The Sinaloa Cartel is losing its marijuana business, and El Chapo’s sons are going after the ‘premium weed’ market to make up for it

Culiacán, SINALOA — The Sinaloa Cartel wants to take back a business that had long belonged to it but has been lost to producers in US over the past decade.

As more and more US states legalize marijuana for recreational use, Mexico’s biggest drug cartel is trying to corner the legal weed market in Mexico, even if the drug itself is not yet legal in Mexico.

In late 2015 when several US states began legalizing weed for medical and recreational use, the Sinaloa Cartel — known for building a criminal empire on smuggling weed into the US — began to feel the financial impact.

In 2012, prior to the legalization of marijuana for recreational use in Colorado and Washington state, the Mexican Institute of Competitiveness calculated that the cartel stood to lose nearly $2.8 billion if the drug was legalized in those states.

In the years since, “Mexican marijuana has largely been supplanted by domestic-produced marijuana” in US markets, according to the DEA’s 2020 National Drug Threat Assessment.

In 2013, US authorities seized roughly 1.3 million kilograms of weed at the border with Mexico, according to the DEA report. By 2019, however, pot seizures at the border had fallen to nearly 249,000 kilograms. [Read More @ Insider]