International Journal on Criminology Volume 6, Number 2, Winter 2018/Spring 2019 | Page 30

Colorado: Cannabis Legalization and the Challenge of Organized Crime
highly diversified (and include people smuggling, money laundering, and weapons),
may well have forestalled the unfavorable impact of cannabis legalization on
their revenue by becoming involved on a massive scale in trafficking opioids, the
consumption of which killed more than fifty-seven thousand Americans in 2016.
This is what writer and journalist Don Winslow, a specialist in Mexican cartels
who also supports cannabis legalization, calls the “pot paradox,” which he cuttingly
and a little perfunctorily summarizes in the following striking pronouncement:
“The heroin epidemic was caused by the legalization of marijuana.” 12 In fact,
it would be fairer to say that the criminal organizations successfully responded
opportunistically to the Oxycontin® 13 epidemic—which was caused by the careless
prescribing of painkillers by American family doctors who were pressured by
pharmaceutical companies—by selling heroin imported from Mexico. Therefore,
as figures from SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration)
show, between 2007 and 2016, monthly heroin use in the United States
tripled from around 150,000 users to 450,000 users out of a million yearly users.
Colorado has been affected by this epidemic at a level higher than the national
average, as is attested to by rocketing levels of seizures and fatal overdoses. 14
In addition to heroin, which is imported directly from Sinaloa, Mexican criminal
organizations are involved in the black market for Fentanyl, 15 an opioid that is
often misappropriated and counterfeited and has become the leading cause, even
above heroin, of fatal overdoses. It caused more than twenty thousand deaths in
2016, a figure that increased almost sixfold in three years. Furthermore, although
the phenomenon has existed for decades, cartels are at the center of trafficking in
methamphetamine and, especially, in cocaine, use of which in American society
is once again on the increase after about six years of steady decline between 2005
and 2011. 16
often makes the history of the fight against organized crime look like a zero-sum game. See Michel
Gandilhon, “La Guerre à la cocaïne à l’épreuve de l’effet ballon,” Swaps 76-77 (2014).
12 Don Winslow, “El Chapo and the Secret History of the Heroin Crisis,” Esquire, August 9, 2016.
Available at: http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a46918/heroin-mexico-el-chapo-cartels-donwinslow/
13 Oxycontin, which was placed on the market in 1996 by Purdue Pharma, is an opioid painkiller
for which prescription rates have exploded via an improper expansion of its use in the treatment
of chronic pain not related to cancers. Between 1997 and 2002, boosted by massive marketing
campaigns, the number of prescriptions increased tenfold from 670,000 to 6.2 million. Today, the
United States, which accounts for 4.6 percent of the world’s population, represents 80 percent of the
global legal opioids market. See the investigation that appeared in Newsweek: Mike Mariani, “The
Junkie with the White Picket Fence,” Newsweek, January 1, 2016.
14 Heroin Response Work Group Staff, Heroin in Colorado, Preliminary Assessment, (Aurora, CO:
Heroin Response Work Group Staff, 2017).
15 Fentanyl is a synthetic derivative of opium. It is legally used as an analgesic, especially for terminal
cancer patients. According to the INCB (International Narcotics Control Board), it is forty times
more powerful than heroin.
16 Rebecca Ahrnsbrak et al., Key Substance Use and Mental Health Indicators in the United States: Re-
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