For the first time in generations, farmers in central Mexico have stopped planting marijuana.
Due to ample supplies up north, courtesy of medical and recreational cannabis legalization, cartel farmers can’t make any money off pot anymore, they told the Washington Post this week. The price for a pound of Mexican marijuana has plummeted 75 percent from $100 per kilogram to less than $25.
“‘It’s not worth it anymore,'” said 50 year-old Rodrigo Silla, a lifelong cannabis farmer. He also told the Post he couldn’t remember the last time his family and others stopped growing mota. “’I wish the Americans would stop with this legalization.’”
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- The Mexico Institute for Competitiveness
For several years we have been writing about how researchers think that domestic cannabis legalization will seriously hurt Mexican drug cartels — who have murdered something like 60,000 people in the last decade. We’ve reported on how California cannabis has cut Mexican cartels out of the Golden State. That garbage goes east now. Researchers estimate legalization would cost the cartels billions, and a think tank in Mexico said that legalization in just one US state would cut cartels out of the US pot industry. Those days appears to have arrived.
Farmers in the storied “Golden Triangle” region of Mexico’s Sinaloa state, which has produced the country’s most notorious gangsters and biggest marijuana harvests, say they are no longer planting the crop. … increasingly, they’re unable to compete with U.S. marijuana growers. With cannabis legalized or allowed for medical use in 20 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, more and more of the American market is supplied with highly potent marijuana grown in American garages and converted warehouses — some licensed, others not. Mexican trafficking groups have also set up vast outdoor plantations on public land, especially in California, contributing to the fall in marijuana prices.
So now we have both the DEA and cartel farmers both screaming bloody murder about legalization — sounds like we’re on the right track.
