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"It's vegetables. For the children."

This is where many of you immediately start talking about legalization, and it's true that, as we've learned from states where marijuana has already been decriminalized, consumers prefer to buy their drugs from people who aren't psychopathic murderers. It's estimated that legalization in Colorado and Washington will cut around $3 billion from annual cartel profits, so in a very real way, legal dispensaries are a powerful weapon against the cartels.

But before you start talking about legalizing everything, keep this in mind: The cartels are currently on the receiving end of up to $30 billion in annual drug sales to the United States. According to the DEA, as much as $10 billion of that is shipped across the Arizona/Mexico border alone. What do you think would happen if that revenue stream suddenly dried up? Would all drug-related violence in Mexico come to a complete stop, or would the cartels start fighting for control of the entire country? These people aren't going to shrug it off and get day jobs -- it would be like the last scene of Scarface, only spread across all of Mexico.

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At least the neon globe statue market would be thriving.

I'm obviously not saying we should keep fighting the war on drugs because the poor cartels need the money -- I'm saying that it's naive to assume anything we do north of the border can make them go peacefully into the night. The war on drugs should be about minimizing the negative impact of drugs on our communities. If the greatest reduction of that impact comes from legalizing certain drugs, then let's do that right now. But it's not as black and white as many people seem to think. For example, if marijuana were legalized tomorrow, do you think the cartels wouldn't be smart enough to find a way to carve themselves a piece of that revenue (or that they haven't already)? Hell, cigarettes are legal, and there's still a worldwide $100 billion black market just from people looking to avoid taxes.