Trump Re-shuffles the Drug War Deck of Cards

On Monday, March 19, 2018, Trump will release his plan to combat the opioid epidemic with a call to Stop Opioid Abuse. The plan includes law enforcement measures that allow the Department of Justice to seek the death penalty for some drug dealers “where appropriate under current law.”  Trump will also call on Congress to pass legislation reducing the threshold amount of drugs sold that are required to invoke mandatory minimum sentences for drug traffickers and trigger the application of the death penalty in certain other cases. Those are actually two old ideas that have, to date, jammed our prisons past full capacity. In true Trump fashion, if it didn’t work before, just double down on it.

 This is what happens when you let people who don’t understand the problem come up with a simple (or rather simple-minded) solution, because Trump’s plan to include the death penalty for drug offenses is a “might-makes-right” approach and is no different than the way drug lords handle drug turf disputes, Also of note is that these offenses are ill-defined and likely to be interpreted any way a Trump-appointed judge wishes to interpret them. It will no longer be the rule-of-law in this country but the rule-of-Trump.

The opioid commission, chaired by Jared Kushner, was supposed to introduce its recommendations on ways to curb the epidemic November 1, 2017, but we can see Jared has been as effective at that job as he has been at bringing peace to the Middle East.

In late October, Trump and his administration finally got around to…declaring the opioid epidemic a “national public health emergency,” not a crisis, in order to buy extra time to come up with something…ANYTHING. In the meantime Trump went around bragging at his staged pep rallies that he liked the solutions of thugs and foreign leaders like Duterte of the Philippines, Xi of China, and Loong of Singapore. They claimed to have ended the drug problem in their countries by liberally applying the death penalty. So naturally Trump now thinks the best course of action is killing drug offenders, specifically people pedaling opioids.

But we know opioids are not plants grown in secret indoor gardens or cooked up in mom-and-pop meth labs. They are the result of pharmaceutical companies creating powerful pain killers as medicine, for a profit of course. How many pharmaceutical CEOs or lobbyists will be executed for manufacturing the opioid pills that are at the heart of the crisis? For example, will Trump demand death for Dr. Craig Landau the current CEO of Purdue Pharma, the makers of OxyContin, Oxycodone and Hydrocodone? If not, why not? If Trump is looking for the biggest “pusher” of opioids, you can’t get any higher. (Pun intended.)

How about executing Mitch McConnell, Orrin Hatch, and Paul Ryan, three of the biggest recipients of Big Pharma lobbying dollars? These are people who have used their positions to ram through legislation benefiting Big Pharma financially, as well as generously lining their own pockets, and to hell with the people who get hooked on Big Pharma’s products.

Will doctors be subject to the death penalty for simply prescribing an opioid medication to a patient in pain because later on some bureaucrat looking through the doctor’s notes decided the person had been prescribed too many? Will this be a new avenue for the DEA to apply their military approach to the Drug War? Shoot first; ask questions later. (It’s a variation on Trump’s approach to gun violence; take the guns first, apply due process later.)

Has it ever occurred to Trump that maybe people are deliberately overdosing on opioids because they are so embarrassed he is the president?

Applying the death penalty is such a revolutionary idea; let’s apply it to other crimes that indirectly harm people. Like money laundering. If someone…anyone…is even suggested to be engaged in money laundering, give them the death penalty. And apply it the way the Chinese do; 24 hours after conviction, the sentence is carried out.

Another area might be ethics violations. If any member of the White House is charged with an ethics violation, have them executed on the front lawn of the White House. There must be zero tolerance. That would be one way to stop people like Kellyanne Conway from thumbing their nose at the Hatch Act.

Where's a wooden stake when you need it?

          In Trump’s grandiose plan to sentence drug dealers to death, he seems to forget just how much money drug companies, the biggest drug dealers in the world, pour into in American politics. Pharmaceutical companies were among the biggest donors to Trump's inauguration, right up there with Big Tobacco and Big Oil companies. Is Trump really going to cut into Big Pharma’s profits by threatening to kill its users and sales force?

Watch for the sun to rise in the west first.

Pot Halloween-Scare is a Monstrous Lie

What better than a good scare for Halloween 2016? We’ve got it in Orlando. Never mind Halloween Horror Nights at Universal, SeaWorld’s Halloween Spooktacular, the Spooky Empire Horror Convention, or even Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party at the Magic Kingdom. Orange County Sheriff Jerry Demmings held a news conference on Monday October 24^th with the express purpose of frightening the wits out of Central Floridians with the alarm that “Marijuana-laced candy might”…MIGHT…”be put in trick-or-treat bags for Halloween”. Not that they would, just that they might. And here’s the really neat trick. It’s all because medical marijuana could be legalized on November 8^th, fully a week after Halloween.

So a proposed constitutional amendment that hasn’t passed yet, although it's pretty certain it will, is the cause for all the alarm by Sheriff Demmings. When politely asked for examples of when and where children had received marijuana-laced candies…even in states where marijuana is legal, Demmings couldn’t offer any. He admitted that “even though the potential for the marijuana edibles appearing this year may be somewhat minimal, it is still a threat in our community.” Yes, just like the threat to our community of being gunned down by rogue police officers or having an engine fall off of an airliner on the approach to OIA and killing someone. Possibility equals actuality in Demmings playbook. But is Sheriff Demmings going to protect us from either of those two possibilities, as well? Of course not!  

It's better to scare the voters with fictional pot-laced candy horror stories.

            Demmings also added this dire warning “I believe the passage of the amendment could be problematic and would negatively impact the overall public safety of our community.” How will its passage on November 8^th harm the kids on October 31^st? Do the pot candy pushers have a time machine to go back over a week from when medical marijuana is legalized on November 8^th, or sometime thereafter, with reams of the now-legal pot-infused candy to foist on unsuspecting kids?

But drug warriors like Demmings insist it's better this way.

            Tellingly, this whole Chicken Little press conference was hosted by the anti-medical marijuana group “Don’t Let Florida Go to Pot”, a sky-is-falling local group from Pine Hills that claims, without any evidence, that people in other states are putting edible marijuana in packages that look appealing to children. Demmings called these phantasms that are packaging the pot candies in other states “mean-spirited people” who are just trying to “create confusion and injure our children.” Demmings finally made the claim that Colorado is where kids might have gotten the pot edibles while trick-or-treating. The Associated Press had reported on an incident in 2014…yes, two years ago…where eight kids in Colorado ate some pot brownies, but it turned out to be a case of bad parenting at an adult party where the brownies were left right where the kids in the house could find them. None of the kids got them while going door to door. That was the only incident the Associated Press found. Marijuana was legalized in the state in 2012. If it was such a danger, one would think there would be hundreds of stories like that by now. There are not.

The HELL with saving him...we've got to defend the kids who are not being offered pot.

            But why let the facts get in the way? It serves Sheriff Demmings anti-drug agenda, (where Orange County is enriched by continuing its drug war efforts) better by scaring everyone with an imaginary monster than to admit his concerns are baseless.