THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS NON-VIOLENT DRUG CRIME

boblonsberry.com ^ | 03/30/16 | Bob Lonsberry

[shortstop]

There is no such thing as a non-violent drug crime.

Drug dealers are killers, not victims, and it’s a shame the president of the United States doesn’t recognize that.

Yesterday, in what he said was an example of redemption and leadership, Barack Obama commuted the sentences of 61 drug dealers. In the midst of a horrific heroin epidemic, as the death rate from opiate overdose has quadrupled, the response of the president is to turn loose the profiteers and purveyors of this plague.

It is a slap in the face of every mother who has wept over the body of an overdose victim, and every police officer who has struggled to take drugs from neighborhood streets. Broad stretches of urban America are blighted by the violence and venality of the drug trade, and the president has sided with the criminals, not the victims.

He has chosen the divisive logic of racial victimization, which looks only at perpetrators, not victims. He has assailed a fictitious school-to-prison pipeline and ignored the reality of predator and prey.

And so he signed the paperwork for the release of dozens of heroin, cocaine, meth and PCP dealers – many of whom were also convicted of carrying illegal firearms. People whose stock-in-trade was the peddling of substances which unavoidably led to death and ruin, were turned loose on society.

And he boasted of it. He held it up as a moral example, as the sign of a higher understanding and sensibility.

Instead, it was the facilitation of one of the greatest evils facing America and the world.

The illegal drug trade has ravaged American cities, Mexican states and Latin American countries. It is a commerce of evil and violence from top to bottom. Every dollar is blood money, every transaction is tied to death, ever participant is responsible.

And drug dealers are the sharks that swim in home waters. They are the reign of terror that ghettoizes the American neighborhoods where families and businesses struggle to survive. Turning them loose, calling them victims, standing beside them, is pure evil.

And so is putting money in their pockets.

Those who buy illegal drugs, from pot to pills and heroin to hashish, are equal partners in evil. The simplest marijuana purchase provides the profit motive that guns down countless young black men and ravages innocent Mexican communities. Those who use pot, and other drugs, buy the guns and bullets and provide the bounty that decimate urban black America. If you buy drugs, you have blood on your hands. If you sell drugs, you have blood on your hands.

And if you release drug dealers, you have blood on your hands.

Perhaps the president’s view is shaped by his own illegal conduct. As a younger man, Barack Obama smoked marijuana, and was photographed boastfully doing so. He and friends built an identity around their illegal drug use.

When you’ve done business with drug dealers, maybe it’s easier to see them sympathetically.

But when you’ve attended the funerals and walked by the streetside memorials or heard the mothers weep, you feel contempt for drug dealers, not sympathy. Your heart goes out to the victims, not the perpetrators.

These drug dealers were mostly sentenced to 10-year terms, which is federal law and seems about right for the damage they do. But they will all get out early, contrary to the wishes of Congress and federal judges, because of the president’s seemingly race-based philosophy.

And right in the middle of a national discussion about heroin and opiates, right in the middle of a national flood tide of death, the president has stood beside the drug dealers, as their defender and friend.

Just as he once stood as their customer.

[varyouga]

It wont be the case because nanny-statism has stupidly been allowed to flourish and rolling it back now will result in riots.

I’d rather pay for every doper than continue the police state though. It costs several times more to spy on people and keep them in prison than give all dopers free housing, food and dope. Not to mention the violence and theft for dope that would be eliminated