Pot legalization could stop Mexican cartels

Alternet.org:

The Mexican drug war that has taken the lives of 28,000 people over the past four years could conceivably come to an end if California votes to legalize marijuana.

The Mexican drug war that has taken the lives of 28,000 people over the past four years could conceivably come to an end if California votes to legalize marijuana, say prominent American and Mexican policy makers.

Hector Aguilar Camín, editor of the Mexican magazine Nexos, and Jorge G. Castaneda, a former Mexican foreign minister and current lecturer at NYU, write in a Washington Post column that Mexican drug gangs could see their revenue drop 60 percent if marijuana was no longer a contraband item.

"As their immense profits shrank, the drug kingpins would be deprived of the almost unlimited money they now use to fund recruitment, arms purchases and bribes," they write.

Camin and Castaneda's arguments join those of the former Republican governor of New Mexico, Gary E. Johnson, who wrote at the FireDogLake blog Friday that marijuana decriminalization is "probably the only practical way to weaken the drug cartels."

America’s policy for almost 70 years has been to keep marijuana -- arguably no more harmful than alcohol and used by 15 million Americans every month -- confined to the illicit market, meaning we’ve given criminals a virtual monopoly on something that US researcher Jon Gettman estimates is a $36 billion a year industry, greater than corn and wheat combined," Johnson wrote.

Last week, the California Council of Churches IMPACT, which claims to represent 21 denominations with 1.5 million worshipers, officially endorsed California's Proposition 19, the ballot initiative that could see the state become the first in the Union to decriminalize marijuana by popular decree.

“The prohibition of marijuana has failed," Rev. Dr. Rick Schlosser, Executive Director of the California Council of Churches IMPACT, said in a statement. "It’s created a culture of criminality around a substance that is less harmful than both alcohol and tobacco, which are both legal, controlled, and taxed. Let’s control marijuana like alcohol by passing Proposition 19 in November.”

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