Weed isn’t “drugs”. Heroin is drugs, crack is drugs, whiskey is drugs. Weed is milk and cookies.
Don’t know about Colorado, but in Washington the legal pot is so expensive that I’m sure the black market is as vigorous as ever.
$20-30 a gram? That’s an average of 700 an ounce for the legal stuff.
As manufacturers’ representatives! 
What happened to all the bootleggers when Prohibition was repealed? I’m sure a lot of them (not all, but a lot) either retired on their proceeds or went out and got a job. I gather that in the 1930’s, having been a bootlegger wasn’t much of a stigma. If anything, you were a hero.
I think we as a society have to take a good hard look at what happened with Prohibition and how the situation with marijuana (at least) is pretty much the same thing. People want it, and people who don’t want it per se don’t think it’s a big deal.
One of the interesting chapters in the first Freakonomics book dealt with street drug dealers and how LITTLE money most of them make!
The bottom line was that a drug ring is very much like a fast food corporation. A coke cartel is like McDonald’s! At the top, you have Pablo Escobar or Ray Kroc making billions. Then you have franchise owners making millions. Then you have middlemen/managers making $50,000 a year. And then you have cashiers/street dealers making minimum wage.
Point being, the guy selling crack on a corner in Harlem is NOT getting rich. His bosses are, but he’s still living with his mother.
To expand on this - in my misspent youth I knew several low-level drug dealers of various sorts: none made serious cash. It may LOOK like serious cash, because they dealt with cash in large amounts; but at the end of the day, it wasn’t very profitable.
Just as bad was running a small-time grow-op for pot. This was not the road to riches it appeared. It was like any other small business in that the expenses had a way of eating up the profits, so that if you actually worked out the ‘wage’ the owners could pay themselves per hour of work, it tended to compare unfavorably with a regular-type job … only, of course, it was illegal, so one ran a serious risk of being chucked in jail and having all your stuff confiscated (and of course there was nothing in the way of benefits).
Assuming there are still controls on drugs, my guess would be undermining those controls like getting painkillers and antibiotics without a doctor’s prescription or marijuana, meth, alcohol and tobacco without paying excise taxes.
And others, I should think, took the money they had made bootlegging and went into some legitimate business.
That is something that is hardly ever mentioned. Prescription drugs like Oxycontin, Valium and others are some of the most heavily abused of all. They have a very high addiction potential and some people never manage to get off of them at all even with the best treatments available. They are also legal today as long as you have a doctor (or more likely, several doctors) writing the prescription(s).
The term 'Drug" doesn’t mean much on its own. We might as well be talking about potential laws to address ‘Chemicals!’. Where do you draw the line? I don’t think it would be a wise move to make morphine available over the counter again even though millions of people would love it but many of those would also either become addicted and require expensive inpatient help to get weened off of it once addicted or they would just die from an overdose. The same thing goes for its illegal cousin heroin. You don’t see a lot of older heroin addicts or even former addicts. There is a reason for that. All it takes is one overdose to stop the whole show for good but many end up committing suicide before it even comes to that even if they didn’t have those tendencies before they started.
Yup, only the “working” types will go legal. Everyone else will continue as normal. However, in “Weeds”, and I have no idea if this is true as this is a sitcom, they mentioned that a legalized store kept a database of names. I imagine there has to be some database of legal users in these states to keep track of what they are using, how much, status, etc. So, that could be a bad thing for anyone involved in Federal contracting until the Fed changes their stance. But, even if they do change their stance that does not mean Federally employed persons (guvvy or contractor) can legally use drugs. I imagine they will not be able to. I still see a reason for underground trade.
A lot of the smart ones, like Meyer Lansky and Charles Luciano, already had legitimate businesses, to serve as cover and launder profits for their illegal enterprises, provide them a veneer of respectability, and to avoid the risks of having all their eggs in one economic basket. They were also diversified in crime, as well: in addition to bootlegging, the New York Syndicate was into numbers, loan-sharking, prostitution and illegal gambling. When the Volstead Act was repealed, they just shifted over to other revenue streams.
I would expect the modern cartels to do the same, should illegal drugs ever cease being profitable.
As was pointed out in Freakanomics, dealing drugs is basically a MLM scheme. Sort of Amway, but with guns. So the mid- and lower-level dealers aren’t smart enough to do anything better. Overall, the crime rate would drop but I doubt it would affect the official employment rate much.
Regards,
Shodan
I think on “Drugs, Inc.” that the legalization in some states caused an uptick to marijuana traffic. The reason being that people can now legally possess marijuana. You can buy yourself whatever quantity legally, and then buy more illegally, the LEO would never know the difference if he stopped you on the street unless you had it all on you or they came to your house with a search warrant.
Just only have the amount on your person that you are legally allowed to have.
I stand corrected. The “working class” looses out. Apparently, that “brick weed” isn’t what the connoisseurs would want anyways.
Maybe, just maybe, the cartels will loose enough power temporarily to allow for the locals to establish partnerships with US companies for manufacturing, etc., and they’ll have a legit job that has decent pay and benefits. That’d be worth legalization right there: stop most incoming smuggling across the board, weak cartels allow for the partnerships, create an economy boom in Mexico resulting in a “trendy-spending-class”, money and jobs galore, and they’ll want out boutique weed… the flow is reversed!
According to what I read in another thread, they become betrothed to washing machines.
They continue to sell drugs illegally because a regulated drug will cost more, have less potency and get a sin tax on top of that.
Yep.
If they change to another crime, given their experience of having other folks doing the work, I should think they would manage prostitutes or have kids doing B&E for them.
drug
drəɡ/
noun: drug;
- a medicine or other substance which has a physiological effect when ingested or otherwise introduced into the body.
Drug users are so picky about how others view their hobby of choice. I heard a heroin user say “Well at least I’m not doing meth.”
but to each his own.