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Mexican Pot Farmers’ Profits Dwindle as U. S. Loosens Marijuana Laws

Mexican Pot Farmers’ Profits Dwindle as U. S. Loosens Marijuana Laws

The free market at work

The marijuana legalization brigade has made great strides in their efforts to legalize medical marijuana in a large number of states, and they only seem to fail (for the time being, anyway) when they go too far and push for too much as they did this year in Florida.

While seeing great success across this country, the progressive push for legal pot is having unintended consequences for Mexican pot farmers who are seeing their profits diminish as more states pass pot-friendly laws and the Obama administration refuses to close the border or enforce our nation’s existing laws regarding the growth and sale of marijuana when such laws “clash” with the new states’ laws.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

The loosening of marijuana laws across much of the United States has increased competition from growers north of the border, apparently enough to drive down prices paid to Mexican farmers. Small-scale growers here in the state of Sinaloa, one of the country’s biggest production areas, said that over the last four years the amount they receive per kilogram has fallen from $100 to $30.

The price decline appears to have led to reduced marijuana production in Mexico and a drop in trafficking to the U.S., according to officials on both sides of the border and available data.

. . . .  Though federal law still criminalizes production and possession, the U.S. Justice Department has backed off its enforcement efforts when they clash with state law.

The relaxed legal environment has upended the old business model.

“Changes on the other side of the border are making marijuana less profitable for organizations like the Cartel de Sinaloa,” said Antonio Mazzitelli, the representative in Mexico for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

Although Mexico remains a major supplier of marijuana to the U.S., its market share is thought to have declined significantly. Alejandro Hope, a security and drug analyst in Mexico City, estimated that Mexican marijuana now accounts for less than a third of the total consumed in the U.S.

The LA Times highlights one man’s plight:

He started growing marijuana as a teenager and for four decades earned a modest living from his tiny plot tucked at the base of these rugged mountains of western Mexico.

He proudly shows off his illegal plants, waist-high and fragrant, strategically hidden from view by rows of corn and nearly ready to be harvested.

“I’ve always liked this business, producing marijuana,” the 50-year-old farmer said wistfully. He had decided that this season’s crop would be his last.

The reason: free-market economics.

This was always going to be a result of legal pot in the U. S., and as the legal marijuana movement grows beyond medical marijuana, Mexican pot farmers will continue to suffer the consequences that progressives probably never intended.

[Featured image via the LA Times]

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Comments

…that X will continue to suffer the consequences that probably progressives never intended.

Pretty much sums up the end result of all progressive initiatives. Progressives have grandiose scheme A followed up by totally unrelated FUBAR plan B that ends up with consequences planned or not that hurt people.

You can pretty much just fill in the blank.

A – save the planet
B – global warming BS
X – coal mine workers out of jobs, birds dead in wind projects, EPA disaster of the day

A – protect women’s rights
B – abortion on demand
X – millions of dead babies

Midwest Rhino | January 2, 2016 at 10:12 am

In a pure world I suppose we would keep it illegal, but in such a world who would smoke pot?

Holder gave guns to the cartels in fast and Furious, then Lynch let HSBC off with a “light” fine, when many people should have gone to jail for laundering billions for the cartels.

For at least half a decade, the storied British colonial banking power helped to wash hundreds of millions of dollars for drug mobs, including Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel, suspected in tens of thousands of murders just in the past 10 years – people so totally evil, jokes former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, that “they make the guys on Wall Street look good.” The bank also moved money for organizations linked to Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, and for Russian gangsters; helped countries like Iran, the Sudan and North Korea evade sanctions; and, in between helping murderers and terrorists and rogue states, aided countless common tax cheats in hiding their cash.

