Marijuana is once again topical in Spain. Not on the streets, where it never went out of style, but in Congress. This week two parliamentary groups, Más País and ERC, presented two bills to regularize their cultivation and consumption beyond medicinal use. The initiative by Errejón It has been particularly popular, although Unidos Podemos had already explored similar reforms in the past. Reactions, as always, have been found.
But what happens if you legalize it?
One factor: crime. A few years ago we addressed the economic angle of regularization in this article. Today is the turn of crime, the other great problem associated with drug use. Since Nixon declared “the war on drugs” fifty years ago, the shadow of violence has distorted the political debate around legalization. Marijuana and other substances are associated with dangerous levels of crime for society. The response of all countries has always been the same: banish it from the legal until it does not exist.
Cannabis legalization policies in 🇺🇸 have managed to reduce the profitability of this drug, by moving from a black market to a legal one.
And this generated a collateral effect: the violence associated with this drug was reduced in Mexico, due to the lower illegal traffic. pic.twitter.com/LOZ8vbwuUH
– Juan Luis Jiménez (@JuanLuis_JG) September 30, 2021
The problem. Only a thick veil was drawn on a problem that never ceased to exist. The toll was paid by poor producing countries (Mexico and Colombia, two of the most dangerous states in the world even today) and by the communities most affected by drug trafficking, either in the impoverished neighborhoods of Baltimore or Chicago… Or on the border between the United States and Mexico. This is where the violence has been most intense for decades, and where this study that concerns us today comes in.
Downward. Published in 2019, the work took advantage of the recent wave of regulation in the United States (both medicinal and recreational) to compare border violence before and after legalizations. The result was clear: the creation of a legal marijuana market created once-non-existent competition for drug trafficking, which depressed its profitability. As traffic from Mexico to the United States declined, the violence associated with their activity also subsided. Those municipalities or counties closest to the border benefited the most.
The logic. Emerging from underground, the marijuana business was subjected to different regulations (quality controls, supervised distribution, transparent suppliers, taxes). This triggered its price … But it also improved its qualities and reduced the risk for producers and sellers. People preferred to go to the corner store than to go to the corner of the most dangerous neighborhood in Denver, Colorado (where more than 200,000 people already work for the sector).
The demand for substances imported from Mexico (less fresh, more dangerous) fell. The illicit business dwindled.
In figures. Today we know that the border states that legalized marijuana only for medicinal use reduced their crime rate between 7% (Arizona) and 15% (California) between 1994 and 2012. What is even more interesting: the Mexican border states , where the substance is not legal and where the world’s leading cartels operate, also benefited from 13% fewer violent crimes. Traffic-related killings plunged 41%, and the effect was most pronounced among towns within 350 kilometers of the border.
In the authors’ words:
Instead of investing in expensive policies of repression and punishment, politicians should focus on introducing policies that reduce the profitability of drug trafficking. In this regard, legalizing or decriminalizing the production of illicit substances can be an important tool, because it seems unlikely that criminal organizations, whose way of fulfilling their contracts involves violence, will be able to compete with agents who comply with their contracts within the system. judicial.
Progress. In other words, once the State appears, there is no ecosystem that can compete against it. Some countries, like the United States or Canada, have realized this during the last decade. Europe not yet. Spain could be the first large EU country to regulate recreational cannabis use, with all that this implies. Others like Colombia, now focused on the export of cannabis flower, also seem to have understood.
All this goes through a paradigm shift: legalizing consumption does not generate more violence. Generate less.
Image: Axel Schmidt / Reuters