Prisoner of the war on drugs
I don’t know this person, but recently ran across their blog. It may be a story, it may be a lie, or, of course, it may be simply a one-sided view. But it’s also very interesting. It purports to be an account of someone caught in the war on drugs for having done a favor for a friend, when the friend turned out to be a drug dealer.
The blog begins with some advice for other people who don’t think they’ve done something wrong when the cops arrive: no matter how nice they seem, the cops are not your friends. They’re junkies, and what they’re addicted to are arrests.
Now at this point, I admit that anyone who has ever watched an episode of Law and Order would have said, “I’d like to speak to my lawyer”, but this guy was nice. He acted like he was really helping me, going out of his way to come see me before the feds did. PLEASE!! I have kicked myself over and over and over again over this, I don’t need anyone else to tell me how dumb I was. I’m the first to admit that I made a BIG mistake. I lie awake at night regretting this hour of my life more than anything I’ve ever done, but like they say, hindsite is 20/20. At this point I can no long cry over spilled milk what’s done is done, now I have to concentrate on damage control.
What the person “admitted” to was receiving gas money for driving a car a friend had bought over the Internet back to their city. What that meant to the cop and the justice system is that they had been paid for running drugs across state lines.
The war on drugs, like our earlier war on witches, thrives on victims. It isn’t enough to convict someone, the system needs each victim to provide more victims. So with the promise of staying out of prison over the holidays, they get to start looking for more people to turn in, in the hopes of reducing their sentence. If they had actually been a dealer, they would know people to turn in. Because they’re not, they need to re-enter the black market and find some dealers to turn in.
Note that because it’s a blog, it reads backwards. You might want to go to the beginning and read them in chronological order. (There are only two or three pages in it so far.)
- Prisoner of the War on Drugs
- “SHEW!!! OMG! that was way too close! I was the only one who got to go home from court yesterday. I have 60 - 90 more days of freedom to try and do something to knock as much time off my sentence as possible.”
- Drug Policy Alliance
- A drug policy research institute, they are reprinting some drug policy classics and publishing important new works. There is a lot of useful news here, and information on seminars and conferences. This is one of the two major drug policy reform sites on the Internet.
- Drug Reform Coordination Network
- Over the years I’ve watched DRCNet grow into an incredibly useful resource in the field of drug law reform. “The world’s leading drug policy newsletter... raising awareness of the consequences of drug prohibition… DRCNet supports rational policies consistent with the principles of peace, justice, fr eedom, compassion and truth. Each of these has been compromised in the name of the Drug War.”
- Families Against Mandatory Minimums
- “Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM) is a national nonprofit organization founded in 1991 in response to the excessive penalties triggered by mandatory minimum sentencing policies. FAMM promotes rational sentencing policies that give judges discretion to distinguish between defendants and sentence them according to their culpability. FAMM’s 19,000 members include prisoners and their families, attorneys, judges, criminal justice experts and concerned citizens.”
More prohibition
- Learning from alcohol prohibition
- If the people against ending drug prohibition had been around in the thirties, we would never have ended the prohibition of beer and cocktails, because of the dangers of pure alcohol and bathtub gin. One of the lessons of the alcohol prohibition era is that we don’t have to go from banning everything to allowing everything. There is a middle ground.
- Progressives ruin a different kind of race in New Jersey
- As a potential triple-crown winner prepares for the third race of the Triple Crown, it’s almost impossible to place a bet in Atlantic City, NJ.
- U.S. homicide rate compared to gun control measures
- Extrano’s Alley lists the U.S. homicide rate from 1885 to 1940, and somebody else puts it into a chart.
- The Great Illusion: An Informal History of Prohibition
- Herbert Asbury’s book has to rank as one of the greatest arguments ever written against the drug war; this book about alcohol prohibition chronicles and forecasts all of the problems with modern prohibition that we see today.
- Cannabis Britannica
- Subtitled “Empire, Trade, and Prohibition”, this is an in-depth history of how prohibition came about in Britain, and ends up describing how marijuana prohibition came to the forefront of international attempts to ban opium.
- 26 more pages with the topic prohibition, and other related pages
“Besides, it’s your word, a junkie, against a cop’s, a public servant. That’s a funny thing to call a cop, a public servant. Try telling one to grab a broom, I bet it wouldn’t come out good. Servant? I wonder who came up with that one.”