“They violated every go**amn law in the book,” says Jack Blum, an attorney and former Senate investigator …

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/gangster-bankers-too-big-to-jail-20130214

Prohibition in the roaring twenties had Tommy gun battles in the streets of Chicago, now it is the poor neighborhoods run by murderous gangs, enriched by drug money. Our Choom Gang president made martyrs out of Trayvon, Brown, even Freddie … all druggies. And he fought to turn Zelaya into another Narco dictator in Honduras. And El Chapo is now free again, obviously a man with friends in high places.

The “poster child” for this story is not the Mexican farmer “just trying to get by”, it is all the sheriffs and mayors that have been beheaded by the drug cartels and millions of other victims, not to mention the degradation of social orders.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marisol_Valles_Garc%C3%ADa#Background

Keeping the money circulating in America, away from the cartels, seems the best bad option at this point. But the open borders gang will probably yell loudest about keeping dope illegal, to keep their dark money coming.

…Mexican pot farmers will continue to suffer the consequences that progressives probably never intended.

Don’t worry about the poor pot farmers. Once the progressives realize what’s going on, they’ll just arrange for the US government to send subsidies to the Mexican pot farmers.

I would be more concerned about the fact that with the decline in the price of Marijuana, that all those farmers are going to start growing something more profitable.

My personal bet would be Opium Poppy Plants (to make opium and or heroin). But Coca for the manufacture of Cocaine would also not be out of the question. Ephedra sinica is harder to grow in commercial quantities (Meth) but could be done with the right setup. Alternatively, for the long-term farmer Sassafras root (ecstasy) might be the way to go.

All you need is a farmer now with a lot of time on his hands and a good chemist, and you’ve got a new income stream. With enough farmers, the price drops as the quantity increases, and you have a new epidemic right in my back yard (I live less than 6 miles from Juarez, Mexico, and drive within 100 yards of the boarder every day I go to work).

So now they’ll grow poppies for the heroin market.

Capitalism.

Midwest Rhino | January 3, 2016 at 10:44 am

This is just another rant of mine on the myth of “Free Trade” being some magic elixir. The structure for trade happens within a structure of law and order. Supply and demand are first balanced against the laws of nations and corruption of public officials.

BigDoper and BigCommie have this concept of “cornering the market” on our liberty, where they own the power. Simultaneously BigCorp seeks to tap foreign “slave” labor and escape our burdensome laws. They have infiltrated BigLiberty and BigFreeMarkets (USA) to harness the power our limited government system had unleashed. Reagan was the last president to really preach about US as a shining city on the hill, as the anti-liberty globalists are claiming the high ground now.

Foreign governments and big money now write our laws secretly. Their front men, our politicians, need more submissive patriots, so they focus on taking our guns away, breaking down society into a nation of sheep to be sheared. They already “sold short” all the wool, selling our children’s futures. That doesn’t really fall under the “Free Trade” rubric, it is just abuse of raw power, and we failed to use force to stop them.

Closing the borders is an essential first step on the road to recovering our independence. I’d say free trade is “downstream” from rule of law and America First interests. And all that must be downstream from an ethical (Judeo-Christian, served us well) culture, if we are to maintain liberty.

Most of our global competitors (atheist Marxists, under various disguises) are ruling OVER their people/slaves, not governing FOR them and fighting to maintain their liberties. They use the iron fist.

While “free trade” explains this farmer’s plight in the micro sense, the macro issue is our government sanctioning open borders, to profit from that cross border illicit trade (other drugs, humans, even jihadists), enriching the anti-freedom cartels. That is treason.

imo our $30 Billion/month trade deficit falls into the same category. “Global Free Trade” is an Orwellian term, in that we are enriching anti-freedom cartels and communists, who in turn keep bribing our government to act against US. We are selling the rope to hang ourselves, via unsustainable debt obligations and leaked/sold classified tech.

Just pay the Clinton/DC/NYC Cartel, and you can get anything you want. “Free Trade” is not destined to make all nations free, it also a power that enriches the anti-freedom oligarchs. Our real competitive advantage is that we are the sole military superpower and greatest economic power … but that power is being sold out the back door.

My Sunday sermon 🙂