Tales from the West Texas Dust

We continue with the conclusion of our interview from last week with Councilman Sam Parker as he picks up on how Interstate 27 is a major corridor of drug distribution in West Texas:

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Parker:(contd.)...If for no other reason than it was constructed, it really turned out to be a major drug corridor. The bringers of drugs from Amarillo to Lubbock and from Lubbock to Amarillo bring drugs through this major corridor in several ways. It's shipped in cases in 18-wheelers; almost always unbeknownst to the driver, it's shipped in the interior wheels of duallys--that's the large pickup trucks that have four wheels on the back instead of two. The interior wheels are very often packed with marijuana; and the drug enforcement people are very sparse along this corridor. It's left to the Texas Highway Patrol to make arrests. Law enforcement individuals not only have to pay great sums of money to informants to find this out, [but] it also costs the taxpayers lots of money to have the extra officers and their equipment patrolling. Not only then do we have the expense of the executive branch of law enforcement, but we have the expense of housing the criminals and warehousing them following their convictions in expensive penitentiaries and state jails and substance abuse felony punishment facilities. So what happens is that drug abuse causes small town living to be very high. Not only do we sacrifice the economic opportunity of being able to distribute wealth that's not otherwise available to us because it's all tied up in the hands of government, police, fire, etc., but also there's fantastic wealth that's tied up in the hands of the drug dealers.

I talked to a heroin dealer one time who decided to get clean and sober; and during the couse of his treatment, he described just how much money he handled. He lived in a trailer; and he said that on a nightly basis, he would have to roll up the carpet in his trailer and take his carpet pad out and put in layers of 50s and 100s [dollar bills American] and then roll the carpet back. Of course, he couldn't spend the money nor could he deposit the money in a bank--of couse, you can't make a deposit of $10,000 without causing federal bills and whistles to go off in local banks. You can, however, warehouse this money. Now if that money is tied up under the carpets of old trailers and in the hands of drug dealers, that money is not available to circulate in your pockets or my pockets.

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