Cutting Cartels and Gov't Costs While Saving Willie Nelson

Cutting Cartels & Gov’t Costs While Saving Willie Nelson

Global American Series

22 April 2011

People are concerned about border security and the killings in Mexico. How can the U.S. cut the cartels down to size while cutting our own law enforcement costs -- and even generate new revenues in the process?

The last two Presidents of Mexico have vastly different views on the cause of the violence and the solution. One of them is right, but which one? The last President Felipe Calderon set out in 2006 to kill the cartel leadership. The result has been an explosion of violence, beheadings and over 34,000 people killed in Mexico in the last five years. Former President Vincente Fox has said that drugs should be decriminalized, which Mexico did in 2009 under Mr. Calderon for small quantities of marijuana and even heroin.

What is the solution? We’ve been here before, in the 1920’s and 30’s when alcohol was made illegal. A small time gangster named Al Capone ended up running one of the biggest criminal organizations out of Chicago and gangsters carried machine guns and used them on each other in the fight for control of the business. What we are seeing in Mexico is an international version of that drama. The cartels now rake in over $39 BILLION dollars a year, which they invest in heavy weapons like Ak-47’s, much of which is imported from the United States. The cartels are now moving into the U.S. They could be operating in your city or next door.

How do you fight a $39 billion/year business that pays no taxes and settles scores with firepower and can afford to build submarines to haul contraband into the U.S.? For fifty years the U.S. has spent up to $50 billion a year –now Trillions of dollars--on a lost cause that has not diminished supply or demand, despite jailing hundreds of thousands of people. The result was no different in Al Capone’s day. Despite the law, people still drank alcohol, and many ended up dying from contaminated bootleg booze. Bars were controlled by gangs and not mom and pop owners –until prohibition ended.

According to the FBI, last year more than 850,000 people in the U.S. were arrested for marijuana possession – not for selling or committing any crime other than possessing an illegal substance. In Texas over 80,000 people were arrested for marijuana, 97% of them for simple possession. The cost to the State of Texas ranges from $10,000 per arrest to an annual cost of $24,000 to house them in jails. Multiplied out Texas is spending from $800 million to $2 BILLION a year arresting people for simple marijuana possession. Over 50% of the drug arrests are for marijuana possession -

How many people have died from marijuana? According to the Center for Disease Control, tobacco kills about 435,000 per year, alcohol kills over 85,000, legal prescription drugs kill over 30,000 and marijuana has killed zero people – that’s right. Medical experts say a person would have to consume over 1,500 lbs of it in 15 minutes to overdose. Not even a dedicated pot head could go through more than a cigarette or two in that time! Estimates are that between 20 and 50 million people in the U.S. smoke it.

The current law results in unequal enforcement. Singer Willie Nelson, who was recently picked up at a traffic checkpoint in a bus on which officials found several ounces of pot. He paid a fine and was let go. The Sheriff even joked about him singing as part of the deal. Yet kids, mostly minorities, end up having their futures ruined by an arrest for simple possession and spend hard time in jail, at a huge cost to the State. It keeps them from getting jobs because they have a record. Can we afford to spend billions to lock up nonviolent offenders for possession – which forces jails to release the violent to make room for them? Does arresting people like Willie Nelson for possession of a substance that hasn’t killed anyone make sense in these tough budgetary times? The U.S. has only 5% of the world’s population, yet we have more people in jail than Russia and Communist China! Most of time are nonviolent offenders.

Fourteen states have now sanctioned medical marijuana, allowing it for medical purposes. It has been used to keep people from going blind with glaucoma to relieving the nausea from chemotherapy. Portugal and Holland have legalized it, and found that addiction rates did not rise – in fact kids there use less than half of the marijuana than kids in the U.S. where it is still illegal. Is it the fascination with forbidden fruit? Actually until 1937, marijuana was legal. It was used in ancient China as an herbal cure.

So how do we cut the cartels down to size, cutting them off of billions in income while also cutting billions of law enforcement dollars from hard-pressed State budgets – and even provide a new source of billions in “sin taxes” on currently untaxed revenue?

Hear the details by tuning in to the Global American radio program on Saturday at 9 am Central time, streamed on www.Business1110KTEK.com and podcast 24/7 on www.GlobalAmerican.org.

Michael Fjetland

Global American Series

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