- Drugs of all kind are readily available all over Cleveland County.
- Prescription Drugs are probably the number one drug that is abused, so who writes these prescriptions. None (for the most part) of those prescription writers, Doctors, are arrested for over prescribing those drugs. The only Doctor I recall getting arrested for such was Dr. Skorman, the foot doctor.
- Food Stamps are widely used with impunity in Cleveland County to buy drugs. Around 25,000 people in Cleveland County are on Food Stamps, Many recipients are known to sell or otherwise use Food Stamps to purchase drugs. Some are reported to DSS, but ZERO are prosecuted.
- Food Stamps are the currency of choice in the drug trade. When Food Stamps were actually paper “stamps” a perfect situation for the drug trade was this. A $100 Food Stamp was given to a drug dealer for a $25 rock of crack cocaine. The Food Stamp recipient didn’t care because the recipient had no work involved with getting the Food Stamp. The drug dealer would take the $100 Food Stamp to a “fence” who worked at a food store, maybe even the owner, and sell the $100 Food Stamp for $50-doubling his money on the sale of that rock of crack cocaine. Then the store employee would put the $100 Food Stamp in the store cash register and take another $50 dollars in cash out of the register and put the cash money into his pocket. The store employee had taken $50 out of the cash register to pay the drug dealer, another $50 out to pay himself and put the $100 Food Stamp into the cash register. The cash register balanced out perfectly. A perfect crime had just taken place with an almost ZERO chance to get caught.
- Now, Food Stamps are given out each month as prepaid charge cards. Supposedly, according to DSS, this is foolproof against such a crime as noted above. But the Devil is always in the details. The Food Stamp Program is scammed just as much, children are not fed just as much, drug dealers and others make just as much and maybe more. It works like this. Say the recipient gets $1,000 a month in Food Stamps. She, it’s usually a she-a single mother with four or five children, gets her monthly card with $1,500 credit on it. She gets or sets her password. She goes to a store and buys $250 in groceries. That leaves $1,250. She sells her card and password for $800. The store employee resets the password and runs the card through several times per month to get the full $1,250 run through the cash register and takes out his cut in cash each month to the amount of $550. The cash register balances. The recipient who just sold her card and password for $800 cash pays another recipient $800 in cash for her $1,500 Food Stamp card and password.. The second recipient has $800 in cash to run through her own drug dealer. The first recipient has a full $1,500 Food Stamp credit card that she can recycle all over again. Some of the smarter Food Stamp card recipients get into the drug dealing business themselves and have only $400 or so in the drugs they value at $800 to another recipient for the $1,500 on the Food Stamp Card. This goes on and on. But in the end all the money on the Food Stamp cards is run through the DSS accounts and the drug dealers and store employees have made a killing. DSS records indicate Food Stamp recipients receive $3 million per month on these cards. That’s a lot of opportunity for mischief. DSS records also indicate out of the Food Stamp fraud cases that they receive, ZERO are prosecuted.
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