WILL LEGALIZING POT HURT DRUG CARTELS?

Drugs and violent crime in Tucson and Southern Arizona have created
an unlikely commonality between a pro-marijuana group and law
enforcement officials, both of whom think that legalizing pot would
eliminate the driving force behind much of the illicit drug trade
along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Even though the Border Patrol works around the clock to secure the
border and prevent drug trafficking through patrols, checkpoints,
fencing and high-tech measures, agents reported that from Jan. 7
through Feb. 3, they found more than 7,800 pounds of marijuana in the
Tucson Sector.

If the United States legalizes marijuana, the Mexican drug cartels'
biggest "cash crop" would be eliminated, said Mary Mackenzie, founder
and treasurer of the Tucson chapter of the National Organization for
the Reform of Marijuana Laws, or NORML, which advocates legalizing marijuana.

"Prohibition creates the drug cartel," Mackenzie said. "Without
prohibition, there's no business in it for them. Our government keeps
the cartels in business, it keeps the prices high and it puts decent
Americans in prison. It's not a war on drugs, it's a war on Americans."

The group LEAP, or Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, an
international organization of current and former law officers, agrees
that illegal drugs should be legalized and regulated. Its members
argue that legalization would reduce harmful consequences from
fighting the war on drugs and lessen the incidences of death,
disease, crime and addiction.

"Prohibition has created the black market," said Richard Mack, who
served as sheriff of Graham County for two terms in the 1990s and is
a member of LEAP. The cartels "are trying to push drugs on our youth
for huge profitability.

"They wouldn't do it otherwise. If marijuana was legal then we
wouldn't have to give money to these criminals."

The Other Side

The issue's not that simple, said Tucson Police Department Lt. Greg
Roberts, who is one of seven officers in the department's Home
Invasions Unit, which was established last year to investigate the
crime that is often linked with drug trafficking. The local unit was
the first of five home-invasion squads in the country, he said.

"We work with federal and state departments to stop the drugs coming
into the country," Roberts said. "If we stop (the drugs) before they
enter the country, then the violence will stop."

Often the home invasions occur when drug dealers believe a person is
storing large amounts of drugs in his or her home. Police say home
invasions are inherently violent crimes because of the excessive
force used by assailants to subdue victims.

Roberts said that in Tucson, 107 home invasions were reported from
January through Dec. 1, 2009. More than 90 percent of the Tucson home
invasions directly relate to the drug trafficking across the Mexican
border, he added.

Of those 107 cases, only 28 have been successfully resolved, leading
to the arrests of 45 people, Roberts said.

On the Ballot?

Tucson's location along Interstate 10 -- which runs coast to coast --
makes it a prime corridor to move drugs, people and money, said Lt.
Octavio Gradillas of the Nogales (Ariz.) Police Department.

And because the cartels network all over the country, home invasions
have occurred in areas as far away as the Northwest and the Northeast.

Anne Hilby, a spokeswoman for the Arizona Attorney General's Office,
calls drug cartels "highly sophisticated and adaptable units of
organized crime."

"Cartels don't adhere to jurisdictional boundaries," Hilby said.
"Therefore, different law enforcement agencies from different areas
all need to collaborate to have any hopes of slowing down the
border-related crime."

Groups that have long advocated legalizing marijuana are starting to
reference the violence of the cross-border drug trafficking as reason
to make marijuana legal in the United States. In Arizona, advocates
are working to get a measure that would legalize marijuana for
medical use on the state ballot in November.

LEAP is part of the campaign, too.

Mack, who first gained national attention by fighting the federal
Brady Bill, which required state and local law enforcement to conduct
a background check on anyone wishing to purchase a handgun, said he
spent three years as an undercover narcotics officer for the Provo
(Utah) Police Department and became cynical about the war on drugs.

"Here I am risking my life to stop a problem that we have very
minimal effect on whatsoever," he said. "I became disenchanted. The
drug war wasn't working, and law enforcement was pretending we were
minimizing the problem."

Still, there is disagreement that ending marijuana prohibition would
significantly hurt the cartels, which are also involved in human
trafficking, gun smuggling and money laundering.

"Even if marijuana were legal, the cartels could quickly adapt and
focus their energies to any of their other criminal enterprises,"
Hilby said. "The only way to really fight back is to attack the
cartels on all four fronts."

Not so, Mack said.

"What we've been doing has failed miserably," he said. "We need to
absolutely put legalization on the board of ideas."

Arizona News Service is staffed by students from the University of
Arizona School of Journalism.