A former US street legend, who as a drug dealer was once responsible for flooding California’s streets with most of its hard drugs, spoke with RT about his activism against drugs.
After making up to US$2 million a day and then spending 20 years in prison, “Freeway” Ricky Ross started from scratch and is now trying to make a difference by keeping kids from following into his footsteps.“I think I am the perfect one for this job that needs to be done,” the activist says. “Most people don’t know how you get started selling drugs. They don’t know how you get out of selling drugs. They don’t know how you can go from being illiterate at 20 years old to being as literate as I am now.”Freeway Ricky Ross says that the American government turned a blind eye on drug pipelines between the US and Nicaragua. “The government needed this money to fight this war with Nicaragua. Reagan and Bush felt that if Russia took over Nicaragua, they will be too close to America. I believe they felt that it was more viable to sacrifice a particular sector of America and a race of people in America in order to save the whole country,” the former drug dealer says. “So they let these guys open a pipeline – Danilo Blandon, Norwin Meneses and the rest of the crew that worked with the Nicaraguan connection. I knew ten or 15 different Nicaraguans who were inside this organization that was selling drugs.”“I don’t think that the government necessarily gave [the traffickers] drugs or what not, but in a sense they sanctioned it because they turned a blind eye. They knew that these guys were selling drugs, but they did absolutely nothing about it. I also believe that had they not let these guys sell drugs, it’s possible that I wouldn’t have ever become a drug dealer.”