Low-Grade Mexican Marijuana is for Latinos

I can’t stop laughing long enough to be outraged. Wait…no, nope, can’t muster a frown.

Turns out some schmuck in Los Angeles thinks that pot from Mexico is targeted to Latinos in the barrios and that

“Your typical Berkeley intellectual … is very unlikely to cross paths with the Mexican cartels. It just doesn’t happen.”

That was George Mull, president of the California Cannabis Association, quoted in the LA Weekly. You know I’m gonna have to go there, so humor me – What the hell is he smoking? There, I said it, it’s passed.

Apparently this Mull guy is defending the botique medical pot shops in LA, trying to distance them from anything remotely connected to the Mexican drug cartels. The idea is to legitimize them as for-profit enterprises, and not non-profit clinic/dispensaries. He says that most of the marijuana sold at the shops is locally and home grown and that the product are designer strains of bud. As opposed to

” … People of color are only slightly represented” at medical marijuana gatherings. Mexican weed, he said, is “often is aimed at inner cities, particularly youth.”

¡Dios mio! What else are we to blame for? West coast intellectuals can’t profit from their designer bud because the Mexicans smoke chusma weed? Have they ever tried it?

There’s actually a study, done by RAND, that claims that

cartels get up to a quarter of their income from marijuana. Federal figures suggest that marijuana headed across the border increased 44 percent from 2005 to 2009 — the years that the pot shop business exploded in California (with some claiming in 2009 that there were more dispensaries in L.A. than there were Starbucks).

The legalization idea would reduce the dispensary income by four percent – most of the LA pot, allegedly, is home grown. I wonder who’s bent-over with the talache, working the soil, helping the designer buds grow? You think a Berkeley intellectual will get his/her fingernails dirty?

Anyway, I love the last graph of the article:

Either way, there’s no need to get racial about it. Nearly one out of every two people in L.A. is Latino, so we’re going to assume here that some people of color smoke good weed somewhere in the area (possibly, Mr. Broadus?). Some might even own those very pot shops.

Follow Victor Landa on Twitter: @vlanda