Photo Credit: Payton (Flickr CC)
The landscape of drug trafficking has been changing due to the legalization of marijuana, but some politicians are learning all the wrong lessons from it. First in line is Wisconsin’s own Glenn Grothman, crowned worst politician in the state by the marijuana industry.
Our nation’s southern border is infamous for the streams of drugs smuggled across it by cartels—it has been one of the driving arguments behind former President Trump’s border wall—but marijuana, which used to be the drug of choice for organized crime, has dwindled in importance since many states have been legalizing it.
According to drug seizure data from Homeland Security, the amount of marijuana seized at the southern border decreased 78% between 2014 and 2018 then another 25% between 2018 and 2020. It went from 3.6 million pounds of marijuana seized in 2013 to less than 600,000 pounds in 2020. The same data indicates that heroin and cocaine saw little change, while meth trafficking increased modestly. Fentanyl trafficking increased in 2020 and soared in 2021 so far with outlier numbers.
It is armed with this information that Rep. Glenn Grothman addressed Congress a few days ago: “I don't think we have spent enough time addressing the drug crisis in America,” he said. “More drugs are coming across the border because it is easier to get across the border. More people are crossing the border. But even more so, as marijuana becomes legalized in the country, it is no longer profitable to bring marijuana across the southern border.”
That much is true: Marijuana legally produced in the United States is significantly cheaper, easier to access and safer to consume than illicit products smuggled across the border. As legalization spread across the U.S., Mexican marijuana saw its value drop to a tiny fraction of what it was on the American market, to the point it has become difficult to make a decent profit out of trafficking marijuana.
Grothman continues: “Well, if the Mexican drug cartels cannot make money selling marijuana or bringing marijuana across the border, how are they going to make it up? They are going to make it up by bringing more and more dangerous drugs—meth, cocaine, heroin, but above all, fentanyl. They are going to bring more and more fentanyl across the southern border. Now, we have 90,000 deaths in this country in one year.”
Shift to Fentanyl
The dramatic rise in fentanyl trafficking is a source of worry. The U.S. Border Patrol believes that it is due to a newly increased capability by Mexican cartels to manufacture fentanyl themselves. Most importantly, fentanyl is an incredibly powerful and dangerous drug, many times more deadly than heroin. The market for marijuana, a soft, non-addictive substance, has essentially no overlap with the market for a violently addictive and deadly opioid. If cartels could traffic both, regardless of U.S. laws on marijuana, they absolutely would—they were simply unable to craft fentanyl until a couple years ago, which is when the drug started appearing in American markets.
Most importantly, fentanyl is not “going through the border” in the same manner as marijuana. While cannabis is mostly seized by the Border Patrol, smuggled across the southern border, only 10% of seized fentanyl was found smuggled across the border. Fentanyl is far more powerful and valuable per pound than marijuana was at its peak, and it can be carried in small doses in an inconspicuous manner, rather than through large shipments like marijuana.
In-between nonsensical attempts at blaming antifa and socialism for Nazism and talking at length about the evils of the Soviets in a misguided fear mongering exercise, Grothman concludes that the legalization of marijuana, to which he is one of the nation’s staunchest opponents, leads to more “hard drugs” smuggled across the border, and that we should increase repression against marijuana in the U.S. and against immigrants in general.
No Welfare for Weed?
Grothman supports hard prison time for simple possession of marijuana, mandatory minimums for anyone caught with marijuana, he believes there is no medical use to cannabis (the medical community disagrees), he sponsored the “No Welfare for Weed Act” of 2015, and he vocally opposes the decision of the many states that chose to legalize marijuana.
Glenn Grothman wishes to keep marijuana illegal, and therefore more profitable for organized crime to traffic, which he seems to believe would act as a sort of decoy that would keep cartels busy and happy, and thus not trafficking fentanyl anymore. Unlike what Grothman seems to believe, Mexican cartels are happy to expand and diversify and would not stop trafficking fentanyl, even if the profits from marijuana trafficking were to go back up. The only reason they did not traffic fentanyl before was a lack of ability to do so, not a lack of profit motive.
Fentanyl trafficking is an issue that needs to be addressed, but it will not go away regardless of the status of marijuana. In fact, experts agree that marijuana is a cheap, natural and non-addictive alternative to opioids, and that opioid deaths are reduced whenever marijuana is introduced as a non-opioid option. If Grothman really wanted to alleviate opioid overdoses, he would be a champion of legal and easily accessible marijuana. Instead, he wants to criminalize marijuana and continue to lock up hundreds of thousands of innocent Americans every year.
While repression of marijuana does not help anyone, it destroys more lives. Grothman, along with the Republican establishment, wants to destroy millions of lives for the non-violent crime of being in possession of the very solution to the problem that he is deploring.
