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If the trend continues, New Mexico and the rest of the nation will legalize marijuana within the next few years; and in the long run our children and our grandchildren will ultimately hate us for it.

While many people are characterizing pot legalization as a tax and justice panacea, we don’t know the long-term ramifications of marijuana legalization. Let me give you a prediction based on 31 years in law enforcement, drug intelligence and public safety as well as many years studying this issue.

We already know marijuana use in teenagers and young adults has an adverse effect on brain development. The research is abundant and unequivocal.

Research also shows that greater availability of any substance whether it is alcohol, marijuana, prescription opioids or heroin will result in more people using that substance.

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And please do not give me the argument that legalized marijuana is only intended for people over 21. See how well that worked with alcohol? Marijuana is already rampant to our middle and high schools. Legalization would just make it worse.

No matter how much money marijuana legalization raises in taxes, pot makes our children less successful in school and, frankly, dumber. New Mexico is already at the bottom of the list of most social indicators. Recreational marijuana will only make those problems worse.

Looking a generation or two down the road is where we will see the greatest consequences of legalization. Marijuana legalization will create two phenomena that will lead to future problems we’re not even thinking about today.

The first is that, in time, our politicians and policymakers will divert public safety funds meant for the infrastructure to combat marijuana trafficking and use, to other priorities. This is the same infrastructure meant to keep out heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and other illicit products. That infrastructure will break down and access to these substances will be greater.

The second phenomena is the drug cartel’s reaction to legalization.

Anyone that believes that the legalization of marijuana will break the back of the drug cartels doesn’t know anything about drug cartels. These are very adaptable criminal organizations that won’t let a change in laws get in their way. They will not simply throw up their hands and get legitimate jobs.

Yes marijuana has been their cash crop, but all legalization will do is force them to concentrate on other, more deadly, illicit substances.

Open source information is already coming out of Mexico reporting that traffickers are tearing up marijuana fields and replanting them with opium (for heroin). They will put more effort in getting methamphetamine, heroin and cocaine into the United States.

And with a reduced infrastructure in place, they will have a much easier time getting those products to our citizens – especially our kids.

The other thing that gets completely ignored in this discussion is that the pot of today is not your mom and dad’s marijuana. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, the THC content of marijuana was around 3 to 5 percent. Marijuana today can be bioengineered to produce THC contents in the 25 to 30 percent range and even higher.

It doesn’t matter how many laws are put in place to regulate THC content, marijuana that has the same effect as LSD will be all over streets and in our schools.

The situation looks rosy now, very similar to the rosy situation of 1933 when prohibition ended. Look how many billions of dollars and millions of lives that alcohol has cost American society.

We can all be giddy about the promise of marijuana now, but in one or two generations when we have double or triple the number of drug addicts and America loses its greatness and economic power because of addiction, our kids and our grandkids will detest the society we have given them.

Paul Chavez is a retired Albuquerque Police Department deputy chief and a former director of intelligence for the Southwest Border High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Program.