BigUglyWorld #13 - Free At Last (September 11, 2005)
Band:
Last night we played the Underground for our one year anniversary show with the current lineup. It was so much fun, and all I can say is that if we could do that every night, we would.
Me:
I am great. My birthday was last Wednesday, which I spent watching Anthrax and Megadeth play the Corral. The next night I wound up at the Back Alley for The Hugh Dillon Redemption Choir. The next night was a surprise birthday party for me which then slipped into a night of strange karaoke. Then the gig last night. I'm exhausted, but it's been a fucking blast.
The World Outside:
There is a world outside my doors, I hear it every once in a blue moon. When last I heard there were wars, natural disasters, sick children, sick bastards, and stick figures. What can a guy say?
Meat:
My buddy Charles is free. First off, I should point out that it's only in This Modern World that Charles could possibly be my friend, as we live in different countries and have never met in person, but blah blah blah it's a wonderful Internet.
I met Charles Shaw through my work as a writer, sometimes-editor, webmaster, and whatever-the-hell over at 3am Magazine. Charles joined the team for a while as the Politics and Non-Fiction editor, and I like to think that the experience whetted his appetite a bit and might have been part of his reasoning to create Newtopia Magazine, a brilliant non-fiction, op-ed, current events, politics, and all things nerdtacular zine. During this whole time, we became friends, and I've helped ole' Charlie out as a friend, as a webmaster, as a writer, and as a sooth-sayer at times.
It sucked when the guy went to jail. See, I'm not one of these hippie dinks who thinks that jails are outmoded or whatever. Frankly, sometimes a guy needs his balls smacked for doing something and jail's the right place. Other times you have people who simply are unable to be out there in the world, and jail's our solution. It may not be perfect, but it's something. But to me, jail is about protecting society from people. When they threw Vince Neil in the clink it was to save us from another shitty Motley Crue album. It's how the system works, damnit.
Charles got stopped and searched by a cop. He had a little bit of marijuana and a little bit of MDMA (also known as ecstasy) on his person. He did not have the sort of quantities that would lead the cops to believe he was dealing, it was clearly for personal use only. Normally this would have been a slap on the wrist, but many years ago, Charles was a junkie and had convicted the sorts of crimes junkies commit. Twice. And because this was his third offence, he wound up in jail for a year.
So lemme ask you, what part of a little bit of pot and a little bit of E makes Charles a threat to society? I could easily see them worrying about dealers, but he's not a dealer. They grabbed a guy who runs a popular and thoughtful zine and who has turned his life around for the better over the last four years and sentenced his ass to a year in jail for possession? To save us from who?
He went to jail on Canada Day (July 1, for those Americans reading this tale) and was released a few days ago. I'm ecstatic that my friend is free and made it through what must have been a shit situation, but all I can do is stare south at the US and wonder what in the fuck they're thinking. Catch a killer. Catch a dealer. Catch a pimp. Do your fucking job and keep the city safe.
You can judge a society on a lot of factors, but ultimately the only real acid test of what a society is comes from looking at the things it does. The US jails are bursting at the seams with poor people charged with drug offenses. Rich people get high all the time but never seem to wind up fucked for it. And the number of drug users isn't on the decline at all. That means we can safely say that either the war on drugs isn't working or it's aim isn't in any way the noble attempt to help people get off drugs. It's about economics, and that says a lot about the US of A.
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