Mexico's Supreme Court legalizes cannabis for recreational use

That makes three countries. I wonder if this'll mean a lot more tourists from the US will start bleeding both north and south to get their weed kinda like how Amsterdam is full of stoners.

Soon Mexico will have to put up a border wall on their side

I can imagine this is a fairly large dent in gang funding and a good move all round. Good job Mexico.

I'd wager this more likely to allow gangs to semi-legalize their money making. A "company" that does its business with guns won't stop doing business, rather they're more likely to be able to do business with more companies, since they could set up a fully legitimate front business for outsiders to work with. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a necessary step, but this on its own won't improve anything.

the united states is now the only country on the north american continent to not have legalized marijuana

Great! Now fix your corrupt government, please.

iirc the cartels deal mostly in harder stuff like cocaine and not in weed. Even then, they would still just double down on gun smuggling and human trafficking if you legalized all drugs.

Well, legalizing drugs should theoretically at least take some of the violence out of the business. The main reason the violence is there is because they can't legally solve disputes or whatever because what they're doing is illegal to begin with, after all. Not that I think it will just disappear overnight, obviously. It probably has attracted very violent people by now, who won't stop being violent just like that.

Weed is not legal in the Netherlands. It is government policy to tolerate coffeeshops selling certain amounts of weed, having set amounts of weed in stock, people having certain amounts of weed on them, and having maximum of 5 weed plants for personal use. The production of weed for recreational use is not legal, nor is tolerated, like using and having certain amounts of weed is.

WIth such deep rooted organized crime as in Mexico, it won't have any strong immediate impact on them, but the logic is absolutely sound. The profitability of illegal drug manufacture and trade is based on the massively inflated end-user price as a result of illegality and the risk of getting caught. Once legal manufacture and sale of said drug builds up momentum, the price goes down and massively disincentivizes illegal trade as it becomes harder to compete with legal businesses. The cartels won't "pack up" because they have other surely much more profitable drugs to sell and smuggle, but this move does chip away at their influence, even if just a little at first. Without profit in crime, crime organizations have no reason to exist.

That's why all the liquor stores today are just fronts for bootleggers, right? Criminal enterprises can't compete with legal markets. You're right, simply legalizing it isn't going to singlehandedly solve the problem, but it's a critically necessary step, both from a legal and moral standpoint.

Valve probably singlehandedly reduced video game piracy with the success of their steam platform. Sure, a lot of people still do it but when you make a product super accessible to the consumer they'll go right for it.

yeah i basically never pirate games out of sheer convenience of steam

Even if this turns the Cartel's illegitimate weed sales into legitimate weed sales, it still makes it safer for the consumer to buy. No doubt there will still be issues but you can't expect such a dire problem to be solved in one or two steps.

Legalization won't make the cartels go away, but I imagine it's easier to bust up a cartel-run dispensary doing shady shit than to bust up a business that operates in secret. Either they lose out on money (and they probably will either way, via legal competition) or they bring their dealing partly into the open.

No, but it does mean they operate under a legal framework in that industry which reduces the violence in that industry, and that's a minor success not to be scoffed at considering that a full blown war on drugs has only made every single aspect of this worse. I hate to say it, but letting them legitimize is one of the best ways we have to mitigate further violence, and no, that doesn't sit well with me, it just seems to be a best case scenario from a utility perspective.

Even still that's good, a legitimate business gives money to the country and contributes to it's economy.