International Journal on Criminology Volume 6, Number 2, Winter 2018/Spring 2019 | Page 26

Colorado: Cannabis Legalization and the Challenge of Organized Crime
in the past twenty years), thus allowing these institutions to focus on
tackling other criminal activities.
During the political campaigns that were launched before the organization of
various referenda on cannabis in 2012 , a number of NGOs (such as Open Society
Foundations and Drug Policy Alliance) highlighted the “deadlock” of the socalled
“war on drugs” policy, which, forty years after Richard Nixon’s declaration
that drugs were “public enemy number one,” had failed to prevent very strong
growth in the market for illegal substances and in the criminal circles that profited
from it.
For example, in 2016 almost twenty-nine million Americans had used an
illegal drug during the past month, and twenty-four million were current users
of cannabis. And as demand for drugs went up, Mexican organized crime groups
increased their control over the wholesale market for the main illegal substances
(marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin) in several hundred American
cities, from Atlanta, Georgia, to Anchorage, Alaska—and not forgetting Denver,
Colorado. In 2017, according to a report by the Drug Enforcement Administration
(DEA), “Mexican transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) pose the
greatest criminal drug threat to the United States; no other group is currently positioned
to challenge them.” 1
With regard to cannabis more specifically, a number of estimates made prior
to legalization put the proportion of the market controlled by Mexican organized
crime groups at between 40 and 70 percent, with revenues of two billion dollars, 2
making this the second-largest illegal drug market behind that for cocaine. Accordingly,
some researchers believed that the implementation of new public policies,
described as “cannabis regulation,” could lead the Sinaloa cartel, the largest
organization operating on either side of the border, to lose half of its revenue. 3 In
addition to such organizations, there are also the tens of thousands of local gangs
of varying degrees of power that are involved in the retail trade.
As we will see, the issue of the impact of legalization on organized crime
is key when it comes to evaluating the effectiveness of new policies for regulating
cannabis. The organized crime we are dealing with here is powerful, features highly
robust organizational structures and offshoots, and is also at the heart of today’s
opioids epidemic, the largest in the history of the United States.
1 2017 National Drug Threat Assessment—October 2017, (US Justice Department Drug Enforcement
Administration), vi. Available at: https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/docs/DIR-040-17_2017-
NDTA.pdf.
2 Jonathan P. Caulkins, Angela Hawken, Beau Kilmer, and Mark A. R. Kleiman, Marijuana Legalization:
What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
3 Alejandro Hope and Eduardo Clark, Si los vecinos legalizan, Reporte técnico, IMCO (Mexico City:
Instituto Mexicano para la Competitividad A.C., 2012). Available at: http://imco.org.mx/wpcontent/uploads/2012/10/reporte_tecnico_legalizacion_marihuana.pdf
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