Drug Crazy - Prescription for Sanity - Page 190

with eight pounds of marijuana in his trunk and thirty plants in his apartment, he got probation.^[16]  It would be hard to imagine a black teenager from the South Side of Indianapolis getting the same deal.

Unfortunately, that’s not the worst of it. Far and away the most ominous byproduct is the corrosive flood of illegal cash that is lapping at the foundations. Honest cops all over the country are watching in dismay as their departments are sucked under by payoffs at every level. Former San Jose police chief Joseph McNamara says it’s eating us alive. “Every week, somewhere across the country, there is another police scandal related to the drug war—corruption, brutality—even armed robbery by cops in uniform.”^[17]

 But as our friends from south of the border warn us, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. At a drug policy conference in 1993, former Colombian High Court Judge Gomez Hurtado told the Americans, “Forget about drug deaths, and acquisitive crime, and addiction, and AIDS.  All this pales into insignificance before the prospect facing the liberal societies of the West. The income of the drug barons is greater than the American defense budget. With this financial power they can suborn the institutions of the State and, if the State resists... they can purchase the firepower to outgun it. We are threatened with a return to the Dark Ages.”^[18]

As Western Civilization stands transfixed, paralyzed by the specter of 20th Century Vandals devouring one country after another, it’s important to remember that this particular impending disaster could be avoided with the stroke of a pen.  The criminal enterprises that now encircle us from the Golden Triangle to Tingo Maria and Tijuana, from Watts and Bronxville to Bel Aire and Sutton Place—the powerful, ruthless combines that threaten to overwhelm the rule of law itself—all could be cut off by simply closing the black market money tap.

The prohibitionists have never been called to account for their part in this disaster, but they are quick to demand a full