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Of gardens and plants

Two pieces of good news today, which is especially welcome given how every morning, when my alarm goes off, NPR comes on detailing further economic woes and such. The first item I'll just mention briefly, but the second I'd like to delve into a bit deeper (as I promised to do in a previous posts' comments section).

First up: Official indication that a White House organic garden, if not a farm, is an entirely probable eventuality. Neil Hamilton, an adviser to USDA head Tom Vilsack, was heard saying:

I believe that by this summer there will be a garden – another garden, a vegetable garden – on the White House lawn...I believe the Obamas are committed to that. It’s a big idea, and its gonna happen. During the campaign, going around shaking peoples’ hands, he never got sick once. He was eating well, and it could have to do with having an organic chef with him. This is someone who 'gets' nutrition.

Maybe Claire Strader will get her Obama Administration post after all, even if it's just as official White House Gardener instead of Farmer. In any case, this is good news.

Secondly, our new Attorney General, Eric Holder, made it clear in a recent press conference that, under the Obama Administration, the Justice Department will no longer raid places that distribute medical marijuana in states where such things are legal.

Under Bush, the JD had been instructed to carry out the rather draconian raids based on state law conflicting with federal law on the matter. So this new policy is definitely a step in the right direction, even if we, as a country, still have a long way to go on this issue.

Simply put, US drug policy as it specifically relates to marijuana is outdated, misdirected, highly flawed, and costly - both in terms of the cash required to enforce, and in the sense of pushing its cultivation and distribution underground, feeding into an often violent culture of organized crime (Prohibition, anyone?).

I am not a pot smoker. Frankly, I don't smoke anything, as I think it's gross. But you know what? I've still done the research, and I've talked to the people most effected, and I've come to the same conclusion as that of thousands of other, more well-informed and qualified individuals. We need to, at the very least, decriminalize the stuff.

As most advocates of relaxing laws related to pot will readily admit, marijuana is not an entirely harmless substance. But it still poses similar, if not lesser, risks to that of the use of alcohol and tobacco. As those things are legal but heavily regulated, so should marijuana be.

The US spends billions of dollars a year on the arrest and incarceration of people for pot related offenses. According to the most recent set of statistics released by the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics, nearly half of all drug related arrests in the country are made for marijuana related offenses. Furthermore:

According to the new BJS report, "Drug Use and Dependence, State and Federal Prisoners, 2004," 12.7 percent of state inmates and 12.4 percent of federal inmates incarcerated for drug violations are serving time for marijuana offenses. Combining these percentages with separate U.S. Department of Justice statistics on the total number of state and federal drug prisoners suggests that there are now about 33,655 state inmates and 10,785 federal inmates behind bars for marijuana offenses. The report failed to include estimates on the percentage of inmates incarcerated in county and/or local jails for pot-related offenses.

Decriminalizing pot wouldn't get rid of all of those offenders. Some of them are desperate or nasty sorts who will find other ways to make money, no doubt. But I think a pretty solid argument can be made that such a move would drastically reduce the overall number of arrests and incarcerations. The associated savings combined with tax revenues from good regulation would stand to make/save a decent amount of money for the country/tax payers.

Part of the problem that leads to our current, misguided policies toward pot is the sheer amount of misinformation that's been fed to the public for the past century. The stigmatization of the "demon weed" by moneyed interests has been well documented but somewhat poorly marketed.

The propaganda campaign aimed toward instilling a sense of fear and menace in regards to this plant has ranged, over time, from the ridiculous to the sneakily mundane, but much of what we've been taught has been either outright falsehood or very stretched truth. Worse, because of that atmosphere, truly scientific medical studies of its use were almost non-existent until very recently.

The real casualties of all this aren't to do with perpetually stoned hippies, but rather with those who stand to really benefit from its medicinal uses, and those who've come up with a whole slew of ways in which to use its non-intoxicating counterpart, hemp (read a comprehensive explanation of the plant and its many uses here).

Industrial hemp has many uses, including paper, textiles, biodegradable plastics, health food, and fuel. It is...one of the earliest domesticated plants known. It also runs parallel with the "Green Future" objectives that are becoming increasingly popular. Hemp requires little to no pesticides, no herbicides, controls erosion of the topsoil, and produces oxygen. Furthermore, hemp can be used to replace many potentially harmful products, such as tree paper (the processing of which uses chlorine bleach, which results in the waste product polychlorinated dibensodioxins, popularly known as dioxins, which is carcinogenic, and contributes to deforestation), cosmetics, and plastics, most of which are petroleum-based and do not decompose easily. The strongest chemical needed to whiten the already light hemp paper is non-toxic hydrogen peroxide.

