if you legalized pot it would kill alot of drug dealers around here. They’d have to switch to harder stuff where the competition tends to be much more .... ah dangerous.
Also - people don’t seem to fathom that the Mexican ‘cartel’ people will NOT let their business just die on the vine. What’s going on today south of the border will likely move north, bigtime.
They already have switched to harder drugs. Marijuana is virtually legal right now under the medical marijuana law we have. Los Angeles city, for example, has hundreds of “clinics” where people with a permit from their doctor ($40 office visit, good for a year) can buy near unlimited amounts (4 ounces per store per visit is the generally agreed upon limit, but, there is no stopping you from going to the next store down the block to buy 4 more ounces, or, coming back the next day to buy more...) and indeed many of these places will sell to anybody with or without a permit.
Because pot is so easy to come by (anyone who wants it either gets a permit, or knows someone who has a permit, it is ubiquitous to the degree that those who want it can easily get it) that the old pot dealers are now cocaine dealers and pill pushers.