Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

My first unwanted education in the perversities of the criminal justice system occurred years ago, shortly after the first Oregon Medical Marijuana Act (OMMA) had been imposed on the prohibitionists by the direct vote of the citizens.

At the time, my legal status was uncertain. On one hand, my medication was technically illegal, while on the other, not using it would have resulted in crippling mental and physical disabilities. I'd made good faith efforts to prove that no other medication was effective for my condition - periodically stopping for as long as two years at a time in order to try every alternative "legal" medication that could possibly have an effect on my condition. I'd lost years of productivity while trying officially approved drugs like Ritalin, Cylert, Disipromine, Welbutran, Lithium, Buspar, Marinol, and others - none of which was effective (and might be misspelled).

From one perspective, I was "in willful violation of the law". From another, I was a legitimate medicinal user under the preeminent legal principles of medical necessity and lesser of evils. I'd also been an active participant in multiple efforts to change the offending laws - efforts that had been illegally subverted through government crimes, the magnitude of which far exceeded any violations I could possibly be accused of committing. Either way, both strict law-and-order types and freemen should be offended by the eventual Kafkaesque denouement of my first prosecution.

There were two main complications with legalizing my situation at the time. The first was that I've always considered ADD to be the primary condition for which I used medicinal cannabis. Unfortunately, ADD wasn't one of the original four conditions covered by OMMA. The Act's original authors were concerned that if the initiative was too broad, it would be much more difficult to counter the deluge of lies and propaganda the prohibitionists were expected use against it. OMMA contained a petition process for adding new conditions, but the Health Division was resisting implementing the process. (The petition process, when finally implemented well past the specified deadlines in the law, was so completely corrupted by the prohibitionists that the petition I filed was summarily rejected without any consideration of the supporting evidence.)

The second was the open question of whether the government would respect the will of the people, and allow any of the provisions in the Act to be implemented. It's a common tactic of authoritarian governments to allow temporary periods of "openness" and "freedom" in order to deceive their opposition into volunteering for elimination. The illusion only lasts long enough for the opposition to develop enough false confidence to openly exercise their new freedom. The authorities then terminate the temporary period of "freedom" - along with all those foolish enough to believe their government's lies and expose themselves.

If the government succeeded in frustrating the will of the citizens in passing OMMA, admitting to using medical marijuana for a condition that wasn't covered would have been a self-incriminating "voluntary" admission of guilt in the minds of the prohibitionists. There certainly wouldn't be a safe means of filing a petition to expand the act to cover an additional condition if the government managed to resist issuing cards for the four conditions already listed in the law.

My expectation that the government would obstruct OMMA, and subsequently persecute those citizens who attempted to exercise their rights under the new law, was well founded in political history. There had already been outrageous abuses in both Oregon and California. Both the state and federal governments had already established extensive histories of engaging in overt dishonesty and dirty tricks in their efforts to find and persecute medical marijuana patients. It was a well founded fear that just signing a marijuana initiative petition might attract the unwanted attention of the drug cops - regardless of an individual's actual drug use.

At least one marijuana initiative in California had been openly "exploited" by authorities as a source of "leads" for drug raids. In a previous election, the Oregon Attorney General had subverted a properly qualified legalization initiative by falsely claiming that the signatures were "suspect" until it was too late for the measure to be put on the ballot. He then proceeded to "investigate" citizens who had signed the petitions on the specious grounds that anyone who supported the initiative was probably involved in illegal drugs. Instead of being prosecuted for his outrageous crimes, this despicable enemy of the people is now a "respected" law professor at a state university.

Just attempting to apply for an OMMA card, or filing a petition for a new condition, could also have compromised my pre-existing basic right to use a necessary medication as the lesser of evils. It could have been claimed that an attempt to obtain a "new right" to medicate was itself proof that I didn't believe my existing "lesser of evils" right was valid. Failing to succeed in getting an OMMA card would then have created the worst possible outcome of having compromised my existing right without establishing an alternative right to use a necessary medication.

It seemed prudent to at least wait and see if the government would issue any OMMA cards at all.

Obligations to my customers who depend on continuous access to my servers make it difficult for me to relocate, so I've lived in the same multi-ethnic complex for over 10 years. Having good reason to avoid attracting attention, not to mention being a strong believer in the principle of mutual respect, I've managed to peacefully coexist with a wide assortment of neighbors. Black, White, Asian, Hispanic, Arab, it didn't much matter since most of them at least tried to be civilized. I couldn't always understand what they were saying - or even guess what language they were speaking. But then, that's also true of many of the more distant relatives in my extended family. A shared self-interest in getting along is all that's really necessary.

My problems began when a black racist with a white trash wife and a huge chip on his shoulder moved in next door. He beat her, and she got back at him by renting her body to the single Arab men who lived on the other side of me. In their spare time they hassled me - or at least the guy they wanted to believe I was. I was more than willing to leave them to their masochistic pleasures, but they were even more determined to expand their battlefield beyond their territorial boundaries. As Leon Trotsky pointed out, "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you."

