05/03/13 – Terry Nelson – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is The Scott Horton Show.
Website is ScottHorton.org.
You can find all my interview archives there.
More than 2,700, almost 2,800 interviews now at ScottHorton.org, going back to 2003.
And our next one, and our last one on the show today, is Terry Nelson from Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm well, Scott.
Thank you for having me.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here, and very impressed by your resume here.
Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background in working for the government on the drug war.
Well, I worked approximately 32 years with the federal government as an agent, and involved directly with either border security or international narcotics smuggling.
I worked all over Mexico and at the Embassy of Mexico City, every country in Central America except Nicaragua and five countries in South America, working the transit zones for the drugs being smuggled into the country.
And after that, I joined up with LEAP about seven years ago, and I've been working since then to try to change drug policy because it's doing far more harm than it's doing good.
All right.
Now, so obviously with a background like that, we can mostly skip, well, you just don't care about drug abuse or something like that, so let's just go ahead and pick up with the harm done by the war on drugs that you would categorize as worse.
It must be much worse for you to really come out this publicly against your former profession even.
Well, I'm not against my former profession.
I'm just pointing out that a strategy that we've employed for four decades is not working, and when you have a strategy that doesn't work, then common sense dictates that you should change your strategy.
Now, I believe that we'll never arrest our way out of the drug problem, and me and LEAP and others agree that we should legalize the drugs and then regulate and control them, get them out of the hands of the criminal drug gangs and cartels, and deal with our drug problem as a social and a medical problem and deal with it through education and treatment instead of arrest and incarceration because the arrest and incarceration of so many of our citizens is actually causing great harm to our economy.
All right, now, well, let's talk about that, the incarceration.
There are a lot of problems with it, but it seems to me like most important is there are people who are not really criminals who are locked in cages like animals by the tens, by the hundreds of thousands, by the millions across this country.
Isn't that just – isn't it strange how not objectionable that is when most of these people aren't, you know, gangsters who committed a violent crime in the process of being involved in the drug trade or anything like that, but they're just regular people but who use drugs, right?
Yeah, well, that's correct.
You're charged with the most serious crime against you when you go to prison, but about 800,000 people a year are arrested just for simple possession of narcotics, and over the last 10 years, we've created – the government has created about 14 million felons.
Well, these 14 million felons have to check the box when they go to get hired, and no one's going to hire them or they're not going to get decent jobs.
They can't get, you know, license in some states, don't even have the right to vote in some states, of course, can't own firearms, and they can never get the jobs or make the kind of money that they would make if they didn't have this arrest record, and therefore, they're not paying their share of the taxes.
They actually become burdens on society and to the contributing society.
You take 14 million people in the last 10 years.
Let's just say they're paying 15%, 20% less income tax than they would be.
That's a lot of money, and it's the kind of money that we don't need to be throwing away.
Yeah.
Well, you know what?
I think money probably does have a lot to do with it.
I wonder what you think about the idea, the conflict there between, you know, maybe the wealthier of those who get in trouble and the income taxes they might pay and really the fact that most of these people are poor and don't pay much income tax, but when they're on probation, boy, do they pay fines.
And don't the state governments and the local governments really thrive from putting, you know, kind of creating this virtual plantation of people paying fees and fines just to not go, not be revoked, to not have to go back to jail at any given time?
Well, the irony of it is that, you know, you arrest a person for a small amount of narcotics, you seize his vehicle, you take a driver who likes to wait for a month or longer, now he can't get to work, so you actually destroy his ability to make the money to pay the fines.
It just doesn't make sense to me, you know.
I'm not soft on crime by any means.
A person commits, you know, a crimes against a person, place, or thing, and he should be severely punished for it.
But I don't believe in punishing people for small infractions and crimes, you know, a consensual crime between two willing adults.
It questions me.
I question whether or not that's really a crime.
I mean, the government has made it illegal, of course, for whatever purpose, and that's probably a topic for a different discussion.
But it's there, and it's ruining people's lives.
Twenty-five percent of the people that will go to prison this year come out of a foster home or institution because when you get arrested for drugs, they take your family away from you, they take your kids away from you, and you put them in foster homes and institutions.
