The Expansionist: Pardoning a Drug Pusher

Friday, June 08, 2018

Pardoning a Drug Pusher

Donald Trump has, bizarrely, been praised for commuting the life sentence of Alice Johnson, a pusher of cocaine!
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This was not a naive young woman selling "nickel bags" to acquaintances on the assumption that marijuana is at worst harmless and at best actually beneficial. No, she was a mature woman who imported, transported, and sold COCAINE:

The Associated Press article at the time of Johnson’s sentencing is headlined, “Memphis drug dealer gets life in prison.” The story reports that Johnson, then 41, was sentenced to life in prison for "leading a multimillion-dollar drug ring that dealt in tons of cocaine from 1991-94."

"Tons of cocaine", bought from the Colombian drug cartel. Cocaine is not remotely beneficial and not harmless. The National Institute on Drug Abuse reports that from 2000-2016, cocaine KILLED 10,619 Americans. But Donald Trump pardoned that vicious criminal. Did anyone die from cocaine she sold? That is not stated in the news coverage I have seen, and may not even be known, by her or law-enforcement authorities. Does it much matter? If a person acts with total disregard for (or "depraved indifference to") human life, s/he should be treated as an enemy of society, and life imprisonment for a woman who sold TONS of cocaine is NOT an excessive sentence — save that incarceration costs taxpayers hugely; capital punishment would be much less expensive to society, if we could eliminate endless appeals and the costs associated with meritless appeals to higher courts and to governors or the President for pardon or commutation of a richly deserved death sentence. And we could harvest organs for DECENT people from subhuman scum who continue to harm society thru parasitism in prison. Saving decent people's lives while carrying out a powerfully deterrent punishment for monstrous criminals would be a win-win. Consider these statistics:

114,000+
Number of men, women and children on the national transplant waiting list as of April 2018.
34,770
transplants were performed in 2017.
20
people die each day waiting for a transplant.

Drugs Are Not Harmless. A lot of people have no idea how destructive hard drugs are, because neither they nor people close to them have used hard drugs, so are fallow fields for malicious enemies of society to sow propaganda seeds for legalization of any and even ALL drugs.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control, in 2016, there were 63,632 drug overdose deaths in the United States.

Does that sound harmless or trivial to you? And that is WITH most of these deadly drugs being OUTLAWED. How many more deaths would there be if we fell for the lies and allowed everyone to sell and everyone to take drugs? 100,000? 500,000? A million a year? Consider tobacco, which should have been outlawed in 1964, when a report by the Surgeon General of the United States linked smoking to immense risks to life and health. But the most that governments would do is require that explicit health warnings be printed on cigaret packages, and commercials for smoking be banned from television.
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Essentially no one today knows that

Prior to the 1900s, lung cancer was a rare disease.

The lackadaisical attitude of governments at both the state and national levels has produced MASS DEATH:

Cigarette smoking is responsible for more than 480,000 deaths per year in the United States, including more than 41,000 deaths resulting from secondhand smoke exposure. This is about one in five deaths annually, or 1,300 deaths every day.

That's only one country, albeit the third most populous country on Earth. The CDC states:

Worldwide, tobacco use causes nearly 6 million deaths per year, and current trends show that tobacco use will cause more than 8 million deaths annually by 2030.

Tobacco deaths in the United States, a country in which essentially everyone born here can read, and information media have worked for decades to inform people of the dangers of smoking, have caused literally incalculable damage to families, friends, employers, and communities. But there are still insane people who (claim to) believe that drug use is a matter of personal sovereignty over one's own body, and society has no right to interfere with such choices.
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I would not have expected Donald Trump to align himself, even implicitly, with the drug-legalization crowd. Yet he has done precisely that, in effectively saying that because Alice Johnson was a "nonviolent offender", a term that prominently fills the news reports on her pardon, her 'crimes' were trivial, so she deserved pardon. I could not disagree more.
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As a gay man living in New York City in the 1970s and 80s, I saw first-hand the ravages of drugs among gay men, many of whom DIED from immersion in a culture of drugs, Drugs, DRUGS, which destroyed their immune system and produced high death rates among young men. I don't wish that on any other group of naive fools. Society DOES have the right to intervene when people stray into lethally dangerous, self-destructive behaviors on the assertion that they know what they're doing, and whatever they want to take into their own body is their own business and no one else's. WRONG. They don't know what they're doing, and their needless deaths ARE the business of family, friends, and society more generally.
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Trump, a colossally unqualified and unprincipled person, betrays the public trust, yet again, with his irresponsible, brainless pardon of a drug pusher who sold "tons of cocaine".

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:55 AM

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