The angry at the world husband had a major problem with my failure to validate his self-image as a privileged victim of my racial oppression. His entirely self-obsessed world-view was dominated by his skin color, and so he expected everyone else to be similarly obsessed. His victim-empowered world-view could only accommodate two possible stereotypes for me - a fawning guilt driven liberal, or a bigoted cracker. The concept that anyone could be ambivalent to the level of melatonin in his skin didn't register within his intellectually challenged mind. Of course, what bothered these dysfunctional misery mongers the most was that I had absolutely no interest in becoming yet another bit player in their little slice of hell on earth.

It's hard to maintain a delusion of pride and power when you're as utterly worthless as these lowlifes. However, their utter lack of legitimate value to the contributing members of society made them perfect tools for the degenerate police state America is rapidly becoming. As informants they could pretend they possessed the power to impose their will on those who failed to show them the obsequious respect they believed they deserved.

Of course, there's no advantage to being an informant unless you've got someone to inform on. Being themselves the cause of the few legitimate complaints that could be made about the inhabitants of the complex, didn't really serve their intended purposes. They had to work at finding "reasons" to turn in their neighbors.

Immigration agents appeared to investigate the ancient Asian man who shuffled harmlessly around the complex, the world his children had brought him to clearly being a far different place than the one to which he was accustomed. Social Services showed up to investigate the loving parents of the well behaved children in the complex, while the informant's own undisciplined savages ran rampant. And of course, the informants "invited" the drug cops to trespass in my private backyard in order to claim they had probable cause for a search warrant to invade my home. The drug cops still had to lie about what they claimed to have observed from the private backyard of my unit, but their lies were now apparently convincing enough "for government work".

The fact that basic principles, as well as established legal precedent, prohibited the drug cops from trespassing in my private backyard didn't matter. They arbitrarily decided that permission from a hostile neighbor was sufficient to void all of my rights if it also served their purposes. (When I later contested this obviously illegal trespass, the prosecutor got around the legal technicalities through a last minute change of judges. Just when the hearing was about to start, the judge who had had time to read through all the case law my attorney had submitted, was replaced with one who only spent a 20 minutes recess scanning the huge volume of distracting boilerplate filed by the police, before arbitrarily "deciding" to ignore reality and legal precedent. Turns out the law is meaningless when it gets in the way of law enforcement.)

The news that the Health Division had finally issued the first OMMA card came out on a Friday evening. The next Monday morning a heavily armed gang of police arrived at my door with a search warrant, intending to seize everything of value they could find. They'd gone through the pretense of knocking, and were eagerly preparing to engage in a bit of gratuitous property damage with their battering ram, when I surprised them by answering the door. They hadn't expected me to be home, and were looking forward to their usual orgy of unrestrained pillaging.

Apparently the all too obvious incongruity of their paramilitary assault, coupled with my repeated warnings that my computers were the property of a corporation, and that interfering with them would cause substantial harm to innocent third party businesses across the country, was enough to give them pause. The fact that well-aged used computers have little resale value, and might actually cost the police money to dispose of, was probably a major factor in my favor as well. The lead cop did comment that it was obvious I wasn't dealing drugs - that I'd have a lot better stuff if I'd been dealing instead of trying to earn an honest living. In the end they were satisfied to just trash my home and seize my medication.

A perversely fortuitous side effect of the government's interference in my ADD medication, was to remind me of a secondary condition that did qualify under the existing four covered condition. I have a congenitally deformed vertebrae in my back. Having always had this condition, I long ago adapted my lifestyle to accommodate it. I don't think much about having to elevate my desk because I can only work standing up, and avoiding the kinds of bending and lifting activities that aggravate my condition. Most of all, the chronic disabling pain I would otherwise suffer responds quite well to the same medication as my ADD.

After the drug cops seized my ADD medication, my chronic back pain rapidly returned. Every other pain medication I've tried either fails to work or causes violent nausea. It had previously seemed akin to cheating to apply for an OMMA card under my secondary condition, but having experienced first hand the gross dishonesty of the prohibitionists, I eventually realized that the war on some drugs and all of our rights was no place for ethical principles or moral hair-splitting. So technically my OMMA card is for my physical back pain, while I continue to consider my use of medicinal cannabis to be primarily to treat my ADD. As they say, the truth is always the first victim of tyrants.

It turned out to be a fortuitous accident that I hadn't been able to apply for a card before the drug cops invaded my home. A conviction on a drug offense - especially one involving cannabis - is grounds for revoking the patient's card. Since I didn't have a card at the time of my "first" alleged crime, the outcome of this first persecution didn't compromise the card I obtained later. Had I been convicted in their latest assault on reason, I've little doubt that my persecutors would have used it revoke my card, and deny me the only medication that allows me to write a coherent record of my ordeal.

The informants moved out suddenly, afraid their treachery and lies had become known. They apparently expected the far more civilized residents of the complex to do to them what they would have done if the situation had been reversed. It must be terrifying to know that you've earned the worst possible torment imaginable, and that only the superior nature of your victims stands between you and the fate you so rightly deserve.

