A Radical Reset
Our Republic has been converted into a democracy which is just another name for mob rule. The mob is getting what it wants, to paraphrase H.L. Mencken, good and hard. One day soon, the entire edifice is going to collapse under its own weight and what takes its place historically will be tyranny. A Radical Reset is the alternative and the system is called Antipolitism. It calls for a new republic based upon merit and not ambition. No parties, no money in politics, no careers in politics, and only serving the public good.
A Radical Reset
We Need to Be Smart About Crime, Not Just Tough on It
What if everything we think we know about fighting crime is wrong? Drawing from my extraordinary journey through the American prison system, I take you behind the steel doors to reveal truths about crime and punishment that politicians and pundits never discuss.
The current response to rising crime in Washington DC reveals a familiar pattern – conservatives demand tougher sentences while progressives call for police reform, yet neither addresses the root causes of criminal behavior. My time as an inmate gave me unprecedented access to the inner workings of drug cartels and criminal enterprises, revealing how our prohibition-based approach to drugs actually fuels the violence we're trying to prevent.
I explain why legalization (not mere decriminalization) of drugs would dramatically reduce violent crime by eliminating the black markets where violence is the only means of contract enforcement. This isn't about enabling addiction – it's about recognizing that prohibition has failed throughout history and continues to waste billions while making our communities less safe. I share firsthand accounts of how the prison drug trade operates, demonstrating why interdiction efforts are doomed to fail against the economic incentives of prohibition.
Beyond drugs, I explore how social breakdown contributes to criminal behavior and why neither "tough on crime" nor "defund the police" offers practical solutions. By shifting our focus from being tough on crime to being smart on crime, we could concentrate our limited resources on preventing and solving violent offenses that directly harm others.
If you're tired of simplistic solutions to complex problems and want to understand crime from someone who's seen both sides of the justice system, this candid discussion offers perspectives you won't hear in mainstream political discourse. Subscribe now and join me in reimagining how we approach one of society's most persistent challenges.
Hey everybody, it's me, your pal, herbie K, host of A Radical Reset libertarian candidate for the 4th Congressional District of Arizona, as a libertarian, and let's talk today about crime. Okay, so today's subject? I'm going to talk about crime, because the news that's taking place at this time is that President Trump has essentially not federalized but augmented the DC Police Department and taken over the senior management of it it seems cooperatively, because the DC police chief seems on board with this to clean up the crime that's going on in the nation's capital, which, evidently going back to one of the things I often say, which is figures, lie and liars, figure regardless of statistics. The fact is universally Democrat and Republican, as far as I can tell. Everybody who lives in DC says it's a hellhole and I have to tell you that I this is not a new issue as far as I'm concerned when I lived in the Washington DC area from 1970, let me think what it was 1977 to 79, I think, were the two years I lived I I was stationed at the national security agency at fort meade.
Speaker 1:I was a russian linguist, um. I lived in laurel maryland with my? Um first wife, who I married way too young but got two beautiful children, so that that was not a mistake. It was just an unfortunate choice of who the mother was going to be. But that's a digression Anyway, by the way, god rest her soul. She since has passed away.
Speaker 1:I do not carry grudges. I've let this go a long time ago, so I don't want you to think I'm one of these guys that walks around hating my exes. Actually, I love my exes. I have two ex-wives. One is deceased. She died of an overdose and it was probably suicide and I don't really know the whole story, but it's very, very sad and I agree. And my second wife is alive and well and we're good friends and we'll probably remain friends for the rest of our lives. I am a great friend and a crappy husband. I've come to that conclusion. This is why I have not married a third time.
Speaker 1:I divorced I'll get into crime in just a second but I divorced in 2004 from Terry. We had been separated for a couple of years before that. So you know it was almost and we had the world's friendliest divorce. We used one lawyer. We divided everything up down the middle. I paid my alimony and my child support and you know there's no drama there to find out. I always considered paying alimony, um, a badge of honor, until my company's collapsed and I couldn't pay it anymore. But that was that's what sent me to prison, and that's another long story for another day. But, um, and I never taught, by the way, I just want to share with you.
