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Full Disclosure

Matt Singer works for Forward Montana. He also is a partner in DP Productions, a small, Montana-based T-Shirt company.

Put This In Your Pipe

by: Matt Singer

Thu Oct 25, 2007 at 11:58:27 AM MDT

If you missed it, the Montana Kaimin earlier this week thought it a good idea to denigrate the work of activists who have fought to produce kinder, more sane drug laws, saying "the right to smoke pot should be the lowest priority." This morning, the Missoulian chimed in, chastising activists for working locally, when the real focus should be state and federal laws.

Thanks, armchair quarterbacks.

Beyond the bloviating, there's been real news about marijuana this week, as the War on Drugs claimed another casualty -- of course, you have to turn to the Independent to find out about it:

Robin Prosser didn't look or sound much like a fighter, but she was. A mother and a musician, the Missoula woman also acted as Montana's most outspoken advocate for medical marijuana, the only remedy that could ease the ravaging pain of the lupus-like immunosuppressive disease she endured for 23 years. Prosser's fight ended Oct. 18 when she took her own life.
In recent months, Prosser, 50, would sit at the kitchen table in her small apartment, pain welling up in her eyes, and talk quietly about the victories and defeats the last several years had delivered. Allergic to nearly every pharmaceutical that could render her chronic pain bearable, she had learned that the political fate of medical marijuana also carried intensely personal implications.
[...]
[I]in March, federal Drug Enforcement Agency agents seized a small shipment of medical marijuana in transit from Prosser's state-approved caregiver. Though she was never criminally charged, Prosser was crushed. She said caregivers became afraid to supply her with the medicine she needed so badly.
In July, she penned an op-ed piece in the Billings Gazette, pleading with Montana's politicians and her fellow citizens to speak out against the DEA's actions and improve the lives of people like her.
"Give me liberty or give me death," she wrote. "Maybe the next campaign ought to be for assisted-suicide laws in our state. If they will not allow me to live in peace, and a little less pain, would they help me to die, humanely?"

Why didn't someone have the good sense to tell Robin Prosser that her medication should be the "lowest priority" in the whole arena of things to change in the world.

I'm sure then that she would have understood why it was so important for her to live with so much pain.

Matt Singer :: Put This In Your Pipe

Tags: marijuana, medical marijuana, citizens for responsible crime policy, Congress, (All Tags)

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Put This In Your Pipe | 2 comments

The Kaimin!! (0.00 / 0)

That ink stained rag. What a load of crap. They don't know how to handle issues that affect real people.

by: Mathello @ Thu Oct 25, 2007 at 14:16:09 PM CDT

The Kaimin editorial (0.00 / 0)

was about as lame as it gets. It ignors history, it ignors the 35 year failure of a corrupt and pernacious government policy. I suspect the Kaimin's editor is too young, uneducated, and propagandized to possibly do a critical analysis of the importance of local activism as relates to US drug policy. While it is a small victoy, true, it's also an important victory because there have been so few victories over the last 35 years. The Kaimin editor completely misses the social, political, economic, class, and racial context of the local initiative, and instead only seems to understand "Blaze it up, Bro."

Former Montanan, Dan Baum, in his book "Smoke and Mirrors", documents that the Nixon White House ignored their own Commision on Marijuana because they saw a political advantage to keeping marijuana illegal.

Baum writes:

When the D.E.A. came to my town in Missoula, Montana, in 1991, and started busting people for five and ten marijuana plants in their base--ment, confiscating their houses, and sending them to federal prison for five years, I started looking into it. It's hard to surprise a reporter. Usually you know what the story is when you set out, and it's a matter of getting the quotes and facts and figures to back it up. But I would spend a day looking into the drug war, and come home and say to my wife, "You won't believe what the government can do now! You won't believe how many people are in prison, how much violence we're causing, how much racial division we're causing, what we've done to the Constitution!"
My book Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure begins with the presidential campaign of 1968 when Richard Nixon won the White House. Nixon depended in the 1968 campaign on mobilizing the white middle-class constituency to resent and fear the anti-war left and inner city blacks. Drugs began to be used as a code to stand for problems we could not discuss in open language-race, class, politics. Nixon mobilized a white middle-class constituency and won the White House on a law-and-order campaign.Then he had to deliver, and that was the problem. The federal government had no role in law and order except customs, organized crime, and interstate crime. The average person on the street never saw federal law enforcement. John Ehrlichman said to me, "Look, we understood we could not make it illegal to be young or poor or black in the United States, but we could criminalize their common pleasure. We understood that drugs were not the health problem we were making them out to be, but it was such a perfect issue for the Nixon White House that we couldn't resist it." Bob Haldeman, Richard Nixon's Chief of Staff, wrote in his diary, "President Nixon emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to."
That's the genesis of the modern war on drugs. And it has worked so well for every administration since then that nobody can let go of it.
Lyndon Johnson had the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration in one of his bills at the end of his presidency. He envisioned that as a $15 million program, but it became a $1 billion program under Nixon. It was a way for police to get radios and guns and cars and tac squads, and it set the precedent for police expecting large funding from the federal government for certain types of law enforcement. State and local police are under the same kind of financial pressure that state and local school boards and social service agencies are. But only the police can augment their budgets from drug crime. Rapists go to prison but they don't lose their houses. Murderers go to prison but they don't lose their houses. The Chief of Detectives in Missoula told the local paper that drug enforcement is the only type of police work where you get a return on your dollar. We have "free market" law enforcement.

http://www.sonic.net...

by: Steve W. @ Fri Oct 26, 2007 at 13:23:39 PM CDT

Put This In Your Pipe | 2 comments

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