Anyone looking at the numbers that doesn't understand that this is unsustainable, it's just really not being very pragmatic about it.
Yeah, and that really is the thing, right, is even with the, well, I don't know.
I'll leave that.
What do you think about the knee-jerk is, yeah, but the message?
Because, and you know what, I can concede that this is just reality, that people really do look up to Uncle Sam like he's the ultimate minister, really.
He's the arbiter of what is moral and what is immoral.
So when he outlawed public racism, the whole attitude changed that, you know what, maybe that really kind of was wrong and whatever, because in a way, really, the national government especially has this moral authority for whatever reason, even more than religious leaders seem to have.
And people really are afraid that if the government legalizes it, that the kind of dumbed-down impression that people get is that they're conceding that really it's okay and it's not that bad of a thing.
And that, of course, terrifies parents that their kids would get that message and so therefore figure it's no big deal if they become a drug abuser.
I mean, that's really what's behind the voter part of our dilemma.
But when it's their kid, it changes everything very quickly.
And I have a problem with the government establishing a moral guidepost.
I think that moral guidepost should be established by the family and in some cases the church.
But certainly the population in general, we all have mores that we follow and they're not necessarily implemented by the government.
But the government shouldn't be our nanny.
And whenever they start trying to decide who can do what, what you can put into your own body, etc., that's quite a bit of an infringement.
And I'll quote an old Republican, Ronald Reagan.
He said government exists to protect us from each other.
Where it fails is when it tries to protect us from ourselves.
You can't protect someone from themselves criminally.
Now, you can do it through education and you can do it through the bully pulpit.
And the countries that have legalized or decriminalized drugs have less drug use than we do in America.
And just recently the GAO came out with a report spanking the ONDCP for not meeting any of their goals.
And they said, ironically, that teen drug use is up between the 15- and 17-year-old for cannabis, but it's down for cigarettes and alcohol, which are regulated and controlled drugs.
So that ought to stay right there.
Regulate and control it.
Use education.
The only success we've had in the last 30 years is with cigarette smoking.
We've reduced cigarette smoking by almost 50%.
We didn't put anyone in jail.
You know, it's forbidden fruit.
You tell a kid he can't do something, he wants to know why he can't do it.
It must be really good if they tell me I can't do it.
And I think that teen drug use would drop dramatically.
It's just not cool anymore because, you know, you can't go around being stupid to your parents' house or your friend's parents' house because they're not going to invite you back.
Right.
Well, you know, a lot of times the anti-drug messages are so confused where, you know, I remember my own experience from junior high school where they came and explained that smoking pot was the same thing as being hooked on barbiturates or shooting heroin or whatever.
And so I remember even hearing my friends concluding that once they smoked pot and it wasn't that big of a deal that really, you know what, everything that they said about this stuff is no big deal.
And maybe, you know, some of these harder drugs really probably aren't a big deal or whatever when actually what they taught us about heroin was right.
You don't want to get hooked on that.
It's the devil.
But they decided that they learned that the entire routine was nonsense.
And so go ahead and try anything now.
That's my primary problem.
I am completely against the D.A.R.E. Program being taught by police because a cop gets up there and says what they say in the D.A.R.E. Program handouts, which is totally bunked as far as I'm concerned.
And then the kids, they've got a 12-, a 13-year-old, 14-, 15-year-old brother who's the captain of the football team, and he's doing it, and he's making good grades, and they know it's a lie.
So then they no longer trust the source.
And we need to put the trust back to our police that they've lost over the years enforcing these unenforceable laws.
A policeman should tell you the truth every time he speaks with you because each time he speaks with you, he's doing it from a physical capacity unless he's off duty.
And then even in some sense, then he's still talking, you know, from a police perspective.
So the credibility that the police have lost, it can be directly attributed to the drug laws and enforcing laws that the people don't really want enforced.
They have to enforce them.
They have to turn friend against friend and friendship group against friendship group because, you know, there's no real victim here in a dope deal other than the fact that where the government tries to say, well, yeah, but the people kill people to get the drugs to you.
Well, that's not that dope deal causing that.
That's the fact that the drugs are prohibited and are inordinately expensive and so valuable to the drug smugglers that they make such huge profits because of the illegality of it, not the drugs themselves.