Speaker 1:I never talked about the details of my crimes because it would be weaseling and in order to, my life today is about redemption. Even doing this is about redemption, just leaving the world a little better than I found it as a Stoic, which I came to in prison, frankly, some people have a Christian conversion. I had a Stoicism conversion and I've always been an objectivist. Anyway, as a Stoic, I came to understand that I forget where I was going with that thought. Look at that, I just had a senior moment. I was going to say something clever about adopting Stoicism in prison and I know I was going down there and I completely lost my train of thought. And, by the way, not because I'm going senile, but I do this sitting in my living room, frankly, and I'm looking at my aquarium and in my and I have two aquariums At one point I had 18. This is what a nutcase I am. And, uh, I have some new fish I put in, and I was just watching them in in one of in one of my two aquariums, my 29 gallon, and it was just. It caught my attention and it just. You know, I don't have the brain power to concentrate on two things at the same time.
Speaker 1:Okay, let's get back to crime. Let's get back to crime and the subject matter at hand. I was talking about my ex-wives, anyway. My second wife, terry, and I are really good friends, anyway. So why didn't we marry? I didn't remarry. I didn't remarry because I came to the conclusion that two strikes and you're out.
Speaker 1:That was the whole point of that whole story is that, you know, I don't know that I would inflict me on another woman. Now, when I say inflict me, you know I've never struck a woman in my life and I'm not denigrating, and you could, you know, freely, during this election, I wouldn't doubt that someone's going to dig up my relationship with Terry and go talk to her and she's going to say I'm a nice guy that's never been angry or violent or anything like that. It's just not in my nature. I can count on one hand how many times I've really lost my temper in the last 20 years. You know, I really and it's not because I suppress my temper, it's because I'm mostly laughing at things I've learned to just kind of slough them off. I've learned to just kind of slough them off. But, having said that, I date, but it would take what makes me a crap husband and I'm only sharing this for those of you who might be in your own relationship issues, so you don't feel alone. I find that when you have problems, if you share them I think this is the theory behind things like aa and and addict groups is that when you find out everybody else's problems, yours aren't such a big deal, so just to share it with you.
Speaker 1:Um, my mother scarred the shit out of me and basically I set up betrayal in my relationships and I do it unconsciously. And when I say betrayal I don't mean, you know, like running around, although I have done that in the past, much to my deep chagrin and regret. But you know, no, I'm not driven to run around, I'm more driven to kind of ignore. You know, the relationship sets up and I come off, as you know Peter Pan, and then the next thing, you know, I turn out to be Captain Hook, you know, and not that I'm a bad guy. I just women don't like to be ignored and I have a tendency to do that and do it unconsciously. And I do it because of all kinds of hidden betrayal dents in my can and I'm aware of it. But even though I'm aware of it, I obviously can't do a lot about it, or I haven't done a lot about it and it would just take.
Speaker 1:I've had one relationship in my life where we got through it all the way to the other side and that one I ended up destroying because the woman was older than me and I somehow couldn't picture that I was 27. She was 35. And we'd gotten to the other side of my betrayal issues and everything was going well and I destroyed it anyway over silliness. So you know, I just don't think I have a good. I'm just not good. People aren't good at everything. I'm better off just playing with my dog and my cat and my fish and I'm really a swell friend. And you know I love women. I don't hate them. I didn't become a misogynist. I just because of my mother's betrayal of me with my stepfather the pedophile, you know it just dented the crap out of me. So I'm really and at 68 years old.
Speaker 1:I have to be honest with you, I don't think about it a lot. You know where, like sex would dominate, for example, the physical part of relationships would dominate my thought. You know, earlier in my life today it creeps in every now and then and that's about it. So, anyway, I don't know why I share all that with you. I just felt wanted to. So let's go, let's talk about crime. So the president's intervened and most honest people, including a lot of honest Democrats like, for example, the governor of Maryland, wes Moore, have come forward and said he hasn't been openly critical of the president. You know he's talked about things that he's done as a governor and he's, as Democrats go, he is a good governor. I'm not going to get into the nuts and bolts of Maryland politics but overall, from what I've seen, he's a pretty competent guy. In fact he's probably one of the better guys on the Democratic side. And even the mayor of Washington DC, muriel Bowser, has been muted in her attacks of Trump because really things are out of control.
Speaker 1:Forget the statistics. Figures lie and liars figure. It's violent crime, gang crime, it's just. And folks, that's the nation's capital, it's just a disgrace. Now it's interesting. You know people.
