Drug War Inc. is making a stab at fighting back against the wave of pot legalization that is sweeping the country. Fighting drugs has been big business for decades now so the folks profiting from it are mature businesses and institutions. Millions depend on the never ending war on drugs for their livelihood. If the libertarians are correct and close to half our prison population is in the system for drugs, that’s a million people.
It probably takes that many to keep them in cages. You have the guards, their unions, the union bosses and the vast administrative layer. You have the people who build and maintain the cages. Then you have the cops and courts who chase and process the criminals. They have their suppliers and unions. Fighting the drug war is a multi-billion dollar industry that serves another multi-billion dollar industry, the political class. The politicians have been using the drug war to scare up votes for generations.
One way to justify their existence appears to be the claim that legalization will breed a whole new type of crime that must be fought by Drug War Inc. Certainly, these new businesses, flush with cash, will be targeted by criminals. The same people stealing copper pipe so they can sell it to buy meth will try to break into weed shops, rob the customers and so forth. Simply decriminalizing the buying and selling of weed is not going to change the fact that it is a cash business conducted by low-lifes.
That can be reduced by letting the pot dealers open merchant accounts to take credit cards and bank accounts to deposit their cash. They will need to adopt the same security tactics pawn shops and check cashing operations have adopted. Korean liquor store owners in Baltimore and Washington have solved the problem of running a cash business in black neighborhoods so the pot shops have plenty of examples. The above ground nature of it would then draw in professionals who know how to solve these problems
That’s not going to deter Drug War Inc from making their claims. You can be sure they will be rushing to the nearest news studio with any evidence of new crime arising from the weed shops. I don’t doubt that the black market weed dealers will seek some way to keep their business going and that may include attempts to get in on the act. Talk to any cop working narcotics cases and he’ll tell you that drug dealers like crime. If not for drugs, they would be into some other illegal activity. Criminals will always be with us.
The question is whether they will muscle in on the legal weed business. Organized crime has long been into illegal cigarettes. They steal them and sell them at a discount to convenience stores, but that’s a low level crime. The more profitable venture is to get large quantities from low tax states and send them to high tax states, without paying the tax. When Canada imposed a massive tax on cigarettes in the 1990’s, bootleggers set up shop in upstate New York to smuggle Marlboros and Camels into Canada.
Another way they can get in on the racket is through extortion, but that’s not a great crime these days. America is loaded with cops looking to arrest someone. The value proposition of extortion is just not what it was in the old days. Going into a retail joint and telling them to pay or you break their legs works if the cops are not prepared to intercede. That was the case in the heyday of the Mafia. Today the cops are the protection racket and they will not let anyone muscle in on their turf, so this seems unlikely.
Of course, the other side to this is that it is an example of anarcho-tyranny. Tasked with stopping the flow of drugs, Drug War Inc. eventually turned into a business and then a racket. It lost interest in actually stopping the flow of drugs and instead focused on terrorizing local potheads. Maybe what comes after anarcho-tyranny is just a massive set of institutions that consume resources, but do nothing.
