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[Order Daniel Greenfield’s new book, Domestic Enemies: HERE.]
Six years after California legalized marijuana, the bodies keep piling up. Earlier this year, six men were murdered in the Mojave desert. Four of the Latino men had been burned after being shot with rifles. In 2020, seven people were killed at an illegal pot operation in Riverside County.
Violence like this was supposed to disappear after legalization. Legalization advocates argued that making the drug trade legal would end the grip of the cartels. Instead the legal market has failed and the cartels are taking over sizable parts of California and the rest of the country.
California’s legal drug revenues have fallen consistently as have those in other legal drug states including Colorado whose model helped sell the idea that drug money would fix everything.
Despite falling revenues, Colorado legislators brag about $282 million in drug revenue. That number may sound high, but it’s a drop in the bucket considering the money that the state and cities like Denver are spending on homelessness, drug overdoses and law enforcement.
While the legal drug business is also collapsing in California, the state is spending a fortune fighting marijuana even as it tries to tax it. Gov. Gavin Newsom paradoxically promised to close the budget deficit with $100 million in drug revenue meant to be used to fund law enforcement and fight substance abuse. The state seized over $300 million in illegal pot this year and uses satellite imagery and heavily armed raids to fight untaxed marijuana.
But despite all those efforts, illegal marijuana has won and legal marijuana has lost.
“Proposition 64, California’s 2016 landmark cannabis initiative, sold voters on the promise a legal market would cripple the drug’s outlaw trade, with its associated violence and environmental wreckage. Instead,” the Los Angeles Times warned two years ago. “The law triggered a surge in illegal cannabis on a scale California has never before witnessed.”
Some of the growers are private citizens, but they aren’t likely to remain in business for long.
The paper described “rogue cultivation centers” that “engulf rural communities scattered across the state, as far afield as the Mojave Desert, the steep mountains on the North Coast, and the high desert and timberlands of the Sierra Nevada” where residents describe “living in fear next to heavily armed camps”.
Cartels and gang members dominate the business. And open borders allowed them to bring massive numbers of laborers to boost their ranks. Not only California, but places as far afield as Maine that have large open areas and limited law enforcement resources, have been overrun by drug operations that more closely resemble parts of Latin America and Asia than the USA.
The coasts, from Southern California up to Oregon, are controlled by Mexican cartels which have expanded so much that they’re running short of workers even during the Biden open borders boom. Some have taken to brazenly advertising for illegal workers in Europe.
A local California DA described “Mexican cartel groups coming up to grow pot, and people from Bulgaria, France and Russia.” The vast exodus across the border has made it possible for cartels to freely bring in any workers they want through even as drug legalization and open borders effectively ended any real penalties for either illegal migration or marijuana.
Asian organized crime may be less on the radar, but it is no less ruthless or violent.
A few years ago, four Chinese people were murdered at an Oklahoma illegal pot farm. Chinese organized crime had “taken over marijuana in Oklahoma and the United States,” the head of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs revealed.
Once again, “the mafias set their sights on Oklahoma when the state’s voters approved a ballot measure that legalized the cultivation and sale of marijuana for medicinal purposes.” Now the Triads run their own compounds “ringed by fences, surveillance cameras and guards with guns and machetes” with 3,000 illegal grows estimated at as high as $44 billion a year.
The Triads are not just in the illegal marijuana business, they traffic in everything from heroin to fentanyl. Legalizing marijuana however provided them with a profitable and semi-legal market that gives them a base to expand their efforts trafficking in even more lethal drugs.
Drug legalization has failed on every level. The legal drug business is collapsing. MedMen, which once promised to be the Apple of weed, fell from a $3 billion valuation to a bankruptcy with $411 million in liabilities. Despite the green crosses and online apps, 80% of Californian’s pot is still the old-fashioned illegal kind. Politicians may be boasting about hundreds of millions in revenue, but the cartels are making tens of billions and they’re taking over entire forests.
The future isn’t pot shops, weed apps or MedMen: it’s Mexican and Chinese organized crime compounds that are spreading across the West and parts of New England like a plague.
Legalization advocates still argue that if the government lowered the high taxes on legal pot, the business model could turn around again, but even without a single penny in taxes, no amount of legal labor is going to be able to compete with illegal aliens smuggled across the border and forced to work for free by gunmen. Legal businesses can’t compete with organized crime.