Speaker 1:The Republicans will scream tough on crime, tough on crime. The progressives will scream defund the police. Defund the police and send out social workers. In between is everybody else who's like, totally confused. I thought I would talk today. Instead of being tough on crime, let's be smart on crime. Let's try something new.
Speaker 1:Crime is a word that has many different parts to it. You know, there's violent crime and there's drug crime and there's theft crime and there's theft and there's fraud and there's all kinds of crime under that catchphrase. But when most of us think about crime, we're thinking about violent crime and invasive crime, the kind of crime that when we come home and you walk in the front door and your house has been looted and everything's all over the floor and your prized possessions are gone and you feel completely violated. It's almost as if you've been raped. It's all over the floor and your prize possessions are gone and you feel completely violated. It's almost as if you've been raped. It's not on the same level. Don't think I'm equating it with rape, but it's an emotional rape because your space has been violated and it's a horrible thing to be robbed.
Speaker 1:I've been mugged. I was mugged in San Francisco. As a matter of fact, when I say when I was mugged, I fought back, so nothing bad came to me. I ended up getting into a fight with a pack of homeless but aside from a couple of bruises, I emerged relatively unscathed. But I've been mugged and I was mugged just because I was standing there. I mean just the target.
Speaker 1:And having gone to prison, I think I have a very unique perspective on crime and criminals that other people just don't have, of my similar background. So all of you listening to me are probably from my general similar background, which is middle class to upper middle class. Some of you may be raised wealthier than me. I was raised upper middle class. I had a lot of advantages. I'm educated, I'm an autodidact Like you, I'm interested in lots and lots of things. But if I hadn't gone to prison, I don't know that I would have ever well, I know I would have never been exposed to the criminal element. To be able to, I spent five years digging into the criminal mind. So I think that I'm better qualified than virtually every other expert around if you can get past the part where I've been a criminal. Now, if you can't get past the part where I've been a criminal, I completely understand.
Speaker 1:I do not get into that argument. As I said earlier, I don't get into the weeds on what I've done and why I should or should not be forgiven and what the details are and mitigations and everything else, because every word I would say would be oh. And that brings me back to why I was bringing up Stoicism Every word would be weaseling. And in Stoicism and this was my original point I was going to when I was converted to Stoicism in prison, I converted myself by reading the meditations of Marcus Aurelius. But anyway, to live a life of value in stoicism, to live a life of worth and of value, you have to live a life of virtue. And I think that that underlines what's wrong with our whole society, because so many of us have left traditional religion and are out there drifting aimlessly without any track to run on, and because decadence is so fun and we do everything so dumb in our society in so many ways governmentally that we end up in this morass of indecency that we make decent. And it's all connected Crime is all connected to the general decadence that we find ourselves descending into as a country and as a culture.
Speaker 1:So today I want to talk about being smart on crime and I'm going to go quick, but Everything I'm going to talk about most everything I'm going to talk about you can find in A Radical Reset, the Manifesto of Antipolitism, which is available to you on Amazon in Kindle paperback or hardcover, written by me, herbie K. Okay, so let's talk about crime. First of all, let's recognize that there are limited resources with which a state or federal government can fight crime. This is really primarily a state and a local problem, and there are only so many dollars to do that and we've been spending them stupidly for so long as part of our run-up of the national debt that this is what I'm going to talk about when I say let's be smart about crime. So the first suggestion I'm going to make and this is going to be the most controversial, well, maybe not the most controversial, but I'm just going to get it right off my chest we have to legalize drugs, not decriminalize drugs. Legalize drugs. Now let me again this is spelled out in detail in my basis, including footnotes in a radical reset, but I want to just make this very, very clear and I'll share it with you as a story. I like to tell stories to illustrate my points.
Speaker 1:When I was at the Kingman prison, so I was in a few different. I was in the Pima County jail for about two weeks and that's where you go right after trial, and then I was sent to Alhambra prison, which is a sorting prison, kind of just. Well, you got the mental picture. It's where they separate inmates by risk. How much risk, community risk, are they? What are the chances are they're going to attack a guard, attack another inmate, so on and so forth.
Speaker 1:Once I went through that that was about 10 days I went to Yuma. I almost said Yuma, I almost put an H on it. I don't know why I would have done that. I went to Yuma because I have good Yuma. You know that's a New York accent saying Yuma, you get it Nevermind. So I was out in Yuma, yuma, yuma.
