Today’s dispensation of confusion from this Administration commuted the sentences of 46 drug pushing criminals. Serious drug pushers. So far, he has commuted the sentences of 90 criminals. Practically all of these criminals were pushing enormous amounts of cocaine, with other drugs taking secondary importance in their arsenals of human destruction. The rationalization for this misguided Presidential disposition was worded as, “These men and women were not hardened criminal, but the overwhelming majority were sentenced to at least 20 years, 14 of them had been sentenced to life, for nonviolent drug offenses.”
The President of The United States perceives these down-liners in billionaire drug kingpin Joaquin Guzman’s international distribution network as “nonviolent” drug offenders. Guzman has two things to be grateful for this week, apparently. And most of these 46 thugs had guns and many were pushing in school zones. It requires a disturbing mental exercise to perceive serious Drug Pushers, any drug pushers actually, as being “nonviolent.” Drugs have become prevalent on each and every street of our continent. Kids in primary school are not only provided access, but are the beneficiaries of this Presidential attitude as hard drugs are pushed on them. By whom? The Pusher. Where the rubber meets the road, the pusher pushes the toxic amalgams that ravage the human body and desecrate the brain.
I also don’t differentiate here between the pusher we all see on so many of our street corners, or distributing using the automobiles they call “rice-rockets” and the supposed friend who turns a friend onto a drug. It’s rare that someone gets up suddenly one day and says, “I’m in the mood to do some heroin today.” That just doesn’t happen. That’s not how drug use expands. Use grows maliciously and with intent. Self-serving friends make money from friends, and “friends” are easy picking since there are few behavioral forces more powerful than peer pressure. Perhaps such malicious and malignant individuals don’t really fit the definition of “friend.” Of course Hollywood does its best to desensitize us to hard drugs — how else are these poor guys in the slums going to earn a living. A pusher by any other name . . .
Pushing drugs is a violent act. It is as violent as murder. It is contagious and it’s disfigurement of society is permanent. It destroys families. It destroys neighbourhoods. There is no room in our society for drug pushers and their upline. Get caught, and you might as well have committed your third murder. And yet, progressives believe they’ll be rehabilitated, just like their killer friends down the lane, or the child molesters in the next cell. History says, not a chance.
Nonviolent? Really? That’s insane.
A constituent of the vast baby boomer generation with a career which has been fortunate to know the ponderous corporate worlds, as well as the intimately pressurized, and invigorating entrepreneurial domains of high tech and venture capital, I have harvested my share of mistakes meandering through corridors of enterprise from Silicon Valley, to London and endless, colourful, sometimes praetorian points in between. The voyage has provided an abundance of fodder for a pen yielding to an inquisitive keyboard, a foraging mind, and a passionate spirit.
Whether political or business or social or economic or personal, is it not all political? It is a privilege to write, and an even greater privilege to be read by anyone, and sometimes with the wind at my back the writing may occasionally be legible. I do not write to invite scorn, nor to invite respect, but if I get really lucky the writing can stimulate thinking. I also write for the very selfish purpose of animating my own processes, and engaging the best of what life offers. Above all, whether biting fire or swatting shadows, I am grateful to be gifted the freedom to write and publish whatever flows down to the keyboard. To all those who enabled this freedom, and to all those standing guard to preserve it, I am indebted.