Submitted by James Folsom on Wed, 09/21/2011 - 14:36
You’re a Mexican Drug Lord. You’re making millions growing and shipping marijuana to the United States. You’ve taken the necessary precautions to keep the pesos flowing. You have law enforcement and the Mexican Government on your payroll. In exchange you feed them a low level “employee” and a small shipment they can confiscate for the newspapers. No big deal. All in all, you’ve got it made. Only one thing bothers you. Only one thing can send your operation reeling.
Legalization.
Marijuana legalized? Can this happen? It’s almost happened in California already. If it does happen, what will you do Mr. Drug Lord? Are you going to sit there and take it? You’ve amassed a small army already with those pallet loads of one hundred dollar bills you have stashed in your basement. Maybe it’s time to get serious?
If marijuana becomes legal in the States, that means farmers in rural North Carolina will be growing it. And that’s just the start. You’ll have farms in Hawaii, Florida, Louisiana and California too. Heck, with greenhouses you could see farms all over the US. The US government will be able to tax and regulate it. The price will drop like a rock. There will be no need for you Mr. Drug Lord. No need for your pushers either. You’ll be out of business. At least you’ll be out of the weed business.
Are you going to take this lying down? What can you do? You can try bribery. But how much money will it take to bribe every voter in America? That won’t work. The only thing that has a shot is fear. Fear and intimidation.
So how does the Mexican Drug Lord strike fear into the hearts of Americans. He can’t just declare war on out military. That’s a losing battle. No matter how many men and weapons he can afford, he can’t outspend Uncle Sam.
There is one other way though. Take a lesson from militant Muslims. Terror works wonders with the whole fear and intimidation thing. Americans are still talking about 9-11. That was ten years ago. And those were big city targets. New York and Washington, DC were the targets on that one. Imagine what would happen…
Mexican Drug Lords have shown they have no problem killing innocents. Cities and towns in Mexico have literally given up in the face of the drug cartels. Businesses are taken over. Police departments either bought off or over run. These people are ruthless. Think about what they might do if their livelihood really was seriously threatened.
There could be terror strikes everywhere. Suicide missions? Possibly. If they pay someone’s family enough money, they might be able to persuade some poop Mexican to do it. What would they target? How about high schools, where they used to have a lot of customers, but no more? Or colleges? How easy a place were colleges to peddle their pot?
Many of these high schools and colleges could be in small towns and cities all across the US. Imagine if this happened. People would be afraid to send their children to school. How about stores where legal pot is sold? Could this mean Wal-Mart? Or any grocery chain? Convenience stores? Imagine a Wal-Mart full of shoppers blowing up right before Christmas in small town, USA. What possible effects could this have on the US economy if people were afraid to go shopping?
Ok, this is a little far out there -- but the question remains? Just how will drug cartels respond if we put a serious dent in marijuana sales? Will the focus simply change to cocaine, meth, and heroin -- all three are already there and big business in America. In a way it would be like McDonald's phasing out the Big Mac, because the BK Whopper became too darn popular. McDonald's would still be around, but instead of Big Macs it would keep on pushing it's other offerings.
Precautionary steps?
What should the government be doing should pot become legal? Should they go “pre-emptive” and just send the fighter jets south and bomb all these drug cartels hideouts? That hasn't happened yet and it's just not likely to happen in the future. Don’t try and tell me they don’t know exactly where they are. Of course, this would not look good in the “UN” community. But really, what does that matter? The government’s numero uno job is to protect its citizens. They must do whatever it takes.
This is all speculation of course. But it does give us something to think about when one day this issue is on the ballot when we go in to vote.
What will the cartels do?
Unrealistic
This is a lot of nonsense. If marijuana were legalized, it would be a gradual process and the smuggling of it into this country would gradually decrease and probably disappear.
What this would mean for the cartels, is that they would simply have to focus more energy on other drugs. Marijuana most likely is not their "cashcow" drug anyway. There would not be any reason for increased violence. They would simply switch specialties.
I'm not sure where you did your research, but it seems like most of it was done by watching hyped up tv shows or movies.