Speaker 1:By the way, the asshole of America, I'm sorry. I know there are nice parts of Yuma and I've camped outside of Yuma and bass fished on the Colorado river many times. But as far as the prisons go, what a shithole and flies like you can't even understand, because they're right in the middle of the lettuce fields and it's just swarms of biting flies all the time. It's just delightful and the only thing that keeps the flies under any kind of control are the pigeons. So we have gajillions of pigeons which occasionally inmates grab, slaughter and eat. Yeah, I know, fun place prison. Anyway, it's not an everyday occurrence, although I have seen them capture it into Sidewinder, which is a small rattlesnake that moves sideways. But anyway, I myself never partook, just saying. But I want to talk to you about so.
Speaker 1:After Yuma I was transferred to a private prison in Kingman, arizona, and Kingman that was a much better prison. Speaking from a prisoner's experience, the private prison was much better run than the public prison. Period, end of story. Just like in everything else in life, profit is not a bad word. They just did a better job running the prison. I'm not saying it was more lax or more slack or more anything else, it's just that everything worked and the state prison everything. It was anybody's guess. So the menus were exactly the same. The state provides the food, they cook it. But it tasted better in Kingman. It was just better prepared, more care, more this, more that. Everything was better. Medical care was better, period. But the other thing that went on in Kingman prison is the drug trade, and that's where I'm going to with this on the legalization of drugs.
Speaker 1:Long story short, I got to know a lot of what are called the PISAs very, very well. Pisa is so prison is broken down by racial group and, by the way, that's a self-breakdown. The prison doesn't do it, the inmates do it. They just don't like each other by race. So there are the white guys, and I've talked about this before, so I'll do this fast. There are the white guys that are called the Woods, which is short for Pecker Woods. Don't ask me why white guys self-identify as a Pecker Wood. They do. They're run by the Aryan Brotherhood. And the skinheads are the gangs that run the whites in prison. Each racial group is run by a gang, frankly. Then there are the black guys who are called the kinfolk in prison, and I forget which gang runs the kinfolk.
Speaker 1:And then there are the Chicanos, which are the American Latins, and there are the Paisas, which are the foreign Latins. They're mostly Mexican, but there's some El Salvadorans and Guatemalans, and so on and so forth. A Paisa, it means country in Spanish, and Guatemalans, and so on and so forth. Apaisa, it means country in Spanish. So basically, the country guys versus the city guys in the American cities, and they hate each other. The reason they're two different groups and not together is they hate each other. It's just as simple as that. I don't know why they hate each other. I'll let them explain it to you if you ever get into a discussion. I have some inkling, but that's not what this is about.
Speaker 1:And then there are the chiefs, and the chiefs are great. Those are the Native Americans and they keep to themselves and they're very quiet and they're mostly there for alcoholism-related things, because Native Americans just don't metabolize alcohol. Well, I think that's a medical fact. I think I could be crazy, but anyway, they're quiet're, they're quiet and they keep to themselves and they're mostly easy to get along with. I don't see, I don't think the whole time I was in prison I said 20 words to a chief. You know, at one time I said more than 20 words, but I mean at one time, and it's it wasn't hostile. They just don't, they're, they're. They're in their own place, they worship their own way, they do a sweat lodge, they do the drum, the dance, the whole thing. It's very interesting. I used to like to hang out around them, but anyway.
Speaker 1:So back to the Pisces. The Pisces ran the drugs in the prison yard because they're the ones that are all connected to the cartels. And in the book A Radical Reset I lay out how the drugs got into prison. A little hint it doesn't come up the assholes and vaginas of people that come into prison like on TV. Yes, that does go on. And yes, people do try to bring it in up their asses and do try to bring it in in their vaginas. Visitors, you know, to come visit their husbands and boyfriends and all that kind of good stuff. That's all true. But that's an insignificant amount of drugs because, frankly, there isn't not to be.