Drug legalization increased homelessness and drug abuse. It boosted illegal migration and organized crime. It made life worse in every state and city where it’s been tried without delivering tangible benefits to anyone (including weed users who still get theirs the old-fashioned way) except for a few politicians who temporarily have a few million more to pass around to special interests, donors and lobbyists.
And all they had to do was hand over half the country to organized crime.
Why is illegal pot more popular? Cheaper? You’d think users would pay extra for a little quality control.
I would hope that legal drugs are only sold to adults, the problem is, dealers don’t care about age, they use cannabis to encourage kids into the drug habit claiming that it is harmless fun but almost every homeless smack head starts with pot.
I think you’re on to something.
Tobacco is a legal product, and endlessly harassed.
With pot kept on a semi-illegal standing, it has the added bonus that lawyers are denied filing massive law suits as they did in 1998, and don’t get hauled before congress to answer questions about “marketing to children”.
Cannabis is NOT harmless. Researchers have correlated heavy use with mental illness, and some say it causes it. Cannabis also lowers IQ by as much as 7% in heavy users.
Most users start in adolescence – a time when they should be building their mental and physical skills.
You should see some of the “peer-reviewed” medical research journals. The abstract will preface the research paper with “we understand that unregulated marijuana is considered a safe recreational and used for a number of medical conditions” then throw the hammer down on all the proven short-term and long-term harm marijuana does. It’s a farce.
Marijuana, psychedelics, and other drugs corrupt the minds of many of its users.
These drugs should never be legalized.
America’s political elites have gone berserk themselves.
I have no doubts that the teacher’s unions will soon be recommending the use of marijuana in the classroom in order to enhance student learning.
Remember $10 five finger lids? All Mexican. Kilos by the truckload. THEN, in the War of Drugs, Just say No, the brilliant U.S. government sprayed PARAQUAT on the Mexican fields. Rememer that? One toke, cough, cough, cough. (“I didn’t inhale.”)
What did that do? You then had to upgrade to COLUMBIAN, now $35-$40 a lid. Very expensive in the day but now the only way. Columbian cocaine was for the rich people and rare. THEN THE COLUMBIANS, who imported kilos of pot, figured out that a kilo of cocaine was more profitable and just as easy to import as pot.
ON AND ON…. LEADING TO TODAY’S PROBLEMS, ADDICTINGS, ZOMBIES, HOMELESSNESS, CRIME, …. SO… BLAME THE U.S. GOVERNMENT AND THEIR BRILLIANT IDEA TO SPRAY PARAQUAT!
“Legalize Marijuana and tax it and we’ll fund our schools.” LOL, WITH STONED OUT KIDS??? (I have a friend, no really it’s not me, whose oven, freezer stopped working, and needed new tires. “CAN’T AFFORD IT!” Then he buys the vapors, gummies, grams of pot, and POOF…. $$$ UP IN SMOKE!) My point: How much in taxes is paid for ALL the people involved for making appliances, tires, products, delivery/their vehicles, salesmen…… MORE THAN TAXES FOR DRUGS and something to show for it! NOW, A BUNCH OF STONED ZOMBIES WHO DON’T WANT TO WORK WORTHWHILE JOBS AND CAN’T MOST OF TIME DUE TO DRUG TESTS!
Little known outside of California is that fact that the Mexican drug cartels grow their marijuana right here is California in remote areas of the forests in northern California (ideal weather and soil conditions.)
Moreover, the Cartel enforcers who oversee the growing operations are better armed and local law enforcement are to small to amount an effective force to thwart the cartels who have no problems with killing anyone who gets in their way.
The cartels also have their own intelligence sources and seem to always know when state and local law enforcement are preparing to mount a large raid on their growing operations.
Usually by the time law enforcement show up, the cartel enforcers are long gone and the only people to be found are the workers the cartels bring in to harvest the crops. The workers know better than to rat out the cartels.
Mexican drug cartels are notorious for going to a home and killing everyone there just because someone there or a relative pissed them off.
You’re kidding, right?
California Legalized Dope and Want t o Ban Guns typical liberal Democratic stupidity. I can still remember the anti Drugs ad WHY DO YOU THINK THEY CALL IT DOPE?!
I remember those ads too. Marijuana wrecked a life very near and dear to mine.
The police used to call it “Loco Weed” 🙂
The tetm also turns up in westerns and horse stories.
