Homeless in Arizona

I am in favor of legalizing not just marijuana, but ALL drugs.

Drugs, don't cause crime. The laws against drugs cause crime. The Prohibition is a perfect example of that. When liquor was relegalized the crime rate dropped like a rock.

This editorial will make you both laugh and cry from hearing the utter BS Mike Schmidt is slinging to justify to justify the "War on Drugs".

This is proof that educated people can have really stupid ideas. Mike Schmidt isn't some homeless guy living on the street. Mike Schmidt is a general surgeon with 35 years of experience.

When liquor was illegal, the laws against booze caused murders. When the Prohibition ended the murder rate dropped like a rock. The same will be true for "drug war murders" when drugs are legalized.

Yes, some illegal drugs destroy you body. But if we put people in prison for using the legal drugs that destroy your body like tobacco and alcohol most of America would be in prison.

And when you have to pay black market prices for drugs that also causes crime. Currently illegal medical marijuana sells for $300 an ounce or$4,800 a pound. Legalize it and pot would be selling for $3 a pound and all the stealing that occurs for people to buy their pot would disappear over night.

I wonder if the Mike Schmidt guy is part of Yavapai County Attorney Sheila Polk's propaganda team? The BS he is shoveling sure sounds like something that would come from Sheila Polk.

Is drug dealing a non-violent crime? Ask the victims

Mike Schmidt 8:24 p.m. MST August 16, 2015

Prominent liberals and libertarians have joined to advocate “sentencing reform,” code words for reduced prison sentences for a variety of so-called non-violent 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.

Mike Schmidt of Peoria is a general surgeon with 35 years of experience.