Yeah.
Well, it's just, you know, it's a problem of the seen and unseen.
It's hard to get people to imagine what would a life been like without Richard Nixon and without Ronald Reagan and the drug war, the way that they were implemented back then.
What if we'd lived a counterfactual last couple of generations?
And what would things be like in terms of our liberties and in terms of our drug problems and everything else?
You know, it's just hard to conceive it unless you're really interested.
The Harrison Drug Act of 1914, and the Harrison Drug Act was implemented to get rid of the Chinese laborers that came over to build the railroads in the late 1800s because they chased a dragon and smoked opium.
And then you go up to 1936 when Anslinger calls it, you can look at his testimony and you can see what he was trying to do.
He was trying to protect William Randolph Hearst's pack of wood pulp and Dow Chemical because hemp oil is a better lubricant than petroleum.
Hey, did you know all this when you were a cop?
It's all about the money.
It doesn't have anything to do with or trying to control a population.
It doesn't really have that much to do with anything but that in my book.
Now, did you know all that when you were a cop or you figured all this out since you retired or what?
No, when I decided to do this, I started doing my own research and I determined very quickly that the government has all this information readily available.
They just don't give you that when they give their talking points.
They won't lie to you.
They give a report.
They give the truth out of that report.
They just don't give you the stuff that they don't want you to know that's in the report.
But you just dig a little deeper, you can find all this stuff out.
It's not top secret or anything.
And when a bureaucrat comes out to talk to you and gives you a five-minute spiel on television, he's talking from talking points that his staff provided him.
I sugarcoat everything because that's what he wants from them.
I've got a problem and I know I speak for a lot of other people too and that is I don't speak Spanish.
I can't understand it either.
Virtually everything going on south of the Texas border to me is just completely opaque.
And I know somewhere deep down inside that probably two-thirds of the entire drug war takes place in foreign countries, of our drug war is inflicted on people in Mexico and in Peru and Colombia and these other countries.
But I know that I know virtually nothing about it and that most people know even less than me.
So I was wondering, I know you have, as you said, a lot of experience down there in implementing America's drug war as foreign policy.
And I was just wondering if you could try to maybe draw a picture of it, how it works, give us some different examples and help us to understand what is the drug war when it comes to Latin America, really.
Well, you know, Mexico has lost about 70,000 people in the last six years fighting during the Calderon administration, implementing our plan Merida, which was to attack the drug smugglers.
Well, there's one thing you miss.
If you take a top drug smuggler down, he is immediately replaced by someone that may be more bloodthirsty and cruel than him and may have to be initially to establish his dominance over the people that work for him.
You take the Sinaloa cartel, Shorty Guzman has probably 50,000 people on his payroll at any given time.
He can hire more and get rid of them as he needs to move his products.
The Mexican government of Mexico, if my number, remember, is correct, has about 140,000 men military.
So if you've got a 50,000-man drug force against a 140,000-man military, which is basically a guerrilla force, you're not going to win that.
I mean, that's one you can't win.
So it takes about 71 to fight an insurgency, according to the document.
But you're not going to win by arresting a way out of it.
Everyone recognizes that now.
But the harm that's caused to countries in Central America and El Salvador has a huge death rate compared to America, Guatemala, Honduras.
All of these countries down there are suffering bitterly from our drug war.
Colombia has done a little bit better since we pumped about $5 billion into their economy and improved their police force and army.
They've actually managed to reduce the number of acres under cultivation, but the bad guys have managed to increase the yield of the plants by threefold, so it's a wash.
There's probably 100,000 pounds less cocaine coming out of the Andean Ridge Nation now than there were three or four years ago, which was 2.2 million pounds back then.
And it doesn't matter what we do in Colombia, even if we stop every coca plant from being harvested or planted, coca will grow in the sub-Saharan area of Africa.
It's the same basic area.
It'll grow there just like it will in Colombia, and it's being grown in some places.
The FDA is already starting to move offices out of Johannesburg in South Africa up towards Equatorial Africa to combat this, knowing what's going to happen.
