elisabeth, on Mar 18 2007, 12:00 PM, said:
I recently came across
this articlein an Australian newspaper and was so, so angry.
As a quadriplegic myself I can't stand it when people use their disability to excuse bad behaviour. To a certain degree it can cause isolation and depression of course, but using it as an excuse for being a drug kingpin?!
I don't know about you guys, but this article made me really, really mad. There are so many of us out there really trying hard to make a life for ourselves and then someone like this guy comes along and reinforces the stigma of disabled people as helpless and selfishly demanding.
He's worried he might die in jail? Well, it's his fault for being a drug boss. Yes, a spinal cord injury is not something easy to live with, but it's not a get out of jail free card.
Personally I demand equal rights from society, but with that I accept the associated responsibilities. I've seen people's lives torn apart by drugs so I have little to no sympathy for this guy at all.
Thoughts, anyone?
Ah, a rare opportunity to present a truly different point of view.
I broke my neck in 1963. In 1968 my younger brother convinced me to try cannabis and I was high most of the time till 1984, after which I was still high most of the time till 1990 and much of it till 1992. I soon was a small-time dealer, out of my parents' house, where I lived till I moved to a commune I and my friends started in 1970. My rooms had become a local den of iniquity, from what I thought a funny and benighted point of view. I (think I) didn't use cannabis to escape. I used it because for better and for worse it freed my mind and changed some of my thinking processes and helped me write and seemed to lead me to think more expansively about the nature of reality. I thought the laws against it and LSD and other psychotropics criminal and stupid and counter-productive. I also thought dealing of the sort I was doing--cannabis, acid--was a duty and a public service. Mind, times change. There was a ferment then that is now missing, a dream that went awry. And there were genuine acid casualties; it's use as a party drug was and is dangerous. But I will mention that here in the States the heroin and cocaine available is better and cheaper than it was in 1970. (I've never shot either, snorted heroin twice, and was a relatively controlled and functional cocaine user, arguably addict, through the 1980s--much of which story is available here on the boards in my novel LOVE NOTE.)
I didn't see the article which spurred this discussion so don't know anything about the guy who was busted. He may be a self-indulgent sleazeball. When my parents' home was eventually busted in 1973--I still lived there much of the time, the commune ideal at times but always more or less stressed--I, several of my friends, my mother, my father, and one brother but not my sister or one of my busted friend's girlfriend--ah gender bias--were indicted. I and my three friends eventually entered a plea bargain in which we admitted guilt to possession with intent to sell in exchange for the charges against my poor but game mother being dropped. My father had died and the charges against my brother were accidentally dropped; he and my father have the same first name and there was a minor but happy screw-up.
My sentence, which many of you may think lenient, was three years probation. My friends got similar sentences and reported to their probation officer. My probation officer came to my home. I still, even at the commune, was mostly housebound. Soon after my PO's first visit I wrote a letter to him and the local papers to say I was still smoking pot and would no longer co-operate with my PO. I pointed out that jailing me would be extraordinarily expensive if done humanely. My politics had moved somewhere well beyond liberalism and I thought it necessary to resist drug laws I thought misguided and a form of thought control. I knew I might be jailed and hoped I would be able to handle it if I were; I knew if jailed that I would have strong family and community support.
I sent the letter without telling anyone and when it appeared on page one of the one paper that used it my mother and brother were understandably upset. They said that once again nothing would be done to me and they would be made to pay. My brother said I could play hero if I wanted to but he didn't want to. I thought that if I were jailed it would give me standing to proselytize, though that wasn't my word of choice. I merely wanted to say that marijuana was relatively benign and had significant upside, that LSD could be dangerous, should be taken seriously, but was an incredible tool to use to help the individual figure out what humanness is, and that while heroin and cocaine tended to be destructive, their prohibition and handing out long jail terms to users was expensive and counter-productive and futile. Yes, it saves some, even many, from temptation, but it criminalizes and also inevitably corrupts I think still more.
I wasn't jailed, though I feel certain I would be today. The prison population in the US has I think quadrupled since then, largely because of the vast population of convicted druggies, and 'liberal' has in recent years become a pejorative. Marijuana is much stronger and much more expensive, and its use is now more often escapist and less often political or philosophical/religious; heroin and cocaine, as I mentioned, are stronger and cheaper.
I expect the man who thinks he won't be jailed will be jailed. I expect his care will be inadequate. Yes, disability is not a free pass. But it did cross my mind in the early 1970s that a solution to aspects of the drug problem might be the licensing of the marijuana trade to paralytics, many of whom I knew used it to ease pain and reduce spasticity. Of course, I was stoned.
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