A police officer once told me officers liked having something concrete and easy to catch someone with. His mode of thinking was "if someone is willing to risk jail for something as simple as weed, imagine what else they'd do for a greater reward"
That isn't the case IME, most people in the black market dealing with weed are pretty non-violent up until you are talking millions of dollars, which 5lbs will never be. They tend to only deal in weed or weed derivatives at those levels as well. It just doesn't make economic sense to do otherwise. What little bloods and crips style stuff of favela fame is a lot less common now too from what I can tell.
[1] https://www.nbc4i.com/news/local-news/columbus/bank-robbery-...
All of this is caused by the drugs being illegal, which prevents them from seeking justice in the usual way if someone steals from them or rips them off etc.
If you were to legalize drugs and release them, they would no longer have any incentive to resort to violence.
And the same logic applies to people in other situations. If you regularly get shaken down by two bit thugs and the police do nothing no matter how many times you report it, you're likely to eventually take matters into your own hands, even though that isn't exactly legal. So should the police use any excuse they can to arrest you, for the situation they caused, because people in that situation are disposed to commit a violent crime the state can't even prove?
It's called bargaining in the shadow of the law. If you have the ability to take someone to court, they know that too, and know you'd win, so they're willing to settle up with you peacefully rather than both of you incurring the costs of going to court.
When a small time drug dealer's car needs service covered under warranty, they don't go in and threaten the dealership with violence, they drop off the car and expect the dealership to honor the contract. Which the dealership does in the same way as they do for anyone else, because the dealership doesn't know anything about their extracurricular criminal activity and can't use it to renege on their obligations by threatening to turn them in to the police.
You must not have met many weed dealers before have you? Specifically the examples where a "drug dealer" would be violent are so divorced from my own lived experience that it really makes me wonder if this is how some of society really thinks weed dealers act like.
Its also a really funny idea.
I get it you think to be a weed dealer you need to be some kind of hardened criminal who commits all sorts of various crimes or whatever, but im here to break it to you that the hollywood criminal drug dealers youre imagining dont really exist. Many people do all sorts of illegal things because we live in a country with many overly restrictive and draconian laws. Very few of those people are the dangerous criminals you are imagining. Most of them are regular people who dont have the religious reverence for arbitrary laws that some other memebers of our society have.
Pretty much every grow bust they find guns, etc. Even in countries where it should be almost impossible to get those guns.
This was decades ago so I suppose its possible that in the intervening time everyone involved in the weed trade has reverted to the violent Hollywood drug dealers of yore, though I find that unlikely.
There really is this perception among more sheltered circles that if you break some given law you must be some kind of stoic gangster type. Its really not true.
Maybe in the 70s when weed came in bricks shipped in by the cartel. During that time the people moving pounds were probably actually dangerous people. During my time as a delinquent though, weed was grown in the mountains by families who were more likely to be caught donating to the local homeless shelter/passing out food and blankets to the homeless than they were "using violence on people on the street"
I promise you, you dont need to live in fear of weed dealers. They are really not that dangerous.
I agree that bad people do exist. And I'm sure that prosecuted crimes are committed disproportionately by those we'd define as "bad people." But I don't think that bad acts committed by good people are any better than those committed by bad people. And I don't think that a bad person who resists committing bad acts should be treated worse than a good person who also resists committing them.