The government did something and it had the opposite effect?
That’s hard to believe.
/sarc
Correction ….
….. it is not hard to believe that the government implements policies and programs that evolve to harm the very people it is supposed to help.
What a disgrace.
Actually the Mexican cartels took it over before legalization, but points taken.
Good point, but I think what Daniel is revealing here is that the open border and de facto collusion by the Biden regime have allowed the cartels to scale their operations massively and expand their reach. The Democrat Party, the Biden regime, and their enablers in both parties are turning the U.S. into another failed narco state where leftist ideology and drug cartel revenues are corrupting not just the justice system but other foundational institutions of the Republic. Look to the failed narco-terrorist states of Latin America as well as the Middle East for a preview of where this is headed.
That’s what I was wondering. What is the purpose, here? If the governments of various states really wanted to shut down these illegal narco farms, they could easily send in an armed force with sufficient firepower to wipe them, and the leaders, out. There wouldn’t even be that much of a political cost, nationally, and possibly some gain. Something else appears to be at work.
Yup. Profits and favours to those state ,minions that are in collusion with the illegal parts of the industry. Favours are bought, the sellers profit immensely, things continue on. The “legalisation” of the weed industry is an YOOOOOOGE farce. Its pay to play all the way. Its nust that now many of the key operators are driving about in stte owned cars with different livery on their sides. Same game, different players.
The drug cartels in Mexico and the USA could be permanently wiped out in a few weeks if the state and federal governments chose to do it.
They deliberately chose not to wipe out the drug pushers and manufacturers.
What is going on here ?
The USA is becoming more like corrupt cesspool Mexico …
politically and socially and culturally.
America is now in deep trouble because of its elite ruling class and political leaders.
99% of American politicians benefit directly or indirectly from illegal drugs!
As a California resident, I’m well aware of the many pot farms here and of the environmental damage they cause. They exist IMO because those who are tasked to search and destroy them are being paid not to. It’s a problem of very deep and very wide corruption at the highest levels.
Shithead politicians can shrug off that these low-lifes are pouring in across the border, because they know their posh enclaves will remain untainted (Martha’s Vineyard took less than 48 hours to eject Venezuelan illegals.)
Were these tattooed thugs to start moving into their gated palisades, pricks like Bush, Biden, Hillary & Hollywood celebrities would shriek & howl
(Remember Cher’s hysterical reaction when Trump threatened to send illegals to California?)
It’s sort of an understanding; illegals are to be dumped in our neighborhoods only.
LET’S HIRE El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, who took one of the most dangerous countries in the world, to one of its safest by AN ALL-OUT ASSAULT ON CRIME!
Let’s recall that the Democratic Party supported and funded Communist Sandinista Daniel Ortega, still ruling since 1979 and who arrests all political opponents, “as a threat to our Democracy!” (Sound familiar?) At the same time they were screaming, “NO CONTRA AID!” they were funding CPUSA/KGB fronts like CISPES led by Farid Handel whose brother Shafik, was head of the Communist Party and the Communist FMLN rebels. “EL SALVADOR IS SPANISH FOR VIETNAM!” While supporting THE U.S. PEACE COUNCIL, an affiliate of the World Peace Council, run by the KGB, and screaming for PEACE, they started the Sanctuary Movement which led to what they labeled as “DISAPPEARED!” YES, TO THE U.S. where they turned them into Modern Day Slaves! (NM Governor Toney Anaya declared the first sanctuary state and talked into it by the local NM Peace Council whose head led the NM Marxist Educators for Socialist Action. I talked to Anaya to inform him of the CPUSA/KGB fronts and he had his mind made up before the decision. I also talked to Alfredo Cristiani, the President of El Salvador, and informed him of the Democratic Party funding of CISPES, The Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, and Ron Dellums (CA-D) who directed it from his DC office. The next week, he imposed a travel ban of all Americans entering the rebel zones to aid them!)
THIS EL SALVADOREAN SUPPORT BY DEMOCRATS LED TO WHAT WE’RE DEALING WITH TODAY: MS-13 and their inaction on other known violent gangs. Our DEA, FBI, DHS, CIA should meet with El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele. (In an interview with Tucker, Bukele said other countries are seeking his advice so why not ours….. OOPS… THE ONES IN THESE AGENGIES SUPPORTED CPUSA/KGB FRONTS IN THE ’80S AND NOW HAVE TAKEN OVER ALL DEPARTMENTS THANKS TO A CPUSA/KGB DUPE…. BARACK OBAMA!