Speaker 1:Well, I am going to be, I'm being graphic on purpose, but there isn't an asshole in the world big enough to carry the amount of drugs that go on in prison Annually in the Kingman prison. I know this because the Pisces and I again, we're close and we talked about numbers and what was going on and they were doing about three and a half million dollars a year in drug sales inside of prison. It's all done with barter and cashing it out on the outside. There's a sophisticated system on how it's done. Well, when I say sophisticated, as sophisticated as an unintelligent not unintelligent, sorry, uneducated drug addict could handle, but there is a system for how to convert the barter to cash and pay for your drugs and so on and so forth. And they come in by drone and they're picked up by corrupt corrections officers and then handed to the PISAs who then distribute it. And I don't mean to cast aspersions on corrections officers. It's hard to raise a family of four on what they make and or five or six or however big their family is, and they're easy targets. And here's the bottom line about drones the worst substance that's ever been invented in the history of mankind that kills more people than car accidents and murders and any other kind of accident combined, and every other kind of drug but the one I'm going to name combined and cancer and heart disease. The substance that kills more than all of those things combined every year is alcohol.
Speaker 1:There are approximately two billion people on the planet that could be classified as alcoholics. Here in the United States it's about 1 in 20 people is an alcoholic. Most of them are functional alcoholics. They don't consider themselves drug addicts, but they are. There's absolutely no difference, except that alcohol is worse for you and much harder to withdraw from. When you're a serious alcoholic, you're the kind that really is drinking every day hard. And, by the way, what do I call an alcoholic? I'm going to use the definition that's used in a number of studies. But if you're drinking more than four beers a day, or the equivalent, you're probably an alcoholic. If, seven days a week, you view those beers as something you have to have whether you tell yourself you don't have to have them but you're going to have them anyway, or whatever bullshit you tell yourself you don't have to have them but you're going to have them anyway, or whatever bullshit you tell yourself you're probably an alcoholic but you're probably a functional alcoholic. Okay, and there are degrees of things. We have to recognize this as grownups. Not everyone ends up in a gutter. Most alcoholics that I've known in my life are perfect, perfectly functional. In fact, they're married to alcoholics and their children grow up to be alcoholics. They're all functional alcoholics.
Speaker 1:I grew up in an Irish Catholic neighborhood and I don't mean to cast aspersions on the Irish, but there are certain things, certain cultural stereotypes, you know, that lend themselves to cultural stereotypes and in the Irish, drink like fish. I grew up in a place called Mount Lebanon, pennsylvania, and back in the 60s people left their doors open. Neighbors would come back and forth. We were all close to each other and there were the Foy's and the Cooney's and the McElhenney's and the Keys and the Merck's and the there's just a whole bunch of Irish Catholics and they all went to either St Anne's or St Thomas More Church and we were like the token Jews on the block, which was another story altogether, for another day. But the long story short is we used to keep alcohol in the house just for our neighbors.
Speaker 1:My parents didn't particularly drink, not even socially really. We just thought Jews aren't big drinkers, we like to chew our calories. I don't mean that to be a joke, it's really kind of true. But you know not to say there aren't Jewish alcoholics. There are. But we really kept beer and alcohol in the house for our neighbors who would stop in and they would start drinking, to open the refrigerator and take a can of beer out, and the only reason there was beer in the refrigerator was for them to begin with, and it wasn't even a big deal, you know, it was just a normalcy and I'm sure a lot of you live a life similar to that and you're functional alcoholics and that's great. I'm not here to judge you, but I'm here to tell you there is such a thing as functional drug addicts. You know, not everybody who touches fentanyl turns into a freak and we have to start addressing alcohol is so much bigger. Fentanyl is a pinprick compared to what alcohol kills every year. But just you know. We've just decided as a culture alcohol is okay and the rest are bad.
Speaker 1:Now alcohol has some things about it that other drugs don't have, most of which is the social aspects. You know I smoke marijuana, I'm the first to tell you but it's hard to be social when you're stoned out of your mind. Now I get together with a few of my friends and we have a little smoke sesh we call it. I don't do it during the day. I'm not high as I'm talking to you, but oftentimes at the end of the day I'll get together with a couple of my friends here in the apartment complex I live with and with our dogs usually, and we get together. I think we hotbox our dogs and we have a little smoke sesh.
Speaker 1:But the thing of it is it's not as social as alcohol. Alcohol loosens you up, reduces your inhibitions. I understand why people like it. I don't drink simply because I can't stand the taste of alcohol. I just got genetically lucky. It tastes like poison to me, I to me, I to me. You might as well drink rubbing alcohol. I just don't understand it. But having said that, I get the benefit. But I think it's time to grow up, america, and understand that we lost the drug war from the time we began it.
