[stevetrewick]

>smaller decentralized crews that would be much less violent

Maybe, maybe not. The problem is that those businesses are still illegal and so have no recourse to the law for dispute settlement. When fraud, theft, delinquent payments, etc cannot be addressed with the force of the law they can only be addressed with the force of, well, force. Which likely escalates recursively until the biggest bad ass is holding all the marbles, taking us back to where we started out. It's that lack of recourse to legit dispute settlement that fundamentally guarantees that illegal markets for high demand, high value goods will attract and/or create violent actors, IMO.