CHICAGO — As Mexico’s descent into the maelstrom of drug-sponsored gang warfare pushes cartel murders and kidnappings into the U.S., a basic policy question lingers:
Would the legalization of marijuana curb Mexican drug violence and enhance U.S. national security?
In a Wednesday afternoon speech, Peter Bensinger, former administrator of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, dismissed the notion that marijuana legalization would curtail the carnage spurred by Mexican drug cartels. “Legalizing marijuana will not solve this problem,” said Bensinger at a discussion of the Mexican drug war and U.S. security, sponsored by the Chicago-based National Strategy Forum.
But, value-laden judgments aside, it’s hard to imagine how a legalized pot would not deal a blow to the violent capabilities of Mexican gangs.
“The threat will be significantly reduced from an American perspective,” said Juan Carlos Hildago, project coordinator for Latin America with the Washington-based Cato Institute, of the legislative hypothetical.
Mexican cartels make an estimated $25 billion to $30 billion each year off a ravenous U.S. drug demand – nearly 50 percent of which stems from the black-market marijuana trade, Hidalgo said. That windfall has sponsored a violent war, where kidnapping and murder extend into U.S.-Mexico border cities. In Mexico, Bensinger said, federal officials face the abject choice of “lead or silver” – death or money – from deep-pocketed drug lords.
“If marijuana were legalized here in the United States, they will face serious drop in revenue,” Hidalgo said.
While Bensinger said the unmitigated violence among Mexican drug gangs – along with its requisite spillover into the United States – represented “a serious threat to American national security,” he claimed pot legalization would have a negligible affect on cartel operations.
“I don’t think much. No,” he said in a phone interview after his speech, adding that the potency and age regulations that would accompany any legalization law would actually enhance the booming illicit drug market. “You’ll find that people will be offered the relatively less potent pot, and will want a more potent product,” he said.
“That scenario is not backed by any sort of experience in the past,” said Hildago. “When alcohol was re-legalized here in the United States, most of the mobsters went out of business.”
The U.S. government has committed extensive resources to fight the epidemic of cartel violence. In March 2009, the Obama administration added $700 million to the Merida Initiative, a $1.4 billion counterdrug security agreement between the two countries signed by former President George W. Bush.
But the initiative, according to a paper by Dr. Hal Brands of the Strategic Studies Institute, “suffers from a basic lack of balance,” with primary emphasis on internal security, enforcement and interdiction – what Brands characterized as a myopic “supply-side approach.”
Bensinger, too, highlighted the need for a holistic strategy to combat the cartels, including changing the geographic shortcoming of Mexican prosecutor deployment, which is centralized in Mexico City, and addressing U.S. demand. “It’s our appetite for this product that’s driving the violence,” he said.
In January, a former Mexican foreign minister called for the drug’s legalization in an effort to break the cartels, CNN reported.
Legalization would certainly not dissolve the cartels, Hidalgo said, and opportunities would remain in the heroin and methamphetamine trade. Neither would recourse to violence be stamped out. “These are organizations that are highly cannibalistic,” he said. “We might see more violence.”
But from a U.S. security perspective, the threat would be subjugated. “The capability to buy guns and weaponry will be reduced dramatically,” Hidalgo said.
The prospect for legalization, however, is unlikely. “Marijuana legalization, for any purpose, remains a non-starter in the Obama Administration,” stated R. Gil Kerlikowske, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, in an October letter. “It isn’t even on the agenda.”
