As you know, today the RAND Corporation released a study purporting to show that Proposition 19 in California will not have an appreciable impact on Mexican drug cartels' profits. However, this assertion is inconsistent with well-established federal data and even contradicts parts of the RAND study itself. The RAND report fails to properly understand Prohibition and Proposition 19.

To begin with, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy has said that, in reality, the Mexican drug cartels make over 60 percent of their profits from marijuana alone.

Additionally, buried on page 35 of the report, RAND actually admits that Prop. 19 will take the production and distribution of marijuana out of the hands of criminal enterprises and into the hands of licensed and regulated Californians:

"We believe that legalizing marijuana in California would effectively eliminate Mexican [Drug Trafficking Organizations'] revenues from supplying Mexican-grown marijuana to the California market. As we elaborate in this chapter, even with taxes, legally produced marijuana would likely cost no more than would illegal marijuana from Mexico and would cost less than half as much per unit of THC (Kilmer, Caulkins, Pacula, et al., 2010). Thus, the needs of the California market would be supplied by the new legal industry."

In any case, the Prop. 19 campaign very much welcomes a public debate about just how many billions of dollars a year we can take away from the vicious drug cartels when we pass Prop. 19 and actually begin controlling and taxing marijuana. Whether it's over 60 percent of their profits or some smaller slice of the pie, the indisputable fact is that bloodthirsty cartels are making lots of money off of the illegal marijuana trade, and they are sure rooting against Prop. 19 passing so they can keep all their black market profits.

Additionally, the RAND analysis appears to fail to include cartel profits generated from illegal grow operations within California. Most law enforcers will readily acknowledge that many of the illegal pot farms here are run by Mexican nationals who presumably send the profits back to Mexico.

While RAND points out that passing Prop 19 will only end the black market in California and not in other states, our initiative is obviously an exciting start to a broader nationwide solution. California is at the forefront a national and regional movement. Many states are looking to follow California's lead on this issue, just as they did with medical marijuana. There are legislators in several other states who are eager to push marijuana control and tax legislation once California kick starts this nationwide reevaluation of our failed marijuana policies, just as it took action by people, state-by-state, to build a nationwide movement to repeal alcohol prohibition.

The alternative to passing Prop. 19 is a continuation of the current failed policies, the results of which have been obviously ineffective and also deadly. 28,000 people have been murdered in the cartel wars in Mexico over the past four years and, according to U.S. Department of Justice, cartels have already set up shop in at least 230 American cities.

We'd be interested in hearing what solutions RAND and the prohibitionists' would like to propose for a way out of this deadly mess... but they don't seem to have any.