Mexico - Mexican Drug Lord thanks American lawmakers for keeping drugs illegal

[Cuberun]

Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman Loera reported head of the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico, ranked 701st on Forbes' yearly report of the wealthiest men alive, and worth an estimated $1 billion, today officially thanked United States politicians for making sure that drugs remain illegal. According to one of his closest confidants, he said, "I couldn't have gotten so stinking rich without George Bush, George Bush Jr., Ronald Reagan, even El Presidente Obama, none of them have the cajones to stand up to all the big money that wants to keep this stuff illegal. From the bottom of my heart, I want to say, Gracias amigos, I owe my whole empire to you."

According to sources in the Mexican government, President Calderon is begging American officials to, in the words of reggae great Peter Tosh, legalize it. "Oh yeah," said an official close to the Mexican president, "Felipe is going crazy. He's screaming at everybody who comes in, 'Why don't they make this sh*t legal already! You're killing me here!' Look, everyone knows, when you have Prohibition, you create gangsters. And the more you prohibit, the more gangsters you make. El Chapo is hero now to all those slumdogs who want to be millionaires. Kids in the street, when they play games, they all want to be El Chapo, the baddest man in the whole damn town."

Meanwhile, many speculate that rich and prominent Mexican families are in cahoots with American businessmen in the alcohol industry, wealthy industrialists who launder the unprecedented profits from the drug business with their legitimate enterprises, and lawmakers who get gigantic kickbacks and payoffs to make sure that these drugs remain illegal, so they can remain rich, fat and happy. According to sources on both sides of the border, tens of millions of dollars in payoffs and kickbacks are stashed in Swiss banks every year, blood money from the brutal business made possible by a corrupt system supported by laws that don't, and have never, worked.

Rather than putting El Chapo and his kind out of business by modernizing outdated laws and in the process making billions of dollars from taxing drugs (as is done with cigarettes and alcohol), United States government has spent hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars chasing its tail, and offered a $5 million reward for the capture of El Chapo. Many have said that the offer is unofficially: Dead or Alive.

Meanwhile, as an epidemic of murderous violence rages on the Mexican-US border, and the American government wastes boatloads of badly needed money on the illegal drug business which results from the Prohibition laws, El Chapo is laughing all the way to the bank. "Whoever came up with this whole War on Drugs," one of his lieutenants reports he said, "I would like to kiss him on the lips and shake his hand and buy him dinner with caviar and champagne. The War on Drugs is the greatest thing that ever happened to me, and the day they decide to end that war, will be a sad one for me and all of my closest friends. And if you don't believe me, ask those guys whose heads showed up in the ice chests."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-...ml?view=screen
The Huffington Post
March 26 2009

Reputation Comments on this post:

	Great article
	Thanks for using the right format. Great article!
	Great post!

[Kelveren]

Small time paper. This would be wonderful if it were from somewhere that Obama and all our lawmakers on Capitol Hill would see it and go 'oh...crap.' But of course the money's in the pockets of the puppetmasters.

[pasties]

@Kelveren - Yeah, that is a top article. Fortunately, the Huffington post is big time, at least in terms of Capitol hill where it is closely followed.

"The Huffington Post won the 2006 and 2007 Webby Awards for Best Politics Blog and has featured celebrity contributors from politics including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton." - Wikipedia

pasties added 8 Minutes and 26 Seconds later...

In fact.... another recent, interesting article on Obama's attitude on drugs policy, from the Huffington Post.

Obama: (Reefer) Madness to Tackle Legalization?


Norm Stamper

Retired Seattle police chief, member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition
Posted April 6, 2009 | 05:28 PM (EST)



Two themes emerge in response to my 3/28/09 post. Below, a shot at summarizing. Let's call the competing views Camp Yes, as in President Obama should have tackled the marijuana issue during his recent online town hall meeting, and Camp No representing those who believe he was wise to shrug it off.

Camp Yes

Barack Obama, along with at least two of his Oval Office predecessors, was a pot smoker (and cocaine snorter) in his younger days. "Youthful mistakes," declaim all three. (Why don't they, and multitudes of other public figures, just say they did it, they enjoyed it, they outgrew it. Or they calculated the risks of continued use vis-à-vis their upward mobility, and switched back to booze?) This president's drug use did not slow his march toward global eminence (any more than Michael Phelps's kept him from the gold). But if young Barry had been busted? For starters, you wouldn't know the man's name today. Camp Yes asks the president: Why not use your understanding of what a drug bust would have done to your own future to do right by tens of millions of unlucky others?

