blacksword404
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FR
"Shorts sold meth for a short time, he told me, but complains that the people he sold to were unable to wait, and liable to do something crazy. He prefers to deal only with professionals — and, he says, the professionals do cocaine.
“I like to sell to the lawyers, the doctors, you know, people who have something to lose.”
The doctors and lawyers come into the bar where I’ve met Shorts, and I watch them from a distance. I hear them talking about the lines they’re doing or have done, about waking up still fucked up, about 36-hour shifts at the hospital. The drugs ease the stress of lost cases and long shifts. The drugs help them keep up or wind down, make them feel pepped up, ready to go."
Everyday professionals trying to live. People you interact with everyday. The cop that writes you a speeding ticket. The nurse that treats you.
“Everybody does drugs, but it’s the poor who go to jail for it, ” another dealer, named Cruz, told me.
Cruz had grown up broke. At one point, he, his mom and his brother were living on $9,800 a year. “We tried to go through the bank. No financial institutions would lend to us, because we didn’t have repossess-able assets.”
Without the money Cruz made selling drugs, he never could have opened his legal, and so far successful, business. Once he had the money he needed, he stopped selling blow. When I asked him why, he told me, “If you don’t get addicted to the drugs, you get addicted to the money.”
At least he was smart about it. He sld until he got enough to start his own business an then got out.
“The drug lords don’t want [drugs] legalized,” Selander explains, “because it would reduce their profits.” A 2012 study by the Mexican Institute of Competitiveness concluded that if weed were made legal in just three American states — Oregon, Washington and Colorado — Mexican cartels would lose $4.6 billion dollars.
But it’s not only criminals that profit. Selander points out that law enforcement agencies would lose millions of dollars and thousands of jobs should the drug war end. “Yes, there is a lot of money on the black market. But there is also a lot of money for those agencies working drugs.”
The federal agencies who hold $1.6 billion in seized assets; the local police forces that make millions off confiscated cash, property and cars; the lucrative private prisons fed by drug convictions? All of them stand to lose millions if drugs are made legal.
Rico puts it this way: “They don’t care about anyone on the streets. They care about getting their pocket money.”
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RE: Republicans and Legal Pot - 
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