As the basketball season winds down, the baseball season winds up. When the baseball season winds down, the football season winds up. When the football season winds down, the basketball season winds up. Just as one is about to lose interest in a major sport, the exciting playoffs to determine the championship commence.
There are few issues in sports. All that matters is who wins and who loses.
This isn’t so with politics. The issues matter to all Americans—regardless of whether you are a fan of politics or not. Even so, much of the media covers the coming political season—the mid-term elections—as though it were a sport season. Which candidates are going to make it to the play-offs? Which candidates are going to win?
The exclusive coverage of “the horse race”—who is going to win—turns off many people from politics, especially during mid-term elections when the names of the players aren’t as familiar. Moreover our national religion of sport creates the illusion that one division,—whether ACC vs. SEC in college football, or American League vs. National League in baseball—must win, or else all will be wrong with the country.
Not so with politics. Which team wins, the Republicans or the Democrats, will decide life-or-death issues that will affect the lives of millions of Americans. Gun control is one obvious vital issue. Legalizing marijuana is another.
Smoking pot may not seem to be a life-or-death issue, but the illegality of marijuana cost 19-year-old Zachary Hammond his life just one year ago. The CNN headline says it all: “South Carolina Officer Shoots Unarmed White Teen during Pot Bust.”
The Republicants can’t (or won’t) do anything about this issue. If anything, Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump are escalating the failed War on Drugs—retelling the stale old lies instigated by Richard Nixon designed to foment intolerance and division. John Ehrlichman, the Watergate co-conspirator, spilled the beans as to why Nixon decided to wage his War on Drugs:
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White house after that, had two enemies: the anti-war left and black people. You understand what I am saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt both communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night and day on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about drugs? Of course we did.”
Fortunately, today there are a few brave Democratic candidates who aren’t afraid to address this issue. Lee Turner is not afraid to speak truth to power. I stood by Lee, the candidate for SC-04 Congressional district, as she gave the following speech condemning the insanity of our current drug policies. (I had hoped to post the entire video, but with only a cell phone to make an outdoor recording, the sound quality made it difficult to hear.) So allow me to provide a transcript of her out on the street, “Talking Cannabis and Prison Reform” speech:
“Hi, this is Lee Turner, out on the street again. It’s April 17th, tax day. I hope you have yours filed. If not, go home and do it right away.
“Today I want to talk about how we have come we have 5% of the world’s population in America, but we have 20 to 25% of the world’s prison population? How did we get there and how do we fix it? Well, I blame the beginnings of it on good old Richard Nixon, who had trouble back in the late 60’s with hippies and blacks getting in the way of his Viet Nam War… So he came up with the controlled substance act in 1970. It has five levels, the top one being the worst and the bottom one being the best…He listed marijuana and heroin as having no medicinal qualities whatsoever. He thought heroin would put the blacks in jail and pot would put the hippies in jail. And that suited him just fine. He even commissioned the Schaffer Commission in 1971 to analyze the drugs on the controlled substance list, marijuana in particular, hoping they would say it does need to be a Schedule I drug [the worst]. When in fact their findings came back, they indicated not only it shouldn’t be Schedule I, but it shouldn’t be scheduled at all.
“And so now we have a whole community of people who have been incarcerated due to small and inconsequential drug violations, many of them related to marijuana and small amounts of marijuana at that. And now we have an Attorney General [Jeff Sessions] who thinks medical marijuana is an over-hyped medical myth. And we don’t think that’s true at all.
“In fact, I want to say, if cannabis is so dangerous, and belongs as a Schedule I drug, why does the US government own a patent on cannabis? It is patent number 6630575, and it is for the use of cannabis as an anti-inflammatory and neuro-protectant. There are other patents involved also good for treating chronic pain, inflammation, auto-immune diseases, and anti-terminal actions. And…other than that, you can talk to mothers whose children whose lives are dominated by seizures, talk to veterans who are suffering from PTSD, you can talk to people suffering from Parkinson ’s disease, chronic pain, and nausea associated with treatment for cancer.
“So there are all sorts of reasons for us to reform marijuana laws, and reform prison systems sentences related to those. So that’s just one thing on the list today we need to fix. We need to send somebody to Washington that’s not afraid to speak truth to power, and in my opinion, that would be me. My name is Lee Turner. I’m running for Congress in the Fourth District. Please vote on June 12th, which is the primary, and get on my Facebook page, donate to my Act Blue site if you can, and encourage all your like-minded friends to do the same. Thank you.”
Post Script (by Stephen Dreyfus)
I am not officially associated with Lee Turner’s campaign, although obviously I am an avid supporter. I have known Lee personally for about year, and have become more and more impressed with her integrity and intelligence. As an alcohol and drug addiction counselor, I have been an outspoken critic of the War on Drugs for many years. It is my contention that such draconian drug laws exacerbate addiction and other drug-related problems. Unfortunately, few addiction counselors have dared to speak up on his issue, and even fewer politicians either understand the issue or are willing to speak up about changing these terrible laws. I am pleased Lee Turner is one of those few. I just hope she will soon be making such speeches before Congress, instead of on Main Street.