COM 0819.001 2008-2010 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home

against so they can betray them and send them to jail. And when they are through with each person they are targeted against the next and the pattern repeats friendship- betrayal -jail over and over, hundreds of times. But I digress. Let's get back to those kids in the parking lot. None of them were 21 years old but they could and did sell me any kind of illegal drugs you can name. However, they often came up to me and said, "Hey Jack, we're thirsty will you go into the liquor store and buy us some beer? We can't buy beer." They could get all the illegal drugs they wanted but couldn't buy beer. How can that be? The answer is so simple that it has apparently never occurred to our drug czars. Beer and cigarettes are legal commodities and the people who sell them are licensed to do so. Selling those drugs is the way they make their livelihood and they will do whatever they can to protect those licenses. I am not saying if drugs were legal that no children would be able to get drugs. Nothing works perfectly. But no illicit drug dealer is going to worry about checking your child's birth certificate to see if he or she is old enough to buy drugs the street dealer only want to see one thing "Show me the money!" And once they've seen the money it doesn't matter if the child is four years old, he or she will be given the drugs. We know this because we have recorded cases of exactly that happening. So, how much money am I talking about here? Enough money to bribe a cop? Enough to buy a judge or a politician? Enough to convince legitimate bankers to wash that dirty money through their banks? In just the banks of the Southern half of Florida in one year over seven billion dollars washed through. I'm not saying the money spent around the world on illicit drugs each year is enough to bribe a cop. I'm saying it's enough money to buy a whole country. Over 500 billion dollars is spent each year on illegal drugs. i ' That's a lot of money. Until a year ago that was 100 billion dollars more than the US Defense Budget and the US Defense Budget is larger than the next 13 nations with high budgets combined. It also amounts to eight percent of the world's total international trade, about the same as spent in the international textile trade. One of the main differences between the two trades is that folks in the textile industry only make a few percent profit on their investment in the illegal drug industry nearly everything is profit. After all, what are we are talking about here simply weeds. It doesn't matter whether we are talking about marijuana from the Cannabis plant, cocaine from the coca bush, or heroin from the opium poppy it is all just weeds. Those of us charged with destroying it, cut it down or pull it up by the roots or fly over it and spray it with poison. We also poison the poor folks growing it but we don't seem worry about that. However, the point is, we have to go back and destroy the plants all over again each year. They are so hardy and they will grow nearly anywhere that they literally have zero value No value at all. That is, until we make them illegal. Once we prohibit them, their value becomes astronomically high; nearly beyond belief. So much so that marijuana is worth more ounce - for -ounce than gold and heroin worth more than uranium, with cocaine worth something in between. From the locations where it is grown, mostly in developing countries such as Afghanistan and Colombia, to where it is sold in the US or Europe, the wholesale increase in value can be up to two - thousand percent ! How would you business folks reading this like to work on a mere 2,000 percent increase in value of your product? I realized long ago that when uniformed officers arrested a robber or rapist the number of rapes and robberies declines. They took someone off the streets that made our communities safer for everyone. But when I arrested a drug dealer the number of drug sales didn't change at all. I was simply creating a job opening for a long line of people more than willing to risk arrest for those