Changing directory permissions to get Cron to work via drush
To answer non-programmatically for non-coders, the CiviCRM Cron module has been a life saver for us. This will run cron for Civi whenever Drupal's cron runs. Setup is minimal, just needs user, password and sitekey. This allowed me to skirt coding cron.

https://www.drupal.org/project/civicrm_cron