Another Lie: Legalizing Pot Stops Smuggling

The marijuana legalization debate has been over for a while in many parts of the country.  Recreational pot is legal in California, Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Illinois, Colorado, Alaska, Michigan, Massachusetts, Vermont and Maine.  Medical marijuana is legal in 19 states, and possession has been decriminalized in most others.  When states were considering legalization, advocates made several appealing promises.  One of the most effective of these was that once pot was legalized, the illegal drug trade would die off and law more enforcement resources could  be focused on serious crime.   That turned out to be a lie.  

Over the past few years we have reported on numerous drug busts involving the smuggling of illegal pot into the country and the cultivation of illegal pot in suburban homes, national forests, and rural areas across the country.   This is happening because government regulated pot is more expensive and less potent than illegal pot.  People who stumble across an illegal pot farm are occasionally killed, as are police investigating such grows.   Teri Figueroa of the Los Angeles Times reports on three drug busts which occurred over the past weekend.  Federal agents in California caught smugglers with 630 lbs of methamphetamine and roughly 1/2 ton of marijuana.   As reported last year in the New York Times, if anything, the illegal market has expanded since pot has been legalized.

Get ready for progressives to call for legalizing meth to stop drug gangs from smuggling it into the country.