According to "US man 'abandoned' in US jail gets $4m in compensation' " (2013), the United States Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has admitted its mistake and paid compensation of US $4.1 million for imprisoning and then forgetting for four days Daniel Chong, who had been held following a drug raid but never charged. Chong's harrowing experience resulted in serious malnutrition, along with physical and mental problems as he desperately sought to attract attention from his US government captors.
Even though the event was almost certainly an accident (we hope that the US government and its officers are not deliberately so cruel), it is another example of how US drug laws, and the laws of all countries that copy the same disastrously failing policy, only harm citizens. Was Chong actually guilty of any crime? It appears not, since he was never charged. But even if he were guilty of a drug crime, say possessing or selling a drug such as whisky, yaa baa, marijuana, or red wine, he would not deserve such barbaric treatment.
But even worse for the policy of treating some, but hypocritically not all, drug use as a criminal offence, people who are buying, selling and using illegal drugs are not usually doing anything wrong. They are our brothers and sisters, our parents or children, our friends, and so on. They have fun using drugs and in almost all cases, do not cause any harm to any other person or any harm to society, although there is one drug that does cause a lot of harm to society and other people: alcohol. But very weirdly and irrationally, governments make alcohol, which is the most harmful drug to others and to society, legal, whilst making drugs much less harmful than alcohol illegal! This is not rational, nor is it moral. Chong fully deserved his financial compensation from the immoral US government, but so to do all the other drug users and suppliers now in prison or with criminal records. These people have all been harmed by unjust laws and should receive apologies and compensation from their governments.
Of course, there are two groups in society that are very much helped by current drug policy: corrupt officials and mafia groups, both of whom make a lot of money because some drugs that are popular with decent, sensible adults are illegal. But I'm not sure that governments should be making up laws to encourage corruption and to help mafia groups make massive profits.
Drugs, all drugs, are a serious problem, but sane people would have learnt decades ago that current policy is a total failure that only harms decent citizens and society, and would have tried a policy that might actually help.
Finally, I was rather thrilled to be able to use the word oubliette: it's a cool word, but not one that often fits any context where I'm writing. It does occasionally come in my reading: it appears in one of Thomas Harrris's wonderfully gory Hannibal "the Cannibal" Lecter novels and again in an Anne Rice witch novel. As you might infer from this, some of my reading is not very academic. I don't even think that Rice or Harris are great writers as far as artistic merit goes, but sometimes I just want to relax with some fun, easy reading, and their novels are great for that - I think the same about Harry Potter: Rowling writes well, and the story is great, but it's not high literature. Dan Brown, on the other hand, the "famous" writer of The da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons, is such a bad writer that I had trouble forcing myself to read his rubbish, which is a pity because his plot ideas are really good - he's just an awful writer. In fact, I thought that the film versions of both novels, starring Tom Hanks as Professor Robert Langdon, were much better than Brown's novels. On the other hand, the film versions of the Harry Potter books were not nearly as good as Rowling's novels.
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OK. I've finished my homework.
ReplyDeleteAnd I managed to make part 1 really short this time.
I hope your blog posts responding to a BBC News story are coming along well.