Pot is bulky and pungent. That makes it difficult to conceal in, say, a suitcase or a truck. For that reason, marijuana traffickers tend to avoid legal ports or entrances, preferring instead to traverse the expanses of deserts and canyons where Border Patrol agents are often the only signs of human life. To the extent that other drugs cross outside normal entry points, they are most often hitchhikers along for the ride with the weed. In 2013, for example, Border Patrol agents seized 274 pounds of marijuana for every one pound of other drugs.
So for those familiar with the history of drug smuggling, there was a dog that didn’t bark in Donald Trump’s early January Oval Office address, which was intended to frighten Americans into supporting a border wall and give him leverage to end the shutdown. While Trump described the southern border as “a pipeline for vast quantities of illegal drugs,” he only specifically mentioned “meth, heroin, cocaine, and fentanyl”—all drugs that typically come in through formal points of entry. He did not speak of what has been, for most of living memory, the most-smuggled item over the Mexican-American border: marijuana.
Pot, and the impoverished undocumented immigrants who often bring it, are no longer flowing across the border at the rate they once were. This decline has virtually nothing to do with expensive security innovations at the border and everything to do with legalization in the United States. If it were any other industry, one imagines the president would be delighted: When it comes to pot, customers prefer to buy American, writes David Bier for Reason.
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