Speaker 1:And, without going into the entire dissertation, I do, in a radical reset, the manifesto of antipolitism available on Amazon. Without going into all that, let me just cut to the chase. Okay, there is no example in the history of the world of a successful prohibition of anything that anybody in a culture wants, not just drugs, whether it's prostitutes or drugs or anything else. There's no such thing as a successful prohibition. Prohibition, the word, simply means prohibiting the population from getting something that they want by law. A prohibition creates a black market. That's all it does.
Speaker 1:And the reason I say legalization, not decriminalization, is we have fucked up marijuana legalization. It's not legal anywhere. It's decriminalized everywhere or almost everywhere. Legal anywhere, it's decriminalized everywhere or almost everywhere. Decriminalized means you replace the drug, useless bureaucracy, which adds costs to the marijuana, which makes it more expensive than if you continued to buy it from the cartels. So, ironically, the decriminalization of marijuana has not been harmful to the cartels, because they're still selling pot and undercutting the market, and they sell just as high quality weed as as the dispensaries do, or so I'm told Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
Speaker 1:So, having said that, we have to legalize and we have to accept the fact that a small percentage of the population, about one in 20 people, are going to flush their lives down the toilet, whether it's on alcohol or drugs. It's almost always on alcohol. Drugs will hardly add to that total. And not everyone's a junkie. There are functional heroin addicts, there are functional cocaine addicts, there are functional, there's addiction, but there are degrees of addiction.
Speaker 1:Okay, and fentanyl, which is the current boogeyman, is the reason that the cartels are bringing in fentanyl, which is the the current boogeyman, is the reason that the cartels are bringing in fentanyl. There's two reasons for it. One is it's a lot. It packs a lot more bang for the, for the volume, so it's easier to smuggle it into the country, which saves costs, which allows them to sell cheaper to their customers. And that brings me to the second reason, which is their customers want it. A heroin addict knows how to handle his or her heroin. Now, yes, there are a lot of overdoses and fentanyl is dangerous. If it were legal, there would be far fewer overdoses because it would be properly cut, properly diluted, so to speak. That's what cut means, so that it would be used much more safely and we would kill far less people than we do today.
Speaker 1:On fentanyl overdoses, I'm not saying fentanyl is great to be used unprescribed. I'm saying that all addiction is is the unprescribed medication of self-loathing. That's what addiction is, and all we're doing is filling up our prisons full of people who hate themselves because they grew up in horrible situations okay, almost always without a father, with mothers that, as often as not, are addicts themselves, raise themselves on the streets, breed like bunny rabbits. They're not restricting themselves to one or two children like the intelligent or the educated or the upwardly mobile. No, no, no, no, no. They're out there humping like bunny rabbits, having baby mamas and baby daddies multiple.
Speaker 1:I had a woman. I drive part-time to supplement my income at this point in time because I am not a wealthy man. I drive something called Vail, which is kind of like Uber for convicts. Guys with criminal records can't drive Uber, so I drive Vail. Anyway, long story short. Yeah, I know I have some exciting stories from that too.
Speaker 1:I had a woman in my car this morning, lovely young woman, but she has eight children and the girl couldn't have been 30 years old Okay, she maybe was 28. And I mean she was trying to take care of her kids. She was taking them to the dentist. It's not like she was a really pretty good mom actually, but she had eight kids by get this, eight different baby daddies and that's. And in talking to her I don't get the judgments inside the car because I don't want to have fights inside the car, which is exactly what it'll end up being. So I just listen and nod my head, but she just didn't see anything wrong with that. And that's what's going on, guys, and we need to bring this out into the sunshine and stop it, because it all links to the undermining of our society and the increase in crime.
Speaker 1:So part one of being smart on crime is legalized drugs. Bring it out into the open. Okay, long story short. If we legalize drugs, the cost to support a habit will drop from hundreds of dollars a week to for $20,. An addict would be able you'd be able to buy heroin, for example, in a Walgreens for less than the cost of aspirin, because heroin is cheap to produce and it's not patentable because it's been around forever, so it would be produced by generic producers. The same is true, by the way, of all of the drugs cocaine, crystal meth, whatever they should be able to walk into a Walgreens or a CVS or whatever it is you've got near you, rite Aid, whatever. Pick up the drugs safely and properly. Cut, pick up sterile needles.
