'The Sinaloa cartel can buy a kilo of cocaine in the highlands of Colombia or Peru for around $2,000, then watch it accrue value as it makes its way to market. In Mexico, that kilo fetches more than $10,000. Jump the border to the United States, and it could sell wholesale for $30,000. Break it down into grams to distribute retail, and that same kilo sells for upward of $100,000 — more than its weight in gold. And that’s just cocaine. Alone among the Mexican cartels, Sinaloa is both diversified and vertically integrated, producing and exporting marijuana, heroin and methamphetamine as well.'
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/magazine/how-a-mexican-dru...
Maybe this is a west coast perspective but I would have guessed that even before it was legal the vast majority of the marijuana market was served by domestic producers versus imports, whereas cocaine is all imported.
Edit: Some googling produces estimates ranging from 30 to 70 percent imports, depending on the point the article is trying to make, so let's just call it 50% domestic nationwide.
Totally is. I live on the East Coast in an illegal state and all weed around here is either imported from legal states or grown locally. It's not hard to find grow ops or people who will ship weed here. In a world where mass quantities of drugs are so easily available on the darknet, it seems ridiculous to think the domestic MJ market is primarily run by cartels.
That doesn't compare it to Pot sales. They might get good margins on cocaine but what proportion of their profits is what would matter here. That is they could be making even better margins on cocaine than that today, but if 90% of their profits come from marijuana sales...
There has to be a demand for all of that cocaine. If they flood the black market with cocaine the value would drop and so would their profits per kilo.
'The Sinaloa cartel can buy a kilo of cocaine in the highlands of Colombia or Peru for around $2,000, then watch it accrue value as it makes its way to market. In Mexico, that kilo fetches more than $10,000. Jump the border to the United States, and it could sell wholesale for $30,000. Break it down into grams to distribute retail, and that same kilo sells for upward of $100,000 — more than its weight in gold. And that’s just cocaine. Alone among the Mexican cartels, Sinaloa is both diversified and vertically integrated, producing and exporting marijuana, heroin and methamphetamine as well.' http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/magazine/how-a-mexican-dru...
and that was in 2012...