Pubdate: Mon, 17 Aug 2015
Source: Arizona Republic (Phoenix, AZ)
Copyright: 2015 The Arizona Republic
Contact: http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/opinions/sendaletter.html
Website: http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/24
Author: Mike Schmidt
Note: Mike Schmidt of Peoria is a general surgeon with 35 years of experience.

IS DRUG DEALING NON-VIOLENT? ASK THE DEAD

Prominent liberals and libertarians have joined to advocate 
"sentencing reform," code words for reduced prison sentences for a 
variety of so-called nonviolent offenses such as drug dealing and 
quantity possession.

This is naive or outright dishonest. Illicit drug peddling and 
consumption is a non-violent crime if you discount murders induced by 
drug rage or gang wars over drug-sales territory.

It's non-violent if you ignore the many people permanently injured or 
killed by drug use, even those who have great resources. Do I hear 
Elvis Presley, Len Bias, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston and her 
daughter, among many of our famous entertainers and athletes?

Many illicit drugs rot out your teeth; shorten your life span with 
physical handicaps produced from strokes, heart attacks and 
pneumonia; and sap your intellect and motivation. Do I hear zombie? 
That's not violent? More than a few drug-using parents are 
responsible for child abuse, neglect and locked-vehicle hyperthermic deaths.

Many physicians, hospitals and legitimate drug companies are sued, 
and giant damages are awarded to people who are victims of 
medical-care-related illness or demise. But if your illegal-drug 
pusher caused such problems, he or she bears no responsibility for 
such violence to you?

Drugs are often used by pimps to keep prostitutes and sexual slaves 
under control, leading to their amazingly abbreviated lives. What 
about all the AIDS and hepatitis C victims who acquired their 
afflictions, including fertility-robbing venereal diseases, as a 
consequence of drug use?

Those afflictions have a significant probability of ending your life 
or making it miserable. No, that couldn't possibly be violent.

Do I hear anything from the dead or maimed victims of car crashes 
caused by drug-impaired drivers? No, those families know firsthand 
that losing children, the family breadwinner, and Dad or Mom is 
perfectly non-violent.

Sentencing-reform advocates live and espouse the fantasy of teenage 
invulnerability when it comes to illicit drug use, so their pushers 
are their friends; these peddlers couldn't be poisoners. Release them 
at once from prison.

Or are drug felons responsible for thousands of unheralded massacre 
deaths in this country, although they occur over months and years, 
rather than on a matinee afternoon?

And the bedfellow press won't put two and two together for their 
readers to link these premature deaths. These same progressives would 
recoil in horror if drug peddlers were passing out loaded guns to 
their children, but the effect might well be the same on those young lives.

Many of the victims of drug violence are not alive to offer 
counterpoint to the destructive drivel that claims drug dealing or 
possession is a non-violent crime and deserving of legalization. And 
for those blue-nose jurisdictions: Probation, early parole, sentence 
commutation or outright pardon by heads of state are the only 
responses possible for "humane" liberals.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom