Below is an interesting, and if accurate, very sad consequences of the ongoing changes in the national and state marijuana policies and politics.
"Okay, I'm going to say it: The heroin epidemic was caused by the legalization of marijuana.
We
wanted legal weed, and for the most part, we got it. Four states have
legalized it outright, others have decriminalized it, and in many
jurisdictions police refuse to enforce the laws that are on the books,
creating a de facto street legalization.
Good news, right?
Not
for the Sinaloa Cartel, which by the time Colorado passed Amendment 64
in 2012 had become the dominant cartel in Mexico. Weed was a major
profit center for them, but suddenly they couldn't compete against a
superior American product that also had drastically lower transportation
and security costs.
In a single year, the
cartel suffered a 40 percent drop in marijuana sales, representing
billions of dollars. Mexican marijuana became an almost worthless
product. They've basically stopped growing the shit: Once-vast fields in
Durango now lie fallow.
More good news, right?
Yeah, no. Guzmán and his boys are businessmen. They're not going to take a forty-point hit and not do something about it. They had to make up those profits somewhere.....
At the same time, American
drug and law-enforcement officials, concerned about the dramatic surge
in overdose deaths from pharmaceutical opioids (165,000 from 1999 to
2014), cracked down on both legal and illegal distribution, opening the
door for Mexican heroin, which sold for five to ten bucks a dose.
But pill users were not accustomed to the potency of this new heroin. Even heroin addicts were taken by surprise.
As
a result, overdose deaths have skyrocketed, more than doubling from
2000 to 2014. More people—47,055—died from drug overdoses in 2014 than
in any other year in American history. (Perhaps the most famous of
these, Philip Seymour Hoffman, died on February 2, 2014, right at the
height of the epidemic.) That's 125 people a day, more than five lives
every hour, a fatality level that matched the AIDS epidemic's peak in
1995."
So what is the appropriate and skillful response on our part to these events?
Can we see anything similar in our own life? Is there practice for us to learn from this?
For the rest of the article, see the link below.
