Insane in the Membrane

[Originally posted on goofyblog 1.17.07]

The strictest law sometimes becomes the severest injustice.
-Ben Franklin

The war on drugs is a fucking disaster, except for the law enforcement and prison industries, who make a pretty penny off its wrongheaded persecution of small-timers when white-collar cocks grift billions in wars we don’t need using the bodies of those they would save from the horrors of marijuana. Can’t we all agree on that?

-Scott Thill

Decades of government efforts to crack down on both the cultivation and consumption of pot have had a counter-productive effect, since even the most conservative government estimates suggest domestic marijuana production has increased tenfold in the past 25 years. It is the leading cash crop in 12 states, and one of the top five crops in 39 states.
The report’s author, Jon Gettman, says it is “larger than cotton in Alabama, larger than grapes, vegetables and hay in California, larger than peanuts in Georgia, and larger than tobacco in South and North Carolina”.

-Chris in Paris

President Bush has declared today [11.30.06] National Methamphetamine Awareness Day. Although methamphetamine abuse and illegal meth labs have recently become subjects of intense national concern, state and federal policymakers have actually been grappling with both problems for more than 40 years (the first illegal U.S. meth lab was discovered in the early 1960s.) The national strategy for dealing with the drug is the same now as it was then: incarcerate as many methamphetamine offenders as possible and hope for the best.

This punitive strategy has devastated families and failed to make America safer. In fact, the problems associated with methamphetamine abuse -crime, addiction, child neglect, the spread of HIV/AIDS, etc. - are greater now than they were 40 years ago.

-Bill Piper

CNN.com reports: “A record 7 million people — or one in every 32 American adults — were behind bars, on probation or on parole by the end of last year, according to the Justice Department. Of those, 2.2 million were in prison or jail, an increase of 2.7 percent over the previous year, according to a report released Wednesday.” But that’s not the scariest part of the article: “”Today’s figures fail to capture incarceration’s impact on the thousands of children left behind by mothers in prison,” Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based group supporting criminal justice reform, said in a statement. “Misguided policies that create harsher sentences for nonviolent drug offenses are disproportionately responsible for the increasing rates of women in prisons and jails.” Perhaps it’s time to reform our system so *gasp* people can do what they want to their own bodies! All we can do is watch as our hard-earned dollars are stolen to put even more nonviolent criminals behind bars.

Two remarkable developments in Washington in the past week highlight the extent to which the United States has become the land of mass incarceration.

First, the Supreme Court denied the appeal of Weldon Angelos for a first-time drug offense. Angelos was a 24-year-old Utah music producer with no prior convictions when he was convicted of three sales of marijuana in 2004. During these sales he possessed a gun, though there were no allegations that he ever used or threatened to use it. Under federal mandatory sentencing laws, the judge was required to sentence Angelos to five years on the first offense and 25 years each for the two subsequent offenses, for a total of 55 years in prison. In imposing sentence, Judge Paul Cassell, a leading conservative jurist, decried the sentencing policy as “unjust, cruel, and even irrational.”

-Mark Mauer

In a mind-boggling act of sadistic legal legal buck-passing (I can’t bring myself to glorify it with the word “reasoning”), the Florida District Court of Appeals upheld a 25 year mandatory minimum sentence for a Florida man convicted of “drug trafficking” for possessing his own pain medication.

Richard Paey is a wheelchair-bound father of three young children.

He has no prior criminal record– in fact, he’s an Ivy League law school graduate. He has not one, but two extensively documented and excruciatingly painful chronic disorders: multiple sclerosis and chronic back pain due to an injury suffered in a car accident that was treated by a surgery that made matters worse. (This surgery was so egregiously misguided that TV exposes and numerous large malpractice judgments resulted). Paey has already been in prison for three long years.

In prison– a place not exactly known for medical kindness– he has been given a morphine pump, which now daily gives him similar or higher doses of medication than he was convicted of possessing illegally.

- Maia Szalavitz

The prison/police complex is the flip side of the coin in America. It is something “normal” people don’t want to look at. They think: “It could never happen to me.” But it can. And even if it doesn’t ever happen to you, the current system is destroying the fabric of the peaceful, free society that we live in. The Drug War is more of a failure than the was in Iraq. But, that’s just one part of it. We are becoming a militarized culture. Records are being kept, cameras watch. Be careful. Don’t get a spot on your “permanent record.”