I stood next to a man who was about to be sentenced. He committed a crime. This wasn’t his first time. He had gotten himself into trouble with the law for decades. It started in the 70s after he watched his alcoholic father kill his brother. Not surprisingly, he turned to drugs. And because of drugs, he was a convicted felon. Because he was a convicted felon, he could never find a job. Because he couldn’t find a job, he had to sell drugs and commit crimes to live. Because he sold drugs, he would go to jail. The cycle couldn’t stop, not even if he wanted it to. Still, against all odds, he did stop doing drugs. He stopped committing crimes for fifteen years. But in a bad economy without a job prospect and a recent death in the family, he relapsed. He was with a friend who wanted to get high. My client called someone so his friend could buy drugs. He did this because his friend told him he’d get him high if he could find someone to sell it to him. Unfortunately, the drug dealer came to the scene high, the friend and the dealer shot each other and my client was charged with conspiracy to deliver drugs. He did not take part in the shooting or the buying of the drugs.
Lest he forget his place as a marginalized, convicted felon, the judge sentenced him to a minimum of four and a half years to nine years in jail. That means he will be in jail almost 8 years before he is eligible for parole. He will also be on supervision for a decade which means he will have a probation officer well into his seventies.
Our war on drugs is getting out of control. People who do drugs or sell drugs are sentenced more harshly than people who violently assault other people. In fact,some rapists do less time than do the indigent folks who are nothing more than capitalists who sell to consenting adults.
Yes, drugs are not good for you. Yes, drugs are addictive. But so is fast food. So are cigarettes. So is alcohol. This is a video from the famous movie “Reefer Madness” which was propaganda pushed by the government after prohibition was over. Some people believe that the drug war began once the war against booze was lost. Some people think the drug war is really a war against the poor underclass to keep them from rising above the ghetto. Still others believe that we as a society have fallen so far into the hysteria pushed by the drug war propaganda that we have lost any ability to think critically about it. I won’t say what I think. I’ll let you watch this clip and decide if you see any parallels to today’s drug war myths. And I will mourn the life that was robbed by the system simply because he was involved in drugs.
Brilliant
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