I would fear for Bukele’s safety were he to meet with the alphabet agencies.
Tucker Carlson interviews El Salvador President Nayib Bukele: Seeking God’s Wisdom, Taking Down MS-13 (https://youtu.be/U5n8R9lq8SI?si=QOLEMKbquqw78Ui7) President Bukele says MS13 is gone from El Salvador. El Salvador is where MS13 started! Where is MS13 operating? Freely in USA due to the puppet masters of the stooge puppet whore Joe Biden’s open borders! Also in Mexico. But no longer in El Salvador. We got lethal problems since the coup d’etat installed Joe Biden to poop his pants on the world stage. Joe Biden is a treasonous criminal along with a network of other elected officials and other USA citizens involved with them. Although the roots of the coup d’etat is global, and will never be brought to justice unless the world’s governing organizations put out arrest warrants for them. That won’t happen as that global governing body are in the network of graft, corruption, money laundering and bringing down USA.. They’re the ones who put out arrest warrant for Israeli PM Bibi Netanyahu for defending his nation and his citizens. (lozrfr-zatan) is having his finest hours in this era’s generations! Truly, this is how Bible prophesy is unfolding like a child’s pop-up book!
Commies have no grasp of even basic capitalism. They have unnecessarily made legal pot more expensive than “illegal” pot. What has happened is natural . Duh !
I think you’re on to something. Politicians – especially Democrats – just can’t resist more taxes. Therefore, it does no good to legalize drugs and then levy taxes on them, making an illegal black market as inevitable as it would be if the drugs were still illegal.
Although I know that Daniel and many other conservatives favor drug prohibition, that policy guarantees the involvement of organized crime and also heavy-handed law enforcement tactics such as no-knock raids. Surely legalization without taxation is a better approach, as it would cut out the gangster middle-man.
Florida has marijuana legalization on the 2024 ballot, Amendment 3. The proponents are using the same propaganda California and Colorado did when they pushed legalization. There is no effective opponent showing what is really happening once marijuana is legalized.
Smoking pot turns people into democrats, if they can remember to vote.
Is there any difference between the democrat party cartel and the Mexican cartels? Both are violent, vicious and completely lawless.
We still live in a mostly free country but freedom has it’s limits. My view on drug use is that it’s none of my business if a person uses drugs. I lack the prerequisite self righteousness to go around moralizing about what a person should and shouldn’t do with their personal liberty and freedom and their own body.
(Personally, I think body piercings and tattoos is disgusting and hideous but it’s none of my business.)
As long as the exercising of their own liberty and freedom hurts only them and doesn’t impose upon me in any way, what do I care? It’s their life. If they want to ruin it by using drugs, who am I to say they can’t? It’s none of my business. I have better things to do and more important matters to be concerned about.
To put it bluntly, the onus is on them to not make it my business. Make it my business and I’ll regard you as a dangerous rabid animal that needs to be put down permanently asap for the good of society.
The only thing that is going to work is for a religious revival to sweep the nation. There are too many Americans who care more about cheap weed than they do the survival of their nation. I view them as traitors.
“All evil requires is the sanction of its victims.” –Ayn Rand–
The US population is literally being poisoned by Mexican narco-terror cartel factions main lining Chinese synthetic opioids and heroin derivatives across the wide open US southwestern border. The CDC itself claims that between November 2019 to October 2023 there has been over 270,000+ overdose deaths from Chinese fentanyl synthetic compounds averaging at 80,000 deaths a year!
What kind of a sick, morally debased country and its pathetic excuse for government puts up with this outright proxy drug war and narco terror campaign being waged against it by the narco terror state Mexico and China? Why does it happen? Because Democrats and liberal progressives have always loved their illicit drugs and recreational pharmaceuticals more than America ever loved its guns.
When I read California’s proposed pot legalisation bill I KNEW it would be an utter failure. Two reasons:
first the outrageous tax structure. CAlifornia have one of the lowest alcohol tax rates in the nation. And the highest tax on pot in the nation.
Are there issues with msuse of booze? Absolutely. Is it a billion dollar a year government issue? Nope. Drive drunkm get arrested and jailed. Alcohol is prohibited to those uder 21, cigarrettes under 18. Simple.Are these abused? Yes, but its not a major issue.
