Sleepless in Midland

One possible reason for Chicago's high murder rate -- Mexican cartels

Chicago seems like a long way from Sinaloa, but that didn't prevent the Chicago Crime Commission from naming Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman Loera as Public Enemy Number One.

According to CBSnews.com, Chicago is very important to the Sinaloa cartel. Excerpt:

Sinaloa and other Mexican cartels shipping drugs to Chicago are rarely directly linked to slayings in the city, but Riley said cartel-led drug trafficking is an underlying cause of territorial battles between street gangs that are blamed for rising homicide rates. Riley described Chicago as one of Sinaloa's most important cities, not only as an end destination for drugs but as a hub to distribute drugs across the U.S.

"This is where Guzman turns his drugs into money," he said.

And they send in their own people. More:

Because cartels accumulate houses full of cash, they run the constant risk associates will skim off the top. That points to the main reason cartels prefer their own people: Trust is hard to come by in their cutthroat world. There's also a fear factor. Cartels can exert more control on their operatives than on middlemen, often by threatening to torture or kill loved ones back home. ...

Riley's assessment is stark: He argues that the cartels should be seen as an underlying cause of Chicago's disturbingly high murder rate.

"They are the puppeteers," he said. "Maybe the shooter didn't know and maybe the victim didn't know that. But if you follow it down the line, the cartels are ultimately responsible."

Ironically, they are comparing El Chapo with Al Capone, the murderous bootlegger of the prohibition era. While they did eventually get Capone, the end of that gangster era ended when liquor prohibition ended. Prohibition didn't work with liquor, and it isn't working with drugs.

A winning strategy for Republicans in 2016 - free weed

A friend made a casual remark that may contain the seeds of a Republican presidential victory in 2016. The remark was that Gary Johnson got elected as Republican governor of New Mexico because he favored legalizing marijuana. He may be onto something.

Think about it. As long as an Obama like Democrat can make promises he won't keep and yet count on low information voters to sweep him into office like he did in 2012, then Republicans can't win. So Republicans have to beat Democrats at their own game. And a promise to legalize marijuana will capture the low information voters' attention like nothing else would. Add to that a promise to give a free marijuana joint to each voter, and the Republicans would be unstoppable.

The beauty of this is that legalizing marijuana could have a positive effect. It not only would be a revenue source, but it would hit the cartels harder than the war on drugs could ever do. Reduce the deficit and reduce crime. It's win win.

Assuming a 25 pack of legal marijuana cigarettes would cost $7, about the same as a pack of cigarettes, a single joint of marijuana would cost about 28 cents. Multiply .28 times the number of votes counted in the 2012 election, 130 million, and we get a cost of $36.4 million. Given that Romney/Ryan spent $483 million in their losing campaign, that's not an extraordinary expense.

Better get moving, Republicans. Once Democrats get wind of this idea they'll snap it up like a free Obama phone.

Rocky Mountain High -- new marijuana law in Colorado

Question: Why is an old pot head like President Obama so hard on pot smokers. Answer: Change!

Former Choom Gang member Barack Obama's dedication to the warrior side of the drug war seems somewhat inconsistent. But, sorting out Obama inconsistencies would be a time consuming endeavor. Nonetheless, there it is. See Feds Sentence Aaron Sandusky to 10 Years for Medical Marijuana about the federal government’s prosecution of an individual who was in full compliance with California law.

At the November election Colorado voters legalized personal marijuana possession and usage by adults and put marijuana in the same regulatory environment as alcohol.

We owe the voters of Colorado a debt of gratitude for providing us the opportunity to watch that laboratory experiment from a distance. The results should be educational, whether the experiment is a success or failure, if only the federal government will stay out of the way and honor the voters' wishes.

A couple of interesting things about the way the Colorado law came about. First, note that the law was a result of a voter initiative, not their elected lawmakers. Second, the Colorado Secretary of State determined that around half of the186,000 signatures on the petition were not valid. That's a good lesson for anyone attempting petition drives in other states. Unfortunately for Texans, their good elected representatives cannot see fit to allow voters the right to put initiatives on the ballot.

Anyway, best of luck to Coloradans with their experiment. We'll all be watching with great interest.

Uruguay -- a movement to nationalize the weed business

There's probably not enough broad based support for it to pass right away, but these things take time. CSMonitor.com has the story:

The Broad Front – the center-left coalition that holds power – is proposing a state monopoly over the production and distribution of marijuana, making Uruguay the first national government to sell cannabis directly to citizens. The government says the measure is necessary to combat rising drug-related crime, decrease health risks for users, and counter ineffective US policies on drugs. But within Uruguay, interest groups have labeled the legislation totalitarian, while some international bodies argue it breaches global conventions.

“We’re putting this forward as international policy,” says Sebastian Sabini, president of the parliamentary commission created to debate the bill. “The war on drugs has failed. There are more consumers and more violence.”

“Uruguay is opening up a new path,” he says.

Nationalizing a private industry is never a good thing, but nationalizing an illegal business is a new development. It's worth a shot. A lot could go wrong, but it's a grand experiment worth trying.

Pen Jillette on Obama's drug use

Saw Pen Jillette on Celebrity Apprentice recently and came away thinking he was smart, efficient, demanding, and sometimes difficult to work with. But viewers saw what the producers wanted us to see of him, so there's a built in error in any assessment made from those type shows.