So it has to be dealt with in a global situation because it's a global problem, and many at the UN are now starting to ask questions about human rights violations and everything else and saying this isn't working, maybe we need to change.
But the states are very adamant about keeping this policy in place.
But I think we're going to see a change in the United Nations because other countries now are starting to stand up to America and say, look, we can't do this anymore, this is totally killing our country, it's destroying our infrastructure, it's destroying our cultures, and it's killing our young people off at too high a rate.
It's not sustainable, in other words.
A country that doesn't have a positive growth rate is doomed to fail, and if you're killing off all the young people, you're not going to have a positive growth rate.
And it's been going on for a long, long time.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's really not that complicated either.
I know most people don't really like being interested in economics or whatever, but it seems like if we can narrow this down into just a couple of real bite-sized slogans like, you made the market black and this is the consequences, or something like that.
Well, you know, our drug policy cost the United States about $79 billion a year, and over the course of the drug war it's $1.2 trillion that's been spent on it.
But just back up a second and let's say if we legalized all drugs and you didn't have the drug gangs running the inner cities of America, and now the cartel has influence in over 1,000 American cities up from 380-something four years ago.
So anyone can see what's happening.
So if you take that money away from them, you cut the head off the dragon, so to speak, take the money away, then they're not going to be on the street corners and downtown areas, you know, fighting over control of that street corner, and you might actually start revitalization of American cities, which would just serve us in all sorts of ways.
One thing, it'd cut down on travel time into your work, which would save fuel and everything else and save the environment lots of ways.
Plus you could reclaim all this valuable real estate in these downtown suburban areas that are now owned and controlled, not owned, but controlled by the drug lords.
So, you know, there's so much good that could come of it.
And, I mean, there's going to be some bad things happen too, because 1.3 percent of our population is addicted to drugs, and they were in 1914 when they passed the Harrelson Drug Act.
So we're going to have to deal with those that are addicted through treatment.
Let's get them treatment.
Let's fix them.
Let's don't put them in prison and let them come out broken, where we have a 63 percent recidivism rate to prison.
It costs too much money to keep someone in prison.
It costs very little money to send him to a drug rehab and clear him out.
Now, do I understand you right, sir?
Compared to how much we spend on the prison.
Do I understand you right that you guys really are for not just decriminalizing possession or anything like that, but complete legalization of the drug business so that, you know, above board giant companies, maybe Marlboro or whoever would take it up and put the, you know, real giant corporations would put the gangsters out of business?
We believe in total legalization because the only way you can regulate and control something, it has to be legal.
Because you don't even know how much product is out there if it's in the black market and under it.
And once you start the program, then you can't overtax it, because the same thing will happen that's happening with cigarettes today.
When you overtax something, you create a gray market or an additional black market because people don't want to pay those taxes.
They're onerous.
So it has to be, everything has to be regulated and controlled, but it has to be done, you know, in a logical manner to where you can make money off of it, enough to offset your cost that the program's going to cost you, but not enough that you drive it back into the underground.
All right.
Well, listen, I really appreciate your time on the show today, and I appreciate y'all's effort.
Of course, coming from you and people like you, it's the best way to get the message across that it just doesn't work, we've got to call it off.
And, you know, you think about my kind of straw man question there about, well, it sends the wrong message to the kids.
Think about what message it sends to the kids that this is worth it, that all these costs, as you've outlined it, is worth it in order to try to dissuade them from using drugs.
I mean, it just couldn't possibly be.
But it's not working.
I mean, if it were working, I might look at it a little differently.
But it's not.
It's a total failure.
So if something's not working, you must change that strategy.
You can't continue doing the same thing and expect a different result because that's insane.
All right.
Well, thanks very much for your time.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you for having me, Scott.
Have a pleasant day.
You too.
All right, everybody, that is Terry Nelson.
He is a retired Customs and Border Protection Aviation Marine Group Supervisor, and, you know, with the Department of Homeland Security and all that other stuff he said at the beginning of his former jobs there.
And, by the way, if you go to LEAP.cc, that's Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, they've got a bio about him there, and it includes this YouTube of him giving a speech about Plan Colombia and the failure to eradicate all the coca there.
That's some good stuff.
Need to have those guys on the show more often, don't you think?
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