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She said, speaking to a young man we know:
"If you sit in your house smoking a joint or experiencing some mushrooms or zoning out on Xanax, you are not costing me a dime. As soon as they invade your privacy and charge and indict and judge and incarcerate you, it begins costing me. Big time."
She really made me think. As long as you don't normally abuse these substances, you are no doubt someone who will go to work, pay your taxes and you contribute in your own small way. Once someone says, "You are a bad person for doing these things in your own home so we must take you away from your family whom you support and we must make you pay and declare you a felon and make society pay for the law enforcement, the cop, the DA, the assistant DA the clerks, the jail help, the probation officers," it becomes a very tangled, expensive journey into the lowest of the low, the government worker who feeds off the misfortune and poverty and ignorance of others.
Even in a small town all of these salaries add up. Who is paying for all of this law enforcement? All of these "public servants" saving us from what other people do in the privacy of their own homes?
From what I've seen, it is the poor who are keeping this system steaming along, producing felons faster than Bayer's products are killing bees, and you just need to spend a few days down at your county courthouse to see for yourself. I recently did. The experience opened my eyes.
The system is sad and must feed on the poorest among us to sustain itself. Men with cigarette addictions and food addictions and addictions to themselves stand in front of the assembled courtroom and moralize about.....addiction.
The DA struts like a puny banty in love with his comb. He throws a hissy fit any time anyone actually wants a trial, which makes you sit up and hope everybody asks for a trial just to keep watching a grown man act like a three-year-old (with apologies to normal three-year-olds everywhere.) And you realize you are paying for these goons arrayed in front of you - the court jesters as it were - chonking on gum and making snide comments about defendants and totally distracting you from the sobriety of the courtroom.
These people are ....get this.....public servants.
Now, to be fair, the most humanity I witnessed in such a sad, oppressive place resided with the majority of the cops in attendance and with the women in the clerk's office. They are worth their pay and more for the way they treat people, honestly. At least in the courtroom I was in recently...results may vary from town to town.
But the over-funded War on Some Drugs and Some Users is taking up most of the court's time and the court is happy to sentence people to arcane, hypocritical sentences and collect fees due. It works for the exploitive system to have the legislators - high on something - agree to bend over for Corporate America and pass harsher and harsher sentences for non-violent, victimless drug crimes.
But it is we the people who are really bending over.
It's stunning to consider, but I liked the way the young woman put it up above. It made me think about the madness of our society, when a former cokehead is President yet many of the young poor people I know and young people I don't know are being turned into felons on a whim for lesser drugs than cocaine. And they are being told that drugs destroy their lives when we all know they didn't hurt Gee Dubya none. It is the drug laws destroying kids' chances, not the drugs themselves.
I am watching a generation of poor and middle-class kids slowly get destroyed and lose their rights while the sons and daughters of the wealthy "party on" and go on to study and graduate and be productive.
This is the society Gee Dubya wants: only guys like him get a break.
The rest of us pay through the teeth for stuff we don't even want.
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