One thing he is is entertaining. And sometimes he's inspiring. For example, here he is on a video podcast talking about the news of President Obama's marijuana use way back when.

Click to watch.

Interesting thought he raised -- what if Obama had been arrested and treated the way drug users are being treated under the Obama administration? His life story would have turned out much different.

Via.

Obama buzzed on marijuana

What a difference a decade makes. I was just thinking about this the other day. When George W. Bush was running for president way back in the beginning of the century, the msm were all over the possibility that GWB had partaken of some illegal substance -- marijuana, cocaine or some such.

Al Franken even tried to trick him into admitting it by asking if it was true that he was once a coke dealer. Franken expected him to say "no," at which point he would follow up with, "If you'll answer that one, why won't you tell us whether you actually used drugs?" GWB was a step ahead of him and declined to answer the first one.

So now we learn that Obama was a stoner. Click A User's Guide To Smoking Pot With Barack Obama for details plus a guide to his smoking crew's vernacular. Cheech and Chong would beam with pride.

Actually, it wasn't really the decade that made a difference, it was the political party. There are two standards, you know. As Jim Treacher observed:

It’s just funny that the same people who are scrambling to defend him were, shall we say, somewhat less accepting of Bush’s youthful indiscretions.

Yo 'bama, don't bogart that joint my friend.

Bending the war on drugs to help its victims

Readers of this blog may remember the case reported on these pages in late 2010 about the pathetic coke junkie who got caught conducting a "pass off". A "pass off," he explained while on the stand in the punishment phase, was collecting the money and passing off the product to the ultimate consumer at the last stage of a drug transaction, apparently to finance his own drug habit. The late Judge Hyde sent him to the slammer for 15 years. Link.

The war on drugs has been an expensive failure. And if there were an easy solution it would have been discovered by now. Legalizing hard drugs is not a viable option due to the way those drugs replace a person's personality and ambition with a drive to get more of the drug. (Marijuana, though, might be a good candidate for legalization for reasons discussed before. Link.)

The problem that neither prohibition nor legalization will solve is getting drug users to quit. An article in Saturday's Wall Street Journal noted the ineffectiveness of prohibition and told about some experiments in a few jurisdiction that have shown some success in getting people who have been caught to break the habit. See Rethinking the War on Drugs.

Probation has long been a very important tool of the criminal justice system. But there's a flaw in how it has been implemented. If a probationer violated the terms, there were only two alternatives, scold them and send them back on the street or send them to prison to serve out their terms. The probationers figrued out what they could get away with, and the tendency was not to send them back to already crowded prisons.

An alternative program has been put in place in a few jurisdictions for people on probation for drug crimes. In Tarrant County, Texas, it's called SWIFT, an acronym (almost) for "Supervision With Intensive enForcemenT."

The SWIFT program is fairly simple. Probationers must phone in each week day to find out whether they must take a drug test that day. If they fail to call, fail the test, or fail to take the test they go to jail for the next couple of days. The important aspect is that it's swift.

Detection and punishment must be swift and certain if it is going to serve as a deterrent. Assistant U.S. Attorney John Klassen told us that just last month.

The program in Tarrant County was patterned after a similar program started in 2004 in Hawaii called HOPE which an independent 2009 report PDF indicates showed a significant improvement over the old way.

Legalization isn't likely to happen in the near future, and the war on drugs isn't going away anytime soon. But programs like SWIFT and HOPE are ways to use the war on drugs in a positive way to actually improve someone's life. But it takes someone in authority to actually look at the studies and implement the program.

The late Judge Hyde's place on the bench is up for election.  If there's anyone reading this who wants to help voters in Midland, Texas, decide which of the four candidates should be elected District Judge, 238th Judicial District, ask Jeff Robnett, Mike Rittenberry, David W. Lindemood and Elizabeth Byer Leonard whether if elected they will take the initiative and establish a similar program locally. Judge Hyde would be proud of you.

Prison Break Mexican Style

The TV show Prison Break, with a likable mastermind striving for justice in a rigged system, had an entertaining run on American TV. But those heroes were nowhere to be found in the recent story from Mexico.

What was originally reported as a prison riot is now revealed to be have been a break-out scheme. And it worked for 30 dangerous Zeta cartel members. Not so lucky were the 44 rival gang members killed in the affair. Quote:

All of those killed, [Rodrigo Medina, governor of Nuevo Leon] added, were from the Zetas' bitter rival, the Gulf cartel. The two gangs, former allies, are now at war for control of part of Mexico's drug trade and other criminal enterprises.

"We can say without a doubt that this was premeditated and planned," Medina said at a news conference, where he announced a nearly $800,000 reward for information leading to the capture of the escapees.

"This isn't a thing where, in the middle of a riot, it occurred to these people to escape." Medina said. "There was a plan, which undoubtedly relied on the complicity of some officials."

The prison was in Apodaca in the state of Nuevo Leon which is just across the border in Southeast Texas.

Planning a vacation in Mexico? Joe Queenan looks for a silver lining and suggests Darfur, Syria or Iran instead in Dying to Go to Acapulco—Literally.