There was heroin chic, but cocaine was glamorized in Hollywood. Then the cartels got big. There was so much money to be made, the ruthless ones could literally buy up areas and fight their governments. I'm talking eighties.
People snorting it were partying and those who got it with crack were going to prison. The violence of the people on it rivaled what we hear about with meth addicts. Pot was long considered an ethnic thing, that became a symbol of being against the government, etc.
This was before the privatized prison industry became one of the fastest growing things on the stock market. Not having been intimately involved in this, that's just what I remember. People didn't think about it much in 1962. Some used pot between getting their heroin fixes, but alcohol was something they used for the same reasons. There was more in the news about people getting killed form bad heroin in the early sixties.
Some people don't see any difference between heroin, pot and cocaine. But you can grow pot, the others require a network to produce. That is possibly some of the resistance to legalization, that people don't know the difference.
I believe what's going on in Mexico now is mainly due to the loss of the middle class there, not drugs. In the sixties people crossed the borderand no one cared how long they stayed if they were from Mexico. No hysteria over illegal immigration.
When the middle class, such as it was, of educated and skilled workers and businesses in Mexico collapsed, people had to come to the USA to make money to support their families back home. Now these cartels are taking advantage of all of that. If there were another commodity for them to fight over the gangs would sell that.
I don't believe it has to do with drugs, that's just the colorful excuse for the fact that the economy in Mexico has been in trouble for a long time. We've had areas of this country where turf wars have cost lives as well. I see this is a reflection of poverty and not drugs.
If your question was not rhetorical I've answered it the best I can. If it was just an expression of wonder over this, then you won't read what I wrote. That is my recollection as having been old enough and lived in a border state in those years. Just MHO. n/t
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