SamuelRSmith said:
How much cheaper would the black market have to be for most people to want to interact with them? With the black market, you have no guarantee that the product is what you think it is, you have to deal with criminals, and you have no idea if you're even going to wake up with your organs. Not to mention the fear of being arrested The players in the black market will either have to change their game - that is, reduce the imposed risk for potential buyers, or they will have to compete by rapidly dropping the price. Diminishing profits and, therefore, the incentives to play. Either way, the introduction of a legal market will reduce the size - and violence - of the black market. The fewer the restrictions on the market, the smaller the black market. How much share of the weed market do the "bad guys" have in Colorado and Washington today? What share will they have in 12 months, and what share in 5 years? |
Well first off... weed is a low profit margin drug. The only reason drug dealers deal with it is because it's steady.
You get high trafic and a lot of connections, and the police don't really care about weed.
As for the numbers... I imagine they don't exist yet. Ciggarrettes though, i've seen numbers for. Though not in the US, for the UK. In the UK about 20% of the market is illegally smuggled ciggarrettes... and that's just smuggling brand specific kinds of cigarrettes from low tax countries to high tax countries!
Since Tobbacco's high is mosly fictional, brand loyalties develop pretty strongly. This won't be the case for the hardest drugs. Weed will develop strong brand loyalty.... Coke? Meth? Not a chance.
Now something like Cocaine costs $2 a gram to make pure. Then is sold for upwards to $200 AFTER having all kinds of additives and shit put into it.
Will people really be cool with $4-5 dollar grams of Coke that used to cost the average person $200 dollars.
Severely addicted cokeheads and crackheads would be burning themselves out on legal product left and right
And THAT isn't even taking into account regulations. Much like alchohol you can bet that drugs will have a "Purity limit".
It could even be set so low that "Legal" cocaine would be equal to the lowest level $20 a gram junk.
Although it'd only be "equal" to that if drug companies are aloud to mix it with other cheaper "uppers" something that seems unlikely.
So the street product will always be superior.
Either way, if they impose purity limits long term addicts or just those who like the better purity are just going to go to the streets for the high level stuff, since the amount of legal product you'd have to use would be ridiculious to get you high. Not to mention what THAT shit will be cut with when it comes to negative effects.
As for what drug dealers cut there stuff with... Drug dealers operate in a much more free market then buisnesses, there is all kind of competition and they want repeat customers so they're actually usually pretty straight up with people. Drug dealers are generally extremely nice guys unless you repeatidly screw them over in large ways.
I'm for drug legalization but if everyone thinks it's going to be all sunshine and unicorn farts,they're wrong... and it's that kind of attitude and false expectations that could cause drug legalization to be reversed.
