"White Boy Rick" Wershe [To be Released July 20]

[EastsideAl]

I'm with Wheels here. Screw Rick, and anyone else who was involved in the wholesale/retail end of the crack epidemic. I lived on the eastside during those years, and the activities of Rick and his associates ruined thousands of lives, tore families apart, left children with effectively no parenting, terrorized thousands of people with its casual violence, and devastated whole neighborhoods. I lost 2 cousins to the poison, the nice old man who lived behind me got a bullet in the back of his head because he wouldn't shut up and let them use his house to sell from, I had bullets come flying through the back windows of my house endangering myself and my family because someone unleashed a spray of automatic weapons fire on that house at 4:30 in the morning, everyone in my neighborhood had several break-ins and many of their possessions stolen by desperate crackheads... and it goes on and on.

I'm not sorry even for a second that Rick got so much time, I'm only sorry that the other belly-crawling snakes like him didn't get more. And I'm not sorry that he was "just a kid," because though he may have been young he was pretty much grown when this stuff happened. I've heard Rick, and he seems like a reasonably intelligent person, certainly not developmentally disabled, so he knew what he was involved in was illegal and wrong, and he could even see the devastation the addictive poison brought to his own family. Other young men took a different path, but Rick, dazzled by greed, chose to get involved in the drug business. That he got more time than others is, in the end, immaterial in contrast to the costs of that time in our history, and the only people anyone should really feel sorry for here are the ones who actually got hurt. Rick should really apologize to the thousands people still alive who were damaged by his actions, and then just shut the hell up and be happy that he's not underground in a box like most of his 'colleagues'.