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"Cartelville, USA" is a new documentary produced by The Daily Caller and Jorge Ventura that investigates rural Southern California desert towns overrun by Mexican drug and human trafficking cartels. Ventura joins Christopher Bedford and Emily Jashinsky to discuss the film on this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour.
Discussion (1)
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There are good economic reasons for the rise of those cartels in the high desert. The main purpose of prop 67 was to legalize marijuana and authorize the state to set up a licensing system for legal pot dispensaries and growers. Sadly, the way the state approached this was to regard the pot industry as a giant bank with unlimited withdrawals available. They imposed a vast array of taxes, license fees, and mountains of regulations on the industry. That created a price umbrella for illegal growers and sellers. The price on that umbrella was high enough to create very large incentives. In other words, the government encouraged black market and illegal pot operations. I’ve written about this in two articles a couple of years ago. Here are the links.
https://gonzoecon.com/2019/08/california-shows-how-to-grow-a-black-market-part-1-retailers/
and https://gonzoecon.com/2019/10/california-shows-how-to-grow-a-black-market-part-2-growers/
Tony Lima