Item: Here are two very depressing stories from GNN. One is a very skeptical take on the G8 and the other is from a guy who's been sentenced to one year in prison--with a very small amount of both marijuana and ecstasy (less than a quarter of an ounce and about 12 pills...what a threat to society)--where he will write what I suspect will be a dark tale. He's the editor and publisher of Newtopia, which is billed as a journal of the new counterculture. I can't believe that 1 year is a sentence for a first time offender. I wonder if he has a record or if he purposely accepted the sentence for what could be a great story.
Here's a depressing bit...:
And most people end up thinking, “Isn’t it wonderful of our government to try and protect us.”
But within this simple world is another more complex world. It is a world where everyone is addicted in one way or another and the profits from their addictions fuel the economy. A world where lethal drugs like alcohol, tobacco, Vioxx, and Oxycontin are legal and readily available, while relatively harmless drugs like marijuana, psilocybin, and MDMA are designated dangerous and highly addictive, without any tangible health benefits, and marginalized into a dangerous illicit market. It is a world where, in some neighborhoods, the police protect and serve while in others they are the threat and the enemy. It is a world where the rich go unpunished, and the poor go to prison.
And what may be even more shocking is that it has become progressively more serious to have been caught with drugs than to kill someone. In his 1999 Progressive Populist essay, “The Prison-Industrial Complex,” UNLV Criminal Justice professor Richard Shelden cites that between 1980 and 1992 the average maximum sentence in federal courts declined for violent crimes (from 125 months to 88 months) and almost doubled for drug offenses (from 47 months to 82 months).
This is the hidden world that no one has to see or think about except those on the inside.
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