If the US decriminalizes drugs, what happens to the Mexican and Columbian

[hedgehog]

drug cartels?

[Hawkeye-X]

1. My guess that they turn into real companies....

[Somawas]

5. You mean like

Pfizer and Bristol-Myers-Squibb? Or more like Phillip Morris and Brown and Williamson?

[jmowreader]

11. More like the cigarette companies

The medicine companies have to do Actual Research to find new medicines, maintain complex processes for manufacturing, etc., etc., etc. The cigarette companies shred tobacco, spray stuff on it (mainly flavorings) and roll it into cigarettes.

How much research will a pot company have to do?

[High Plains]

9. And all the young men retailing on the street corner in the inner cities?

Forward looking anti-prohibitionists need to ponder such things. Seriously.

[jmowreader]

13. Chong discussed this in "Next Movie"

Chong played a pot dealer who could only sell weed to himself. (No one ever accused Cheech and Chong movies of being realistic.) He said he figured pot was going to be legal some day. "And all these other guys, they won't know how to do it and I'll have a job."

[The_Casual_Observer]

2. Might as well speculate what will happen when we nationalize

the oil companies.

[Cleita]

3. They go out of business or

they may have to go legit, you know with regulations, paying taxes etc.. Same thing happened with many of the bootleggers after prohibition.

[Spock_is_Skeptical]

4. yep

I wish they would just decriminalize everything, just get it over with.

[muntrv]

6. They either become legitimate companies or they get out of the business.

[backscatter712]

7. The same thing that happened to Al Capone's bootleggers...

They went legit, went broke or found another racket to make money on. A few rum-runners, bootleggers and moonshiners kept going just for sport or because illicit moonshine was cheaper than legal taxed booze.

Certainly put a cramp on their style after Prohibition was repealed though...

[Yavin4]

8. Drugs Will Never Be Legalized

Too many people making too much money off of it being illegal on both sides of the drug war from the drug cartels to the prison industry.

Keeping drugs illegal employs:

Street dealers
cops
DAs
Wardens
Prison guards
farmers
drug runners
bankers
money launderers
politicians

[Selatius]

10. You forgot shareholders who hold stock in companies that run and build prisons.

The best way to increase shareholder value for these companies is to pass more mandatory minimum sentencing laws. The more people can be sent to private prisons, the more money the private prison gets from the government. It's the same relationship arms manufacturers have with the government. More war, more contracts, more money.

This is why getting busted for weed can land you in prison.

[Echo In Light]

12. Exactly. How sad is it that incarcerating pot smokers is a "growth indestroy" in the U.S.?

[Beacool]

14. Colombian not Columbian.

Columbia is the university, Colombia is the country.

Sorry, it's a pet peeve of mine. It drives me crazy to see that common error.

As for your question, nothing they keep trucking along. The US may decriminalize pot some day, but never heroin or cocaine.

:D

[windoe]

15. I think the cartels, who are into profit

would turn to bootlegging something else, if not pot then cocaine or some other product. There are many things to pick from.

Legalization would create the space in jails we need for the real criminals, who will need a place to go after we impeach and indict them.