[danharaj]

If there is demand for legal ivory, and the market supplies legal ivory but allows illegal ivory to be laundered into legal ivory, then the presence of the legal ivory market indeed does fuel demand for illegal ivory: The supply side of the legal ivory market is the demand side of the illegal ivory 'market'.

Markets are not static entities that exist on top of some underlying substrate of supply and demand. Supply and demand change according to market structures.

[ngoede]

Yeah, also the big difference it seems to me compared to say the idea of legalizing drugs is that this is a market of theoretically finite supply. Therefore, as the supply shrinks it increases the incentive to find other sources. This is in contrast to a legal drug market which would include legal production and therefore, in theory, crowd out the illegal supply.