They always were a pretty wild bunch.
Posted on 10/29/2008 8:58:44 AM PDT by 3AngelaD
Edited on 10/29/2008 3:21:05 PM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
McALLEN -- Recent U.S. efforts to disrupt drug smuggling routes through the Rio Grande Valley have prompted threats of retaliation against authorities on this side of the river, according to an FBI intelligence report. Vowing to maintain control over valuable trafficking corridors such as those in Reynosa, Matamoros and Miguel Alem
(Excerpt) Read more at brownsvilleherald.com ...
There simply would be too much competition from everyone with a backyard. Grow your own weed, why buy it? Without the politicians and cops to enforce the tax laws, sorry but the cartels are out of business. So is the DEA.
Our next President will be forced by the our citizens to exercise an iron-fisted policy against these foreign paramilitary groups and give no sympathy to our own youths that are essentially committing acts of treason by aligning themselves to these foreign terrorists.
They always were a pretty wild bunch.
A lot of them would. When alcohol prohibition was over most people involved found honest work. The major gangsters, the Al Capone types didn't, but the average Joes with stills in the woods, and the people people transporting car or truck loads of booze and the ones smuggling it in from Canada and so on for most part found legal work. Most of these people weren't even in the business full time. They were just making an extra buck here and there as part time or odd job workers in the black market for booze.
I handled thousands of pounds worth of drug mule cases as a public defender. When I first started doing it, I was expecting all these guys to be hardcore tattooed gang banger types. Some were those types, but most of them actually had clean records, no tattoos, and they were actually fairly law abiding family men with wives and lots of kids. What they all had in common was that they didn't have any money. Somebody would offer them five grand or so to drive a vehicle packed with weed a few states over, and that would be really tempting to these people. They could make several thousand dollars in a four or five day trip, tax free. Most of them had jobs, they just didn't pay very well. These were not for the most part ambitious gangsters who wanted to be the next “Scarface,” they were just involved in this because the opportunity presented itself and they needed the money. They would know little about the people setting up their trips, and nothing about the organizations their handlers were working for. They're just pawns, peons in the businesses. They're people who would do this work if the opportunity presented itself, but not necessarily the types who are out looking to be involved in as much criminal activity as possible. They are not unlike the booze runners and the lookouts or whatever from the old Prohibition days. If drugs were legal most of these people wouldn't be involved in criminal activity. The big players would still be in the game somehow or another for the most part, but most of the little guys wouldn't, just as we saw with alcohol Prohibition.
That being said I'd be dead set against legalizing all drugs. Drugs like heroin, cocaine and meth should never be legalized. They are too addictive and prone to causing horrible problems in our communities. Many of the currently illegal drugs are not widely available and they are so expensive to use that many who might try them won't get the chance, and many who do try them won't be able to afford to do it enough to become addicted. Heroin for instance is really not available at all in my town. Police hardly ever make a heroin bust. Most prosecutors and defense attorneys in my area have never handled a heroin case. The only one I ever had was one where a couple of guys were caught with a couple of pounds as they were passing through on the Interstate headed to a state out east. The last thing we'd need to do is legalize heroin.
Marijuana is a different story though. It's not good, but it's not nearly as bad as the other drugs I mentioned. That and it is cheap and easy to get everywhere in this country. If people aren't using it it is not because they can't find it or can't afford it. Fear of arrest probably isn't stopping many from doing it either because it's so easy to do it without getting caught and even if people do get caught not much will happen to them. There are probably very few people out there waiting for marijuana to be legal so they can finally start smoking it. The vast majority of those who want to smoke it despite all the good reasons not to smoke it are already smoking it.
The kicker is that Americans consume more marijuana than all other illegal drugs combined. It's the drug Mexican drug trafficking organizations are really getting rich on. It's their bread and butter. Mexican drug trafficking organizations produce thousands of tons of it every year in Mexico and increasingly here on our own soil. They sell most of what they produce to Americans. The second most popular illegal drug in the U.S. is cocaine, but Americans consume several times as much pot every year. And Mexicans are only the middlemen for cocaine. They don't produce it. Marijuana is their cash cow. If we take that from them we really hurt them. Not only would it deprive them of billions of dollars in revenue every year, but those vast existing marijuana distribution networks that reach every corner of America that they move the biggest part of their hard stuff through would be gone. They'd be killing each other over what's left of the illegal drug trade and it would be harder for them to move their cocaine and meth and heroin and so on. They'd end up being a shell of what they are today and we could do that without legalizing the hard stuff.
Collectively these organizations are actually raking in many billions of dollars a year from Americans. Our government estimates that Mexican drug trafficking organizations supply Americans several thousand tons of marijuana every year and several hundred tons of other drugs. There are ridiculous sums of money being made. That's why we keep reading about corruption on both sides of the border, gun battles over smuggling routes, the use of well armed mercenaries like we read about in this article, and so on. The amount of money to be made is mind boggling. People are getting rich in the drug trade and they'll stop at nothing to keep the money rolling in and/or increase their share of the pie.