Speaker 1:If they're doing mainlining, a lot of them smoke it. A lot of them don't necessarily shoot it. I learned all this stuff in prison and let them go home and do what they want to do and function through their lives. And most of them you'll never know that they're addicts, because they're functional addicts and the ones that aren't won't have to break into your house. So theft and violent crime will plummet.
Speaker 1:You see, guys, the reason the cartels are violent. Let me explain it to you as a guy that counted many guys in the cartels as friends when I was in prison. Okay, listen to me carefully. They aren't violent because they're monsters. They're violent because they're in an illegal business that they can't sue if they get screwed in a business deal. So it's all done in a handshake and there are no enforceable contracts. So if party A screws party B, party B's only recourse is violence.
Speaker 1:So if we legalize drugs and they come into the sunshine, let's say, the animals convert themselves into legitimate enterprises that are selling drugs in the United States legitimately, in the open, paying taxes, yada, yada, yada, they won't have to kill anybody. They'll go to court. By the way, I don't know that that would happen. I don't know what the transition is. I don't know that Pfizer or Merck wouldn't do it. I don't know who would do it. It's not important.
Speaker 1:In a free market, when a need presents itself, plenty of people will step into the breach to find ways to fill that need. But all of them will be cheap because there'll be no cost of interdiction, which will reduce violent crime and theft by 90%. Don't kid yourself. They say that only 34% of people in prison are there for drug crimes. That's again one of those figures lie and liars, figures, things. That's because they're talking about possession or paraphernalia or sale. But the other 60 something percent, 62, 63%, most of them, their violence is drug related because they were in an illegal enterprise. And if the drugs were legal, there wouldn't have been an assault, there wouldn't have been a murder, there wouldn't have been a beat down Now there will still be psychopaths, but just imagine a world where 90% of crime goes away and all that funding isn't being wasted and we can then concentrate on putting more police on the streets and preventing real crime, real murderers, real rapists. That's what I'm talking about being smart on crime. Step one is legalize drugs. Stop fighting a war. We're going to lose, because everybody loses a prohibition.
Speaker 1:There is no historic example of success. Whenever someone thinks they're going to do something successful that nobody has done before, what they're saying is yeah, everyone else was dumb, I'm the smart one. What do you figure? The odds are that in all of history, he's the smart one. It's like right now, this guy, zoran Mandani, is running for the socialist mayor of New York. He's going to win and New York's going to get what they voted for. Good and hard, believe me and yeah, I know I'm stealing that quote, but it is what it is. That was HL Mencken, by the way, who had disdain for democracy and disdain for the voters, which I kind of understand where he was coming from, without the 19th century cultural disdain that goes with that. But anyway, mandani is going to fail because of socialism can't work. He's not going to be. There are plenty of socialist idiots in this country who think that he's going to be the one to be able to do it. Good.
Speaker 1:It don't fail like all the others, because it can't succeed, it's. It's a horrible system that will always fail 100% of the time. Prohibition is a horrible idea that always fails 100% of the time. We are not going to be the first culture in the history of the world to have a successful prohibition. It hasn't been successful so far. It's never going to be successful. And we spent over a trillion dollars since 1971. That's just in federal money, not to mention state and local, which is even higher and we've pissed away every penny of it and stopped. Yeah, they catch a little drugs here and a little drugs there, but they just keep on it coming.
Speaker 1:And when you read the book A Radical Reset and you really should I talk about different ways drugs are brought into the country, and the ways that I know because I was taught by the cartel guys themselves are probably outdated already. I mean, who do you think the best and brightest will pay you a million dollars a year to be smart? Or the government will pay you $60,000 a year to be an armed bureaucrat. Who do you think is going to get the better of that contest? Just saying Okay. So you know the talent is in the cartels because that's where the money is. And I know that's ugly, but it's real and that's what being an objectivist does for me.
Speaker 1:There is such a thing as objective reality. You can pretend it isn't objectively true, but it is. You can say no, it's not. Yeah, you can insist all you want, it's not true. And it flies in the face of reason to think that the top talent would go to work for the police when they can make millions of dollars working for the cartels and the average person. Yeah, they're hurting addicts, but they don't care because they're not related to the addicts. And why should they? They're really very little different from the guys that make sugary cereal and make kids obese and diabetic. And they do because there's money in it. That's just part of it. No-transcript.