Originally Posted by
Smaguris
By legalizing something you don't take it off the streets, all you're doing is running a controlled market that some may or may not chose to switch to. Black market is home to multi-million dollar businesses of weed in US, and in fact even as of now black market generates as much as $100 billion dollars annually from weed sales
Removing a degree of legal control over a specific good or service does negatively impact the black markets in those areas most of the time from what I've seen. For example, the black market for healthcare in Canada vs the United States, where healthcare is socialized a lot more in Canada. Also, the black market for alcohol also diminished by a significant degree after 1933 in America. Of course the black market will always exist for almost everything that can be obtained illegally.