state. So they crippled the institutions of a democratic state and ruled, just as drug gangs do today in Mexico, Afghanistan, and ghettos from South Central Los Angeles to the banlieues of Paris.
The illegal drug trade over the US-Mexico border does not threaten to generate more revenue than the US government takes in over a year. However, the drug cartels have revenue that is about an eighth of the Mexican government total annual expenditures. That is a level of funding sufficient to compete for primary loyalties and degrade the effectiveness of governance due to corruption.
The easiest way to beat or at least engage in significant harm reduction and mitigation of the cartels is to destroy their cash flow. If the black market in at least marijuana is destroyed by legalization in the United States, the cartels lose half their cash flow. Losing half their cash flow means they have a much smaller base of revenue to cover their fixed costs which means significantly less money to corrupt civil society. It also means a more concentrated anti-cocaine, anti-heroin, anti-meth effort as Mexican and US government assets that were previously working on weed cases could focus on the harder drugs. Defensive legalization is a way to avoid a temporary autonomous smuggling zone on the south bank of the Rio Grande. It is also a way to significantly decrease the bloodshed and violence in Northern Mexico as well.
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