David 1975 A Person Destroyed by Drug Laws
This was a nice friendly kid who didn't have a mean bone in his body who made the horrid mistake of being caught by Pennsylvania state troopers with a few ounces of weed. Long story to short the cops tore his car down to a pile of scrap and he was charged with felony possession and did a couple of years in a state prison filled with hardened criminals were he was repeatedly beaten and raped. When he came out traumatized and stigmatized with a felony conviction and less than a year later he took his life in despair. For those of you who are too young or were born after the sixties or seventies it was still a time were people were given very serious hard time for what would be considered a minor drug offense today. I knew one guy spent weeks in the hellhole of Riker's Island until his friends scrapped the money for bail for possession of a dime bag of weed. Down in the southern states in those days forget about it. I remember there was one horror story that made the national news during the early seventies were some unlucky hippie got caught for one joint and it was in one of those hardcore redneck states was given a twenty year sentence. I knew way too many people from those days whose lives were badly disrupted or outright ruined from this country's insane and failed war on drugs. One of most hypocritical aspects of this is I knew several people who would later became cops that blew weed, tripped acid and snorted coke when they were teenagers or in their early twenties. In more recent years I served on grand jury and about 2/3 of the cases were for petty drug sales and got into some very heated arguments with fellow jurors over some of those cases.
David 1975 A Person Destroyed by Drug Laws
This was a nice friendly kid who didn't have a mean bone in his body who made the horrid mistake of being caught by Pennsylvania state troopers with a few ounces of weed. Long story to short the cops tore his car down to a pile of scrap and he was charged with felony possession and did a couple of years in a state prison filled with hardened criminals were he was repeatedly beaten and raped. When he came out traumatized and stigmatized with a felony conviction and less than a year later he took his life in despair. For those of you who are too young or were born after the sixties or seventies it was still a time were people were given very serious hard time for what would be considered a minor drug offense today. I knew one guy spent weeks in the hellhole of Riker's Island until his friends scrapped the money for bail for possession of a dime bag of weed. Down in the southern states in those days forget about it. I remember there was one horror story that made the national news during the early seventies were some unlucky hippie got caught for one joint and it was in one of those hardcore redneck states was given a twenty year sentence. I knew way too many people from those days whose lives were badly disrupted or outright ruined from this country's insane and failed war on drugs. One of most hypocritical aspects of this is I knew several people who would later became cops that blew weed, tripped acid and snorted coke when they were teenagers or in their early twenties. In more recent years I served on grand jury and about 2/3 of the cases were for petty drug sales and got into some very heated arguments with fellow jurors over some of those cases.