On May 5, 2:19 pm, M_P <m...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> http://deseretnews.com/article/0,1249,695275913,00.html
The rest of the article (Google wouldn't post the whole thing at
once):
Worse than drugs?
There are positive steps being made, such as the drug court approach,
which emphasizes treatment over jail. The endmethnow campaign
currently under way avoids the old "this is your body on drugs" scare
tactic.
But those both in and out of the drug scene, to a person, say all of
the public education campaigns, all of the drug conferences and all of
the brain research in the world reinforces one thing: the public
notion that there's nothing worse than drugs.
"Oh yes there is, and every person and every police officer who thinks
that will tell you there's something worse: somebody who uses drugs,"
said Michael DeSmet, a Sugar House resident who was arrested in
February for possession and intent to distribute methamphetamine.
Since his arrest, he has lost his livelihood, his pickup truck with
its $4,000 stereo and $7,000 in construction tools locked in the back.
He also lost any respect he had for law enforcement in Utah.
"I've cooperated and am doing everything they've asked for, and I'm
being thrashed," said DeSmet, who readily admits to regularly using
methamphetamine but who adamantly denies distributing the illegal
stimulant or having any intent to do so.
During an evidentiary hearing on April 15, his original charges were
upped to a first-degree felony possession with intent to distribute
and a second count for distribution near a church or school.
He was evicted from his house, which came with his storage shed
management job, and he lost his job because of the charges. He hasn't
been paid for his work, he said, which, including overtime, amounts to
about $40,000. He is being given a hearing before the labor commission
and goes back to court on his charges May 5.
"They have authority to go as far as they want to go and resort to any
means to thwart or to appear to be thwarting the drug craze," he said.
DeSmet, who moved from California, has "a past" but next to no hope of
having the future he came here to try to find. "I don't deny and
didn't deny having (the meth) or that it's against the law. I let them
in without a warrant, I did what they asked, but things have come
completely unglued."
Court do***ents say that in the home a bag was found containing 12.8
grams, or about a half ounce, of a powder that field-tested as
methamphetamine. There were also two glass pipes and a digital scale.
"I've been around this stuff off and on since I'm 15 (he's now 43).
I'm not proud of it or saying nothing should happen now," he said.
"But it's like meth is the new Godzilla, except it's worse =97 it's as
real as an atomic bomb to people, at least in people's minds who don't
realize =97 and don't want to, apparently =97 that there are functioning,
working people who are their neighbors on the stuff.
"People have given it and all drugs so much power," he said. "I swear
it's like a real magic word. Say meth or get caught with it and, poof,
your life disappears =97 not just your stuff, your whole life."
The amount DeSmet handed over is a dealer-size quantity, but he says
it was a month's worth of personal use to help boost his energy at
work and keep in check the emotional and physical pain of living with
Stage 4 melanoma. He has gone through chemotherapy and refuses to go
again, saying it ruined his health and didn't keep the cancer in
check. He has four sores. One on his upper back is a black and red
crater nearly a half-inch deep and as big around as a silver dollar.
"The worst part is I'm losing my hair from all this grief," DeSmet
said, in an attempt to lighten the mood after reluctantly showing a
visitor the cancer on his back.
DeSmet refuses medical treatment, and he's refusing to plea bargain
his case "for the simple fact that I did not do what they said I did.
The guy who supposedly bought from me was paying me back 40 bucks. He
just threw it on the ground and walked off."
Turns out the money was marked and the buyer was a friend turning on
him.
"But no purchase was made. I don't deal," he said. "I picked (the
money) up and put it in my pocket, and suddenly undercover cops roll
up."
They were on private property, had been let in illegally by a tenant
apparently in an attempt to observe a drug deal that didn't happen
behind a cinder-block wall they couldn't see through, DeSmet said.
If he can find a lawyer who wants to defend him rather than promote a
plea, he plans to present evidence on Monday that he says proves wrong
every charge against him. Included in the stack of evidence are court
do***ents, pictures and personal journal entries of calls to the
police and courts he made every day since his initial arrest.
Part of the evidence he will submit are photographs of the storage
shed where the alleged deal took place. They depict every possible
angle =97 including from a Google Earth satellite. Whether from space or
on the ground, to watch it would require seeing around a corner, an 8-
foot setback and through a wall.
His legal battles continue, including the escalation of charges.
DeSmet's friends, those who use drugs, those who don't and the
business owner who put up his bail, said his case is so far into the
margins it's not even on the map of what's called for, legally or
morally.
"OK, Mike is not a saint, and the stuff is illegal," one of DeSmet's
friends said on condition of anonymity. "Fine. But to hamstring a guy
and give him the system runaround and take his livelihood, not to
mention his truck =97 which in another reality would be grand theft auto
=97 then I just don't know. Are we all that desperate to just turn over
common decency and common sense over a little dope?"
Yes. In so many words, yes we are, say several of the academics
gathered at the law school last month. Eleven of them have written a
book that in several thousand words says the country is so disoriented
about the drug issue, there is little to no hope of developing any
kind of coherent drug policy.
The war on drugs amounts to applying Mercurochrome on an open artery
or trying to end a flu epidemic by putting the virus in jail.
Policy failure
It's failure across the board, state the authors of "Drugs and
Justice: Seeking a Consistent, Coherent, Comprehensive View." The book
was published this past November by Oxford University Press.
There has been a plethora of gaffes from outright meanness to
knuckleheaded policies, such as the state Legislature approving
standards for methamphetamine detection without the first hint of
scientific data to back them up. Earlier this year, lawmakers adopted
a bill designed to rectify current practice by establi****ng uniform
contamination standards developed by the State Department of Health.
"Putting exposure from using a bathroom where the drug was smoked a
couple times on the same footing as a site of a meth lab where it was
made is, well, just adds more chaos to the issue," said book co-author
and bioethicist Margaret Battin, a distinguished professor at the
University of Utah.
"Despite the enormous expense to governments, cost to taxpayers and
emotional and financial ruin of people in its wake, the gears of this
vast drug policy just keep turning and grinding, and we don't have the
first idea of what's really going on," she said. "We haven't even
examined our rationale for why some drugs are illegal and some
aren't."
But with the current drug policy, there's no big conspiracy =97 it's
just the way things work right now, Battin said.
"But we can make them work the way that serves greater justice and the
control of substances, not just criminalizing and controlling the
user," she said.
|
