Headlines about President Obama going on the road to Mexico to discuss border issues and drug wars got my attention in the past week. Throw in U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s recent comment that the U.S. Justice Department is no longer interested in prosecuting organizations that cultivate and sell “medical marijuana,” and I start to get a little worried.
This all gets a little strange when you recognize that, while growing and selling “medical marijuana” is allowed in states such as California, those actions are absolutely not permitted under federal laws.
Medical marijuana? That’s pretty slick.
There must be a whole lot of sick people in California whom the state government believes can be cured with “ganja” ─ a whole lot! I only say that because I recently read that the number one cash crop in the entire U.S. is not corn, not wheat, not rice, but marijuana.
In fact, in 2006, according to a report by public policy consultant John Gettmann, the annual market value of America’s home-grown marijuana crop is greater than $35 billion, with more than-one-third of that amount ─ $13.8 billion ─ grown in California. Following California on the list of the top five marijuana - producing states are Tennessee ($4.8 billion), Kentucky ($4.5 billion), Hawaii ($3.8 billion), and Washington ($1.0 billion).
Coincidentally, at about the same time that Mr. Holder was making his “medical marijuana” statement, a California State Assemblyman, Tom Ammiano, introduced a piece of legislation that would legalize all marijuana sold in the state and allow the state to tax the sale of the product. The supporters of the bill project that the tax revenues from legalized marijuana would bring in $1.3 billion a year to the state.
According to Ammiano, being able to sell formerly illicit drugs is a sign that California is now able “to think outside the box…and be creative.”
But if the annual sale of “medical marijuana” in the state amounts to just $200 million per year, ─ and it does ─ then, where is the other $13.6 billion worth of non-medical marijuana being sold? Where precisely is all of that stuff grown? How can you hide 8.6 million pounds of marijuana every year? How is it harvested? Who packages and ships it? And whose carriers are they using?
Hey, obviously, this isn’t just about marijuana, whose categorization as an “addictive drug” or a “natural herb” has been widely debated. No, the bigger issue is whether this move by the Justice Department constitutes the first step by the U.S. to legalize the sale of all of the decidedly more dangerous and addictive drugs that are already being consumed here in the country.
After all, if the “bean-counters” can make a “$1.3 billion in much-needed revenue” argument in just one state, for just the sale of marijuana, how much revenue might they project for a deficit-challenged national government by adding heroin, powder cocaine, crack cocaine, methamphetamines, etc., etc., to the list of newly legal drugs.
My concern comes from knowing – despite the image that the sale of illicit drugs is a business controlled by young black people in urban centers – that some of the greatest fortunes in this country have been amassed by people who were absolutely not black, but who were active as drug traffickers, at the wholesale level.
Families like the Forbes’ (the same people whose name graces the cover of the highly respected business periodical, Forbes Magazine) are no strangers to the illegal drug trade, given that the family fortune was actually created as they used their own ships to transport illicit drugs during the Opium Wars in China, in the 19th Century.
With that background, those who routinely read Forbes Magazine’s annual listing of the world’s wealthiest people, shouldn’t have been entirely surprised to see, ranked at number 701, on the most recent list, a Mexican “entrepreneur” by the name of Joaquin Guzman, whom the magazine described as “basically one of the biggest providers of cocaine to the United States,” with an estimated personal fortune of $1 billion.
Another step in our country’s process of publicly blurring the lines between criminality and “big business” was clearly evident when a Forbes senior editor said matter-of-factly of Guzman: “He is not available for interviews. But his financial situation is doing quite well.”
If that doesn’t scare you enough, already, spend just a few minutes reflecting on the fact that Malcolm Stevenson “Steve” Forbes, Jr., the editor-in-chief of that same Forbes Magazine, and the descendant of the family whose members were global leaders in the opium trade, actually was a candidate in the Republican Presidential Primary election in, both, 1996 and 2000.
Thank God, American voters “just said no” to his candidacy.
And while we’re on the subject, let’s not forget the late John Delorean, who started his own auto company after a brilliant career as an engineer and senior executive at General Motors Corporation. When he became strapped for cash, Delorean tried to arrange an $80 million cocaine deal to generate cash flow. By the way, after being apprehended, he went “scott free,” claiming entrapment.
When you tie in the current attempts to relax drug laws, the casual inclusion of cocaine-based fortunes among those of other "business leaders," and the robust sale of state-of-the-art weaponry to drug gang members in Mexico by “somebody” here in the U.S., there begins to be a growing suspicion that Hillary Clinton may have been right, and that all of the U.S. interest in Mexico may not, in fact, be as “pure as the driven snow.”
When you throw in the fact that Afghanistan, which according to our new president, has become the single most important threat to U.S. national security, also happens to be the source of 93 percent of the world’s opium/heroin supply, you start to wonder.
My other concern in all of this is that, even though blacks and whites use illegal drugs at approximately the same rates, when it comes to drug offenses, black people are 10 times more likely to be imprisoned than whites, according to the Justice Policy Institute.
In 2002, for example, 1.5 million drug-related arrests were made and 175,000 people were sent to prison. Even though blacks constitute just 13 percent of the U.S. population, 50 percent of those sent to prison were black.
The most common reason given for moving to “legalization” is that there is such a great built-in “demand” for narcotics within the U.S. population. It’s futile, the argument goes, for the U.S. to try to stop the inflow of illicit drugs into the country because the “demand” is simply too great. However, if you legalize the sale of those drugs ─ especially the harder drugs ─ you dramatically increase the size of the country’s drug-dependent population. Those people won’t be incarcerated for purchasing drugs, anymore, but they will absolutely be prosecuted for the crimes they will commit to obtain money for their newly legal drug purchases.
If U.S. officials were really serious about eliminating the sale of illicit drugs, they need look no farther than Singapore, where the sale and/or possession of drugs and the trafficking of drugs happen to be a capital offense.
With such a law, in one fell swoop, Singapore has virtually eliminated both the “supply” and the “demand” for illicit drugs.
We could do the same thing here, if the government wanted to do so.
If you agree, please go online to the “White House” web site and access the Presidents’ new direct, email service. Let him know you’re not interested in legalizing the drug trade, no matter how many “experts” seem to like the idea.
Seriously. Do that today.
This whole “drug thing” is getting ugly fast.
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