“Is Possession of Fourteen Grams of Plant Material Worth Killing a Man Over?”
I think my reaction to the news of hearing that Chris Diaz faces up to life in prison for possession of a half ounce of plant material was impacted by the news I had been reading before, about our beloved House of Representatives debating Resolution 489, which promised to “protect the symbols of Christmas.” Oh, how many wonderful variations that filibuster could have taken…. Meanwhile there is this little issue of a man who is about to be PLACED INSIDE A BOX FOR THE REST OF HIS LIFE for picking up a little too much of a plant that grows freely on God’s earth. Am I the only one who thinks our lawmakers’ priorities are flat out insane?
The story is as follows: The twenty year old asthma sufferer Chris Diaz (who has a medical marijuana card in California) went to California to get some marijuana to stock up on and take home to Texas. The thing is, his medical marijuana card is worthless in Texas. They pulled him over for expired plates and searched the car, finding a combination of medical marijuana and medical hashish in the amount of fourteen grams.
It is the hash that complicated things. Since of the fourteen total grams confiscated over four of them were hash he automatically qualifies as having “possessed a controlled substance with intent to deliver.” That is right: they charged him with dealing for possessing an amount beyond their threshold of what they thought a user would possess with no other form of proof. And that threshold amount to qualify as a dealer was so low that most users would easily exceed it. This legal assumption has always been absurd but here it is even more damning because of the medical issue and extremely small amount involved. No one who has actual experience in these matters would think him a dealer based on such a paltry amount.
He faces a potential life sentence for this. LIFE!
Our members of Congress are so out of touch with reality that they spend more energy protecting symbols than men. They turn their minds toward minutia while horrors rage all around them. They value vague concepts over tangible life. What sort of people are these and how did things get so bad off that they rule us? Why do I feel like I am living in a madhouse?
When you allow your government to send a man to prison for life for possession of a plant, you have crossed any number of moral boundaries. We the People are almost as bad as these politicians for not stopping these atrocities, and much more weak. You who do not stand up for him have stated that this man’s life is basically worth nothing at all. This Product Preference War has gone on far enough and if people cannot use this man’s case to get heated up over the cause for legalization, then I guess we will have to change a law and go arrest them for one of THEIR consumption habits and then give them the same charge and see if they agree about the fairness of such product persecution at that point! I doubt their crusade is worth that much to them!
People need to get out of this “us vs them” mentality where we take our fellow citizens and cast them as the enemy over simple preferences. This young man is no different than one who gets caught with two bottles of vodka in his trunk yet one gets a slap on the wrist and the other loses his LIFE? This 20 year old at worst would have hurt his lungs some by smoking this stuff…. How the hell does that weigh against the life in a box his punishment from other men might give him? Weed has never been recorded as killing a man but taking all the free remaining years from a 20 year old is certainly the equivalent. How does this case not make things dramatically clear to even those who were blind before how out of sync with reality our drug policies are?
Does it even matter to you guys to get this society functioning correctly?
I will ask again, and please carry this thought with you when you leave this essay and start interacting with humans again, you know, where it might make a difference:
IS POSSESSION OF 14 GRAMS OF PLANT MATERIAL WORTH KILLING A MAN OVER?
This case is of vital importance because we can use it to generate a consensus against itself at the very least, if not the bigger picture. There is quite frankly no sane man on this planet who would argue that a half ounce of plant material is worth doing life in prison over. Not a single one. When I promote this man’s cause I expect that not one single person would dare argue with me as to the morality of the possibility of a lifelong sentence for this “crime”.
I have heard of some extreme cases but like most have not heard of one nearly this bad. Here we have a diseased possibility that no one can abide and the fact that a law is potentially about to be enforced to a degree that no one on the planet could morally accept should be an indicator more than anything that this drug law system does not truly reflect the values of the society it purports to represent. This is an absolute indication that the system is broken and as such it should be a major talking point.
Please do not tell me we are so bored by and jaded to discussions on the Drug War that we will now allow atrocities such as this to occur without response. We would truly be worthless sheep to let this happen with no comment. Remember what we think of the citizens of Nazi Germany for allowing the Holocaust to happen? Well every single day we allow our citizens to be caged over simple human curiosity –what the hell do you think the enlightened societies of the future will think on US looking back? Could it possibly be anything good with such horribly inconsistent policies that we let get this out of control while we sat on our hands?
When the government is this out of whack with its own citizens a revolution of some sort must occur. I am one hundred percent convinced that this government will one day fail if we continue implementing policies like this. There are a lot of young people who will not stand for this their entire lives in my opinion. We are not as programmed as society was in the days before the Internet. They cannot keep stories like this from our eyes anymore and when we see them we will react.
There are few Drug War stories I have heard in the last decade worth responding to more than this one.
With the Chris Diaz case we now have a rallying cry. I know a man cannot be a hero for simply having a plant on him in the wrong era—especially one who was not wise enough to update his tags—but he is in essence a hero of circumstance here in that he is inadvertently becoming a martyr for the cause of legalization. His is the question, the fundamental question of the value of a man’s future and freedom weighed against the desire to keep him from possessing certain plants. He might lose a chunk of his life before we can free him but I hope like hell it is not in vain. So in closing I say to Mr. Diaz, “Chris, we are trying to get you out through the system as soon as possible. You will not be in that box forever. We will find a way before you lose too much of it. YOU WILL NOT SPEND YOUR LIFE IN A BOX FOR POSSESSION OF A PLANT!”
(If everyone who reads this essay forwards it to two people and everyone who reads it gets pissed then we will change this broken law. I have been waiting my whole life to write this essay so please help me promote it. Pyramid schemes do not work to make money but perhaps they can work as a marketing tactic, and this case is certainly worth promoting to the extreme! Most people do not even know this is happening! Please help me!)
(BTW sorry for the caps but they will not let me use italics or underline on this site and this article called for it so I compromised)