 How
much is your freedom worth?
By Nora Callahan, Executive Director,
November Coalition
(Ed. note: This speech was written for
presentation at the annual Seattle Hempfest)
I've come here today to bring you a message from the prisoners
of war in America. The war on drugs is a fraud. It isn't a war
on drugs it is a war on people. How much is your freedom
worth?
Under our present system of purge and punish with regard to
some drug users, if the government has a substance of your choice
on a certain list, then your freedom isn't worth a cent. Your
freedom isn't worth anything to most of your government leaders
and the fellow citizens they hire to keep watch over us.
 If your drug of choice is Prozac
then your freedom to stand in line at the drug store to
acquire it is unimpeded. If your drug of choice is alcohol
and as long as you don't drink and drive or beat your spouse
and children to death in a drunken rage you have the freedom
to drink and legislators would go to their deaths drinking, I
mean go to their deaths preserving their right to drink. But
if your substance of choice is marijuana God help you,
and even He has a hard time doing that.
I talk to literally thousands of loved ones of prisoners and
drug war prisoners and they pray every day and still more
than 30 years into this drug war prayers are soaring and
so are the rates of incarceration of drug law violators. The
drug war it's a tough one even for God.
We have scientific facts in and there is nothing fiscally
responsible or morally motivating with these mandatory sentencing
schemes. All that happens when a drug dealer is sent to prison
is that another takes his/her place. When the first to get nailed
is finally out of prison, his chances of getting a regular job
and re-establishing family ties are so slim that drug dealing
easily lures him. Many times that lure comes in the voice of
an undercover agent or informant assigned to entice the parolee.
And we still know that marijuana hasn't killed a soul, and treatment
CAN make a HUGE difference, a positive difference in an addicted
person's life, and rarely can that be said of prison life.
A charge of rape, murder or marijuana manufacturer reads different
on paper, but prison bed space isn't assigned to the crime
and everyone knows it's first come, first served inside.
Years ago I worked in a metropolitan hospital emergency room.
Periodically, much too often in fact, we had to meet with a family
in what we called the consultation room where we told the family
that their loved one had died, or was in "critical condition"
and the prognosis was bad. I heard a mother's wail of grief for
the first time in my life working there. It's an eerie sound
that rips right through a person. A child's death a mother's
loss, sounding like no other wail can sound.
Years later I would remember that mother's wail, that distinct
sound, but I didn't hear it in a private, hospital consultation
room. There were no doctors standing by with a sedative, no grief
counselor. There was no ministerial staff that could come at
a moment's notice, but there was a judge, twelve jurors, bailiffs,
guards, police and reporters. There was also one mother, three
sisters, and a wife. Oh yes, there was one drug defendant on
trial for "conspiracy".
You know how that works don't you -one drug defendant charged
with a crime that involves many, yet only one facing trial? They
put a few of the so-called conspirators on the stand against
the one. The government calls it "cooperation"
your parents called it tattling and may have scolded you for
it. My generation got whipped for it; now you MUST do it, or
you could face 10 to life. It is being encouraged at the youngest
of levels ratting is taught openly in the schools now.
 We teach informing in our schools,
build prison camps and a sea of razor wire, no ovens yet
but the whole scheme is very Hitleresque? Don't you think?
I had heard that mother's wail before. When I heard it again
years later, it wasn't in a hospital where death and loss are
frequent occurrences. It was in a federal courtroom when the
jury's verdict in my brother's drug trial came back. The foreman
said, "Guilty." My mother wailed, and it cut right
through my soul. My mother had lost her son. That wail even made
the newspaper the following day. And courtrooms all over this
so called Land of the Free are full of this eerie noise as American
mothers lose their children to an ever expanding, profit making,
prison industrial complex that rivals any the world has ever
known!
If your freedom means nothing to your leaders who make these
laws, what is it worth to you? Is it worth an hour of your time
each week? Is it worth a couple hours a month? Is it worth buying
a little less than an ounce so that you can afford to contribute
to drug law reform an ounce of vodka of course you know
forgo a martini and make a donation?
Is your freedom worth a regular contribution to an organization
that is actively organizing against drug laws that sanction and
underwrite, even mandate, amphetamine use in children [Ritalin],
but put a marijuana gardener in prison for 5 to 10?
Our federal leaders are now fully engaged in pumping 1.3 billion
dollars into Colombia in the coming year military aid to
combat insurgents and drugs.
Insurgents? The insurgents are, for the most part, native
people who want to survive economic globalization. Drugs? These
drugs are coca and marijuana, crops that pay, not a lot to the
Colombian farmer, but enough to live on sometimes. Is this because
there is a high demand for cocaine and marijuana in Colombia?
No, there is high demand primarily in the United States.
The U.S. is going to finance the new killing fields
this time in Colombia, because United States' citizens buy marijuana
and coca products. There is one more way to say it. We are going
to Colombia to kill Colombian citizens because Americans are
using illegal drugs.
Colombian mothers will continue to lose ever more children
due to the U.S. drug war while U.S. taxpayers will be footing
the bill to buy guns and pay the gunners' salaries. The guns,
bullets and soldiers will cut down children of Colombia's mothers,
and they will wail, and the few who hear the eerie sound will
have it cut right through them and still, there is no end.
When will the wails of grief become a scream of protest that
cuts the heart right out of the beast of the drug war? When?
When it becomes a collective too big to ignore, when people
join their voices with another and then another still. It will
end when we begin to make greater sacrifices of time and money
and make that commitment to stand to publicly to oppose the drug
war.
The drug war will end, and the prisoners freed, when the injustice
of the war and being a responsible citizen in the nation enjoying
the dubious distinction of world's leading jailer is more embarrassing
than standing outside a prison or courthouse in protest of these
laws. Then, and only then, will the heart of the drug war beast
be ripped out, and no longer the hearts of our nation's children
and the parents who love them.
The message is this. It is not a war on drugs it's a
war on people. Your charge today is this: do something to help
stop this injustice.
If your freedom means anything to you, and you have any thought
of concern to the world's children and the mothers who wail in
loss then you simply cannot stand by and so do nothing.
We must open our ears to the mothers' cries and fill our world
with a better sound.
Freedom can be worth it a little of your time and a
small commitment a contribution toward a collective goal.
If not, then freedom will be no more.
Are we going to stop the drug war? Yes? Then let's do it.
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