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More than a thousand people were arrested as a result of my undercover work. I can't tell you <br />how many of those young folks would have gone on to have a perfectly productive life had I not <br />intervened but I am sure the number is huge. We have a saying at LEAP, "You can get over an <br />addiction, but you will never get over a conviction." A conviction will track you every day of your <br />life because it is on a computer. Every time you go to get a job it is hanging over your head like a big <br />ugly cloud. <br />You know, I could even live with that if it made a bit of difference to lowering the incidence <br />of death, disease, crime, and addiction but it doesn't. And the policies are so destructive. Think of all <br />the people you know personally who have ever used an illicit drug when they were young then <br />put the drugs behind them and went on to lead a perfectly happy and productive life. If you can't <br />think of any and I doubt that, I can name a few for you. You remember the fellow who was in the <br />news so much a few years ago the one who used to smoke but didn't inhale? That's right, <br />President William J. Clinton. But I don't want to just pick on Democrats. We have a man in the <br />White House today who used illicit drugs, George W. Bush. And Vice Presidents, Al Gore and Dan <br />Quail, along with former speaker of the house, Newt Gingrich used illicit drugs. The line is too long <br />to enumerate but all those folks have two things in common. They all used illicit drugs when young <br />then put them down and went on to become powerful politicians and once they got there they all got <br />selective amnesia. They forgot where they came from. Suddenly they came to believe police have to <br />arrest young people for doing exactly what they did in order to save them and guarantee those <br />arrested will never achieve the levels of success of our current politicians. <br />And what have we accomplished with all our hard work and monetary investment. On <br />February 5, 1994, I clipped a photograph out of the New York Times Newspaper. It caught my eye <br />for several reasons. There was no accompanying article, just the picture and that picture was buried <br />on page 23 of the newspaper. The event occurred in the Corona section of Queens, New York, just <br />down the street from where 17 years earlier I had made the largest seizure of brown heroin <br />nineteen pounds. As you can see, they did a little better than I did. The caption relates, "police and <br />federal authorities recovered 4,800 pounds of cocaine, with an estimated street value of $350 <br />million...." <br />Nearly two and a half tons of cocaine and <br />according to the paper of record, the New York Times, <br />this seizure didn't even rate a single article let <br />alone being in the paper every day for a week. "How <br />could that be ?" you might ask. How could we have <br />degenerated to this point where the seizure of tons of <br />cocaine hardly matters. I'll tell you how. It is because <br />by 1994 the police were doing such a great job for us, <br />regularly seizing tons of not just cocaine but heroin. <br />We were seizing so much and so often that the New <br />York Times apparently felt it couldn't keep up with <br />us writing articles so they just took to summarizing <br />those multi -ton shipments. As they did in Joseph B. <br />Treaster's July 15, 1994 article, "3 Arrested in <br />Smuggling Cocaine Found in Newark Cargo," on <br />page B3 of the New York Times. Mr. Treaster wrote <br />of, the seizure of "[t]hree tons of cocaine hidden in <br />0 <br />