Countless Americans suffering from terminal illness and/or excruciating pain find relief not from commercial pharmaceuticals, and their sometimes ghastly side effects, but from cannabis. Patients risk arrest for purchasing, growing, or possessing this analgesic, naturally occurring medicine. The president's compassion for the sick and dying surely dictates action. Real change, Mr. President. Now, not later. Justice delayed is in fact justice denied.

Hemp is a self-renewing, eco-friendly product with virtually endless industrial and commercial applications. The manufacturing of hemp products should be legalized posthaste, its growth encouraged.

A casualty of the drug war has been our civil liberties, along with our faith in a system of governing that guarantees one's right to the pursuit of happiness--as defined not by the government but by the individual. As adult Americans, we enjoy sovereignty over our own bodies, and that includes what we choose to put into them.

It is the economy, stupid. Marijuana is the largest (untaxed) cash crop in 12 states, among the top three in 30 states, and far and away the country's most valuable crop. At an annual value of over $35 billion, marijuana outstrips the combined value of corn and wheat. Its legalization, taxation, and regulation would provide many jobs and help grow the economy, not insignificantly.

Legalization would deliver a devastating blow to Mexican drug cartels, and to street traffickers who sell to kids.

Presumed opposition to marijuana reform is speculative, grossly overstated, and "overfeared." The president was therefore shortsighted, politically, in dismissing the question of legalization. Further, his disregard of the vast online community that helped put him in the White House merely salted the wound.

Camp No

The president's refusal to consider the marijuana issue was smart politics, the only thing he could have done in that situation. Obama is simply too new to the job, too busy with the economic crisis, too exposed politically. Pot legalization is a third-rail: Put a finger to it and Mitt Romney or Sarah Palin winds up in the White House in 2012.

The subject of the Town Hall was the economy, stupid. If the president and his team are able to turn the economy around, and to win credit for it both here and abroad, he will have ample political capital to tackle controversial subjects like major drug policy reform. In his second term.

It's not his job. Congress makes law, the president executes it. Congress must muster the wisdom and courage to craft a bill, pass it, and put it on the president's desk. Consensus? He'd sign it.

The president did not diss his online supporters. He was simply having a little harmless fun with the question, actually helping to neutralize the exaggerated political baggage associated with pot.

Many in Camp No thought I should (a) cut the president some slack, (b) develop a sense of humor, and (c) recognize the limits of what a new president, even one as gifted as Barack Obama, could possibly accomplish in less than a hundred days (assuming he had opted to embrace marijuana reform in the first place).

For the record, I'm an Obama partisan. Like many others I was transfixed by his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Who is this guy? Is he for real? His March '08 speech on race (reacting to the Jeremiah Wright controversy) was, for me, the definitive political statement on the subject, honest, eloquent, inspiring. Many of his other speeches--and, yes, the sheer size of the crowds he drew--in Germany, in Portland, on election night in Chicago, at the inauguration filled me with awe and pride. I watched the returns on election night with dear friends, champagne mixing with tears and goosebumps (even as we understood our collusion with one another in setting unrealistically high expectations of the man).

I've borne witness to 13 presidents (12 within memory), from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Barack Hussein Obama. I believe we've just said goodbye to the worst in U.S. history, and hello to one who could turn out to be among the best. No other president in my lifetime has offered greater hope across a wide range of social and economic issues--including meaningful and comprehensive drug policy reform--than this man. His earlier statements on marijuana decriminalization and the "utter failure" of the drug war combined with his decision to put a halt to DEA raids on medical marijuana dispensaries bode well for reform.

The drug war rests on a constellation of harebrained laws, most of them enacted by earlier generations of frightened, ignorant, often racist lawmakers. It has been fueled by nonstop lies and propaganda, and kept alive over the years by a succession of eight U.S. presidents in concert with one generation after another of federal, state, and local law enforcers.

Dismantling the decades-old, massively bureaucratized and financed drug war machine is a daunting task. Knowing this, given all he's currently facing, shouldn't we cut Obama some slack?

On reflection, yes.

I believe if we do our part, continuing aggressively to advance the populist cause of drug law reform--calling, writing, phoning, visiting our lawmakers at the state and national level--the president will do his part.

But cutting him some slack does not mean letting Obama off the hook by indulging his tendency toward "extreme moderation." He is our chief executive. He has authority. He has a bully pulpit. He has the constitutional power of Executive Order. And he has a duty to take seriously issues important to his constituents, and vital to the health and safety of his country.