Legalising marijuana benefits the black market

The argument

The central promise of legalisation is that a legal market displaces an illegal one: with cannabis available lawfully, the criminal supply chain is supposed to lose its customers and wither. Proponents of this position argue the evidence does not bear this out. Legalising marijuana does not decrease black market activity. Organised crime in Colorado has risen sharply since legalisation, and the Drug Enforcement Administration has recorded the pattern directly, stating that "since 2014, there has been a noticeable increase in organized networks of sophisticated residential [marijuana] grows in Colorado that are orchestrated and operated by drug trafficking organizations." What that describes is not the residue of a market in retreat but an expansion. Sophisticated residential grows run by trafficking organisations require investment, coordination and personnel, and criminal enterprises do not commit those resources to a business they expect to lose. Their growth after legalisation indicates that the new legal regime created conditions those organisations could work within rather than conditions that pushed them out. The mechanism proponents identify is one of cover. Where cultivation is lawful in some forms and in some quantities, illicit production becomes far harder to distinguish from legal production, and enforcement loses the simple signal it previously relied on. An operation that would once have been obviously criminal now resembles a licensed activity, which lowers the risk of running one and raises the cost of finding it. If legalisation strengthens rather than weakens the criminal networks it was meant to eliminate, then one of the principal practical arguments for it fails on its own terms, and the harms of organised crime are added to whatever harms the drug itself carries. On this reasoning cannabis should only be used for medical purposes.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The black market, of course, will not go away overnight. However, once marijuana is legalised over time we can expect the black market to shrink dramatically as they are no longer able to command the same prices they did when marijuana was illegal and they were therefore able to charge a premium for the risk involved in its production. The reason that crime increased in Colorado was not the legalisation of marijuana there, but the fact that it was still illegal elsewhere.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] Increase in crime rates is due to the illegality of marijuana in other places, so is not a reason to keep it illegal.