Craig Glazer Wins The Drug War!!!

TKC NOTE: Tonight Craig Glazer helps us find a way to win the drug war ... By ending it.

If I Ruled The World:
Changing the Drug Laws

There are three main reasons our government does not want to address fixing our broken drug law policy.

This is the same basic policy we’ve had for better than half a century that doesn’t work.  While a lot of Americans would argue against legalizing drugs, almost everyone would agree our policies are not only out of date, but in and of themselves have made America a much more dangerous place to live than it needs to be.

Reason number one for keeping current strict drug enforcement:  the flow, sales and use of illegal drugs is a trillion dollar industry.  According to CNN, the illegal drug world employs nearly thirty percent of the American Work Force one way or another.  Let’s look at the short list, local and state law enforcement officers, Department of Public Safety in most states (or the KBI in Kansas), the DEA, Customs, much of the Internal Revenue Service, a significant portion of the FBI, many special task forces, Department of Homeland Security (specifically Border Patrol), part of the Military enforcement here and abroad, part of the CIA, prison guards officials, guards, educators and staff, psychiatrists and mental health professionals from all areas, the majority of attorneys involved in criminal cases, judges city, state and federal, the appellate courts, the thousands of employees who are civilian support for many of these agencies, postal inspectors, drug counselors, drug rehab center employees, doctors and nurses, as you can see, this list can go on all day.  Millions are employed due to the illegal drug laws.  Another big part of this to mention is the millions taken in by the government at various levels due to fines, penalties and seizure of property both here and abroad.

Reason # 2:  This is a tricky one, there are millions of Americans in the lower and middle incomes who count on hustling small amounts of drugs to help pay their bills, like the light bill or the car payment.  None of them are what you would call big time dealers, but everyone knows someone who needs a bag of weed, a gram of coke or a couple of pills.  Hey, everybody knows a guy who knows a guy.  If the drug laws were changed making them legal and government controlled this would create a deep shortfall in the pockets of these day-to-day dealers.  We would have to be concerned about how these people would keep up on their day-to-day bills, these aren’t people in the cartels, these are people who live in the apartment next to you.

Third Reason:  This is the least important one to the government but to a certain extent does exist.  Concern for your health in using drugs on a day to day basis will cause most people serious problems.  Example, people who smoke weed once a week or so are probably okay, but if you smoke it morning, noon and night it does have a negative effect.  People who use harder drugs once in a great while are also fairly safe, but those using things like coke, heroin and alcohol (which is legal) on a daily basis are in for a bad time.

Solutions

1. The President of the United States should put together a new board of directors to update and correct current drug policy.  Prison sentences are far too long for almost all drug cases.  With the Parole Board disbanded, thousands of small time prisoners with drug-related offenses have found their punishments enhanced by the system that indicted them in the first place.

Example:  I met way too many young people in Federal Prison that really shouldn’t have been there.  One young man, age 19 from Seattle, was selling small amounts of weed and cocaine so he could buy a new car.  He was arrested and offered a minimal sentence by the feds if he would set up some of his friends on larger drug cases.  He was then supplied with thousands of dollars by the feds to set up these enormous drug buys, thus turning the minnows in his neighborhood into sharks fighting for more money than they had ever dreamed of.  In the end, this ‘investigation’ would send twenty to thirty nobodies to prison for between five and fifteen years each.  As we’ve seen this does not get drugs off the street or stop drug dealing.This new board would review current sentencing guidelines, which are outrageous, and get many of the minnows released as soon as possible into government schooling, military or a government workforce to help redirect their lives in a positive way.

2. A board made up of experts need to look at the legal and medical ways out of this drug war nightmare.  We need to focus on replacement drugs which are safer that we can provide to people who want to sign up to receive them.  Replace drugs like Dilaudid for heroin, speed has already been replaced by Adderal, it seems every girl with a big purse has a bottle of doctor prescribed Adderal.

3. A real drug education system mandatory in both junior-high and high school unlike the ones that existtoday which are bogus.  With this in mind, better counselling to young people with problems while they are still in school before they become a problem on the streets.

4. A redirection of law enforcement to spend time protecting and serving the public and not arresting everybody in order to get promotions and to justify the existence of their job in the first place.  Remember, even the FBI five years ago stopped asking applicants if they ever smoked pot or used small amounts of drugs in the past.

This is just the beginning of what needs to be done to make America safer and not such a police state as it is becoming.