While some inroads have been made in certain states through the passage of bills making it legal for farmers to grow industrial hemp, there are still several hurdles to jump and a ways to go before the practice is legal and commonplace throughout the country. In the meantime, we're missing out on a valuable, sustainable, low-impact source for all sorts of goods.

And medical marijuana holds the promise of extreme pain relief, sleep assistance, and appetite increase (among other things) in patients suffering from a range of maladies. Peer reviewed studies have shown this to be the case, even in the face of continued ignorance on the subject by those making the laws.

I am only somewhat hopeful that the new administration will take a serious, scientifically-based look at and approach to US drug policy. We need to do our part to hold them to this, and to see that action is taken from the ground up, too - starting with our own communities. Such action makes economic, medical, and social justice sense.

Inmates deserve better health care

We're all struggling for a better health care system (or any actual system, for that matter) in this country. To most folks, it seems strange that in a place as prosperous as America so many of its citizens lack even the most basic coverage.

So it may be difficult for some to find the time or the will to think about what things are like for those citizens who have landed in prison. Regardless of what they've done, though, these are human beings and therefor deserving of at least basic medical care.

Sadly, however, a combination of negligence and thinly-stretched resources have made for a pretty terrible situation for many inmates of Wisconsin's prison system.

Just two days ago, Bill Lueders at Isthmus reported on a call he'd received from the mother of an inmate being held in prison in La Crosse. She was desperate to get better medical care for her son, Robert Hawkins Jr., who was suffering from "severe stomach problems, high blood pressure, a chronic cough, and blood in his vomit and excrement" but was not getting proper medical attention from prison staff or doctors.

Lueders, being associated with a Madison publication, referred the stricken mother to the La Crosse Tribune, which did end up running a story about the issue. By that time, however, Hawkins had died. It had been two months since he'd first been incarcerated and had been exhibiting symptoms. Two months before prison staff saw fit to have him hospitalized.

And there are more examples of this sort of terrible scenario playing out in our prison system.

Curtis Heino was incarcerated at the Outagamie County Jail when he started to have breathing problems. His wife called to complain that whenever he'd gotten like that in the past, he'd come down with pneumonia. The jail's nurse brushed it all off:

"Nothing big going on with that guy at all," registered nurse Frank Koehler reassured the jail sergeant. "He's got the creeping crud like everybody else that's working in the jail has got. … He’ll survive."

Nineteen hours later, on Jan. 13, the 5-foot-8 Heino was found on the floor of his cell surrounded by bloody tissues and towels, according to jail officer reports obtained by The Post-Crescent through the state’s Public Records Law.

Still another incident involved a female inmate at the Taycheeda Correctional Institution.

Michelle Greer, 29, died within hours of pleading repeatedly with corrections officers for help with an acute asthma attack Feb. 2, 2000. She collapsed on the floor of a dining hall, where she died gasping for breath, still clutching her inhaler. She had told corrections officers multiple times that the inhaler was not helping her condition. Corrections officers had contacted Taycheedah health services twice on her behalf and were told by nurses that the situation was not an emergency because Greer could still talk.

And there are more stories - too many to list here. What's going on in our prisons may just be a reflection of a greater problem being faced by the nation. Our supposed health care system is in shambles, run by profit-driven institutions, unevenly distributed, and prohibitively expensive.

As far as I can tell, there are two big things at issue here: 1) Our prison systems are overcrowded, understaffed, and underfunded, and 2) Our health care system is bloated and failing. The combination, for many, is lethal.

It doesn't have to be.

Pushing aside any arguments that prisoners don't deserve good medical treatment simply because they're prisoners (because that's just fucking wrong), we need to focus on fixing several problems. The United States has the highest number and percentage rate of incarceration in the world. That's one in 100 adults behind bars (more than 2.3 million), at a cost of nearly $50 billion a year for state governments and $5 billion more for the federal government. This is not an area where we should take pride in beating even countries like China.

Between the massive economic downturn and these sorts of numbers, it's no wonder that many prisons find themselves strapped for adequate cash and staffing, something that too often leads to the kinds of deadly scenarios described above.

Measures like killing the so-called War on Drugs, mandatory minumum sentancing laws, and other wasteful and/or discriminatory rules would held to ease the number of people behind bars. So would more spending on things like public education (argue all you like, people are less likely to turn to a life of crime if provided with better opportunities early on in life).

But some of this comes down to negligence, too, and we need to hold the responsible parties accountable for these peoples' deaths. We also need to make sure better training is provided for jail staff, so that the often clear-as-day warning signs don't go unheeded.

The most important thing is that these are almost all avoidable deaths, as we should be doing what we can to see that they are, in fact, avoided. No more phone calls from weeping mothers, please.


(photo by Gìpics on Flickr)