I'm not worried about people overdosing as much as I am about the harms they cause innocent people. Even if drugs like heroin were cheap, addicts would still steal to get it because they wouldn't be able to hold down jobs. They'd steal and they'd cause us a lot of other problems. Right now according to government statistics only something like one third of one percent of Americans use heroin. If legal the vast majority of Americans would be smart enough to leave it alone. But with low prices and easy availability a few more would try it and become addicted. It wouldn't take that many new users to double or triple or quadruple the number of heroin addicts we have today. The same goes for cocaine and meth.
Marijuana is already cheap and we couldn't make it much more available than it is already. Many millions of Americans use it every once in a while at least. More than 100 million Americans, more than half of all adults under 60 have already tried it. Almost everyone who wants to use it is already using it. That and of course marijuana users aren't much of a threat to us for the most part compared to people who use these other drugs. Use probably wouldn't go up that much and if it did go up more than I think it will it still wouldn't be that big of a deal.
If it was pot or nothing, I’m there with you legalize MJ, let the munchies begin!
I think the social ills associated with alcohol abuse far outweigh anything we would see with full decriminalization of all recreational drugs. I think we can agree the current WOD ain’t getting it done.
If marijuana were legalized, would employers still have justification to test for it as part of hiring? Would that still work as a stigma against it?
I think not!
Perhaps the Zetas realize that among the first things 0bama will want from us citizens after he takes office is our firepower.
What is interesting to me is that this is the exact area of Texas where the local elected officials and a few people whose loyalties reside in Mexico have put up the most resistance to the fence project. They may live to rue the day.
Or a whole bunch of them may be in on it.
L
Indicted former Starr County sheriff is refused bail By LYNN BREZOSKY San Antonio Express-news Oct. 20, 2008BROWNSVILLE — Reymundo Guerra's resignation as Starr County sheriff didn't convince a federal magistrate judge to set bail for the former lawman, who is accused of using his position to assist high-ranking members of a drug cartel..... He is one of 15 defendants in a 19-count federal indictment alleging conspiracy to move cocaine and marijuana from Mexico into the interior United States... An FBI agent testified during a detention hearing Friday that Guerra asked a sheriff's department investigator to reveal intelligence to a man Guerra said had ties to Mexican law enforcement. The man, 31-year-old Jose Carlos Hinojosa, was named along with Guerra and 13 others in the indictment and is believed to be a leader in the Gulf Cartel...If convicted, Guerra will join a list of other border law enforcement officials, including predecessor Eugenio "Gene" Falcon, who have fallen amid alleged drug crimes or corruption.
Like Miami, parts of Texas no longer belong to the United States, and we have done very little to stop this.
Some employers now will not let cigarette smokers work for them, even if they only smoke when off the clock and off of company property. These policies have been challenged in the courts, and the employers have won. If employers don't want to hire pot smokers, they won't have to whether marijuana is legal or not.
The stigma that marijuana really isn't there because it is illegal. It's there because people have no respect for forty year old stoners who live with their parents. It's there because there is nothing cool about being one of the stoners sitting on the couch stoned out of your gourd staring at the TV with the sound turned off, a scatterbrained stoner who makes no sense half the time. There are so many good reasons not to be a pot smoker, especially one who smokes it all the time. Whether it is legal or not, there will always be a stigma associated with smoking pot. Parents won't want their kids to smoke it. Most young ladies will not want pothead boyfriends, like most wives don't want pothead husbands. A lot of people will not like it being smoked in their homes. It's just not the fun social lubricant that alcohol is most of the time and it will never enjoy the popularity as alcohol, and it will always carry with it a certain stigma.
Look at the Netherlands. Marijuana is for all intents and purposes legal there and has been since the 1970s. Retail sales from facilities with permits are legal. Possession of a small amount is legal. Growing a few plants is allowed. Most people don't smoke it though. Only around 20% of the Dutch have even tried it compared to over 40% of Americans. A much lower percentage of their teens have tried it compared to teens here. It's not really “cool” to be a pot smoker there. A young person who does it is no rebel, he's just one of the losers sitting on the couch stoned out of his gourd staring at the TV with the sound turned off. That's no way to be if you want to have any luck with the ladies. It's just not really cool there. I don't know what our fascination with it is but we almost always have the highest per capita use numbers and when ours aren't the highest no country has substantially higher use than we do.
The laws in place in a country or a state really don't seem to matter. Where marijuana is popular it is easily available to anyone who wants it and those who want to smoke it smoke it. We're a lot harder on pot smokers than most Western nations, yet we almost always have the highest per capita use rates. You see the same thing all over the Western world though. There is little correlation between the laws in effect and the per capita percentage of people who use marijuana. Some places have harsher laws and lot of people smoke it, while others basically allow it and far fewer smoke it there than in the places with more strict laws.
I honestly believe that the vast majority of people who would smoke marijuana in this country already smoke it. If all the good reasons not to smoke it not related to its legal status are not enough, the far remote possibility of getting caught and having to maybe pay a fine, maybe even be on probation for a while or whatever isn't going to stop these people. And those precious few who are waiting for it to be legal before they smoke it aren't going to be a problem for us. For one there aren't that many of them, and the fact that they are responsible enough and have the will power to leave it alone now indicates that they would probably be fairly responsible pot smokers. The real losers and trouble makers who would smoke it are already smoking it.
Thanks.
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