“Is Legal Pot Crippling Mexican Drug Trafficking Organizations? The Effect of Medical Marijuana Laws on US Crime.”
We’ll let this highly recommended piece speak for itself, because the factual, now known answer to the question turns out to be – yes…
…Medical cannabis is – for the first time since the Drug Wars began – helping DECREASE cannabis-related violence and money trafficking as demonstrated conclusively in the article. It’s also hurting the cartels.
So please enjoy and share an excellent, instructional read..!
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Meanwhile, here’s more historical background and perspective on the subject.
Effective social policy on psychoactive drugs – has long eluded society.
American’s social experiment in alcohol prohibition had failed in spectacular fashion by 1933. Alcohol had a huge long-term constituency. Millions of Americans really wanted to drink. So they found ways to do so.
Supplying that thirst gave birth to large-scale organized crime, and “the mob” went on to become involved in many illegal enterprises after repeal.
Back in the ’30s, for complex (if illogical) social/political reasons, the government next turned its sights on the less socially engrained, more exotic “marihuana” plant and its agricultural cousin, hemp.
See e.g., http://bit.ly/2mBRPME for a fuller account.
Still, cannabis had its smaller constituency and its underground use continued unabated despite enforcement efforts. However, when Baby Boomers rediscovered the plant in the “psychedelic”1960s, by 1970 the US had upped the ante from simple prohibition to declaring (real) war on on – a plant.
Since then, millions have been jailed, tens of thousands of Mexican innocents have been killed by drug cartel violence, and TRILLIONS of dollars have been spent.
Yet use continued at high levels. And organized (international) crime became bigger than ever.
Cannabis prohibition then, and its absence from the medical pharmacopeia, has been a much larger and more fiscally and socially costly failure than alcohol prohibition ever was.
…Enter state legal medical cannabis, stage left in 1996 in CA…..
…and a growing majority of states have since finally begun to work WITH the plant for the benefit of patients and state budgets, instead of their previously futile attempts to stifle it completely.
Now, while UT reform opponents still argue for more of the same and warn of “unintended consequences,” we have the actual researched answer to the question:
“Medicinal cannabis – so how’s THAT working out?”
And the answer is: Far better than everything tried for all the preceding years – both as social policy and as safe, cost-effective, beneficial medicine.
Click and read! The more you know….
#MMJ #Crime #Cartel #Reform #USpol #CApol #UTpol #TRUCE
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See full article – Legal marijuana cuts violence says US study, as medical-use laws see crime fall
