Ahh... drinking coffee and listening to the best of steppenwolfe...God Damn the Pusherman. Reminds me of Ann Landers or dear Abby or whatever it is we get here in Topeka. Recent column on marijuana use and legalization. Couple disjointed letters for, a bunch against. I got a kick out of one letter... lady said that we don't put people in jail for using mj, just for selling it. Possession is a misdemeanor. Selling is a felony. Well, how the fuck are those users going to get their dope?
OK, you bust the seller, put him/her in jail. There are 30-40 people out there with no source. One of them gets the connection that the seller had, now he's not just a user anymore, he's a seller. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does economics.
So, the way the cops move, he's got about four years before he gets busted. And most likely he's just selling enough to pay for his own use, and most of his sales are by request...
From the other side, the economics are like this... it takes 4 cops working 2 years to put a seller in jail... that's 8 cop years...$200,000. Then there's the court time, the jail time @ $40,000/year. Let's say 5 years, that's another $200,000. Damn, is that math right? $400,000 to bust someone for the equivalent of selling someone a six-pack of beer... Yeah, my tax money at work.
That's not counting the dealer as a productive citizen before he gets busted. Say he was a salesman making $30,000 a year. That means his boss was making $60,000 a year off of him, so we need to subtract that $60,000/year from the local economy... for 5 years. That's another $300,000 gone.
As an ex-con, the guy spends the next ten years getting out of the hole we dug for him; let's say he makes $15,000 a year for the next 10. That's another $300,000 lost. (The math- making 15K, he puts 30K into the economy, instead of the 60K he did before the bust. *10=300K)
So, one million dollars later, we have what we started with. Except we're all ten years older, and the process has been continuing.
These figures are ballpark, SWAG (Scientific Wild-Ass Guess) numbers, mind you. Your mileage may vary...
There's a web ring for people advocating the decriminalization of marijuana. I was thinking about joining, but then I thought of Topeka's finest knocking on my door with a search warrant and finding (after first planting) a hundred thousand dollars worth of cocaine in my bedroom. Well, I know that couldn't happen right here in Topeka... Right....
I just ordered carpet for the rental house. It'll be ready to go pretty quickly now, I hope. We'll get an ad in the paper this weekend, anyway. Making two house payments with no extra income really sucks.
I've also got a list of other stuff that I'm going to advertise this weekend:
O'yeah, I added on to yesterdays' page and didn't tell anyone about it. Completely forgot about the notify list people. Anyway, click on Yesterday to read the rest of it. It was pretty boring, anyway, if I recall rightly...
Oh, yeah, I started tracking stats on this site with WebTracker. It's pretty interesting so far. 70% of the hits were by WIN95 users, that impressed me. Only about 40% were MS Internet Explorer; I thought that'd be higher. And 10% Mac people.
19:35: Well, I got some stuff done this afternoon before the headache hit me again. I get headaches so infrequently that I don't really know how to handle them, so I lay down and try to go to sleep. Sleep is the answer to a lot of things... not this headache, though, dammit.
Anyway, I got the plumbing done without incident! Is that spooky or what? Bad plumbing karma is cumulative, though... I really need to watch out on the next project!
By rights, I should stay up all night tonight so I can get properly turned around for tomorrow, but I don't think that I can make it. Ever since I got up, I've wanted to go back to sleep; my sleep-resistance is wearing down rather rapidly. I want to hottub with Karen, especially since she wimped out on me last night. That might re-vitalize me or it might just put me right to sleep, and at this point I really don't care which it is.
The republicans are out to get the VP now, for making solicitations (for money) from his office. The majority leader said that this is the biggest thing since Watergate. Sure... the republicans want something to be bigger than watergate. Whitewater was supposed to be it, but they just can't get the goods on slick Willie, can they? After all of that trying, and still coming up empty, Po' folks... all their best people and all of their good intentions coming to naught. Newt and the gang just want us to have an honest government. They'll do anything short of resigning... the only real answer.
Ah, well... in a perfect world, there would be no republicans, no democrats, no politicians, no lawyers, no liars, no preachers. We would all be comedians.