When the tax rate s so putrageous it WILL be ignored. They also put a very restrictive set of rules, permits, regulations, etc on the “legal” pot scene. So onerous fully two thirds of the pot sold statewide was “off lis” circmventing the state system entirely.
Had they made cultivaion anddistribution of pot similar to that of, say, chickens or tomatoes, there would BE no statewide mess like there is oday. Sure, limite age distribution, and make supplying underage a crime.. just as with alcohol and tobacco. No big deal. But the state had to come in and play Nannie, regulate the industry to death, make it so outrageously complicatd, expesive, impossible to comply the underground market thrives… and ignores all moral aspects of the product.
washingto did much the same thing. I know folks who grew before it was “legalised”. Simple.. lay low, watch to whom you sell, no big deal. Once the state system was put into place the wole industry is a mess.. privae home grows are common, but small. Other rules are so stupid.why cnnot the normal banking/credit/security ssytem in place for, say, vacuum cleaners, not suffice? But no. tis is MAREEHOOOOTCHEE wso we MUST micromanage it, restruct, etc. All transactions mus be in cash de to silly banking regulations. That means gobs of greenbacks IN THE STORE. Bumping a pot store is far too common. Saff can’t be armed because of fed regs, some are anyway. Money has to be taken in cash by rprivate car, but those in the car cannot be armed due to “spayshul rools”. They can haul booe in the car along with guns, but not pot.,SO.. a second car, no pot but two or kore armed security folk follow the money car. Can’ get credit, can’t use credtit cards.. SO many aspects of the bisiness are “spayshull” it becomes its own corupt clandestine speakeasy sort of gig.
I do not use the stuff, disapprove its use.. yet I am NOT gong to tak a stand and say jo one else can. I would not hire an employee who regularly uses the stuff. I want his body AND HIS MIND to be dedicated wilst he is in my employ.
All these rules and regs lead directly to control by underground and crrrupt criminal actives. Until the stuff s made a “normal” product and not treated as a fa cash cow for the state, regulated into oblivion, it will continue to be a crime-plagued debacle.
Remove it from Sched ! classification as it is NOT Shed 1 t all. Make it legal, lie cigarrettes and alcohol, but with some rational restrictions. Let it “come out of the closet” and be normalised. THEN here would be no space for the criminal element.
When is the last time we read about the criminal kingpins of, say, coffee or shingles or used car sales been a sugnficant culture wide issue? Of course… never.
Sure, the odd creep in the used car business comes along, but they never last because of he far larger perscentage of hnest and uprght dealrs overshadoes the dirtbgs.
Whenever government throw a noose round n issue and draw it tight, the criminal element always rises up and becomes a massive player.So what else is new?
I hope this is not too off-topic. Years ago, an acquaintence lent me a book entitled “The Unseen Hand”. Its thesis was that all events in modern history were controlled by five factors – international banking, international corporate comerce, international militarism, the international intelligence community, and organized crime. The opposing thumb of the hand was international banking becaused it touched (financed) all the others. At the time I thought this guy had too many nuts in his granola. But considering the path history has taken – the money laundering scandals involving major international banks (HSBC), the destruction of our border and now the brazen pot farming affecting communities and ecosystems, the killings and the lack of prosecutions, I’ve begun to wonder if he was right.
As the saying goes, “Follow the money.” So the first question should be who funds these farms, these community take-overs? Why is the FBI busting J6ers but not MS13 gangsters? Why isn’t this is a security issue on steroids? And why has our border remained wide-open for more than three years? I fear if we follow the money it may lead to some very troubling places. I hope I’m wrong.
Alcohol and Cigarettes kill more people every year than ALL the drugs combined and yet those two are 100% Legal..
The weed being produced and smoked today is nothing like the Weed we all smoked in the 1960-70s as the stuff today is so powerful its just silly.
Legalizing was a good idea but the States messed it up.
If you ask a Drunk Bum in Skid Row what was the first alcohol he ever drank the answer would probably be…”A Bud Light”.. therefore Bud Light leads to alcoholism and we must blame the Busch Brewery.
If you ask a Heroin Junkie what was the first drug he ever took it would be Beer and Weed and nobody wants to ban Beer.
Personal responsibility is not the business of the Government… Everything in moderation.. even moderation.
I live in California and out Governor is a total Moron