Sure but organized crime runs on profit margins, and study after study has shown that by and large organized crime can't fund itself without the profits from drug running.

Nothing else is as lucrative, and most secondary markets they get involved in tend to be to supply things the criminals want - i.e. guns and sex trafficking.

There is a bizarre trend in these conversations to make a defeatist argument along the lines of "the cartels can never be stopped" that doesn't seem to line up with any of the actual evidence.

For example, gun running into the US just isn't a thing - gun smuggling is what organized crime takes out of the US - but the money needs to be USD to pay for it, and ultimately Mexico just doesn't have a lot of that without drugs.

Even in California, the cartel is still active in the grey market. As long as the legal option remains dramatically more expensive than grey market, and how couldn't it with sometimes a >30% tax rate, there will be a grey market.