The informant's unit had been totally renovated before they moved in, but they'd caused so much damage in just a few short years that all of the brand new fixtures and appliances had to be replaced - including the bathroom sub-flooring. However, I have to admit, even the weeks of hammering and sawing that followed were preferable to the incessant din of loud music and screaming voices that had previously emanated from that unit. In stark contrast, my unit was renovated before their's, and even after living here 10 years, with the exception of predictable wear on the carpet, the fixtures and appliances in my unit still work as well as the day I moved in. But then I'm the deviant drug user, so my behavior is expected to be different than the fine upstanding citizens who turned me in...

After enough time had passed that I was starting to wonder if a glimmer of rationality had intruded in the minds of the prohibitionists, and they'd decided to just let it drop, I found out the grand jury had handed down a secret indictment. The intention of secret indictments is to set up the accused for the maximum disruption of his life, and an intimidating display of police power. The objective is to arrest the accused "out of the blue" when he is least prepared, typically during a "routine" traffic stop. This tactic allows the police to impound and search the accused's car, interfere with whatever he was doing at the time, and in general make a public spectacle of their coercive power. In the process they hope to discover additional charges they can bring against the accused.

My attorney advised me to beat them to the punch and surrender at the county jail. The first time I tried, I had to stand around for over an hour before being informed that they couldn't find the paperwork. I had to come back again a week later.

I was "booked" at 8:00 AM, deprived of my shoe laces and possessions, and instructed that any failure to obey the guards would result in draconian punishment far more severe than the original charges. Even though I'd appeared voluntarily, and wasn't being charged with a violent crime, I was repeatedly handcuffed and arbitrarily moved from holding cell to holding cell in an obvious exercise in intimidation. My attorney had already negotiated my release on personal recognizance by noon, but the police continued to detain me for another eight hours just to demonstrate their absolute contempt for the rights of "innocent until proven guilty" citizens.

This was just the beginning of nearly three years of arbitrary court appearances whose sole functional purpose was to demonstrate the court's ability to demand my appearance, and to maximize the cost of defending my right to use a necessary medication. I have no doubt that the prosecutor hoped I would miss one of the dozens of otherwise meaningless appearances, since that would have allowed additional charges to be brought against me.

I got to observe a lot of "legal process" that would offend any rational individual who understands the principles of the constitution while waiting to be told yet again that nothing was going to happen on my case. One of the most outrageous abuses I observing was a hearing to dismiss the charges against a defendant.

There wasn't any valid reason why the defendant had to be there - after all, the sole purpose of the hearing was to tell him that the court was admitting that the charges against him had been a mistake. But his failure to appear on demand offended the power of the court. His attorney pointed out that the defendant had dutifully appeared for every previous hearing on his case, and his absence this time could only be accidental or due to circumstances beyond his control. The judge didn't care - he charged the missing defendant with failure to appear, and swore out a warrant for his arrest. After all, even though this citizen was innocent of the original charges, he had now committed an offense against the process, and failed to show properly subservient respect for the omnipotent power of the court. Worst of all, he'd deprived the court of this last opportunity to arbitrarily disrupt his life and gratuitously waste even more of his time. Such an egregious offense against the egos of those who claim to represent justice would not go unpunished.

The prosecution endlessly delayed my trial for their own convenience. The real reason for all the delays became clear when after nearly three years of rescheduled trial dates, they finally hit on a date when my doctor wouldn't be able to testify. It suddenly became imperative that my case go immediately to trial. No more delays would be tolerated - especially since this time I needed the continence.

The prosecutor had consistently refused to acknowledge that my use was medicinal - or even that I intended to mount a medical defense. Her intention was to lie to the jury that I was solely a recreational drug user. A common tactic used to undermine medical defenses has been for judges to simply deny defendants the right to inform the jury of their medical condition, based on the willingness of the medical establishment to lie that cannabis has no legitimate medicinal value in spite of over 2000 years of evidence to the contrary. The Federal courts still commonly resort to this tactic in order to convict patients and activists in states that have legalized medical marijuana.

This obvious violation of the rights of defendants got more difficult for Oregon courts when the citizens passed OMMA and signaled their rejection of the obvious lies of the prohibitionists. It's now a bit too obvious of a stretch for a state or county judge to simply deny the jury the right to know that the citizens of Oregon have overwhelmingly declared marijuana to be a legitimate medicine. However, it's still nearly impossible to mount a convincing medical defense without expert medical testimony - especially since there are still so many credentialed prohibitionists willing to lie under oath that reality doesn't exist.

The lawyers cooked up a deal at the last minute that violated all reason and logic, but which offered a "lesser of evils" alternative to trusting my fate to a dozen typical constitutionally illiterate, and bill-of-rights hostile Washington county jurors. In essence, the deal was that if I agreed to plead no contest to a crime I didn't commit, the government would sentence me to continuing to commit the same "crime" I was originally prosecuted for committing. My former "crime" would be magically transformed into a legitimate medical treatment by being stamped "approved" by some name-less, face-less, brain-less bureaucrat. And if the official application of the full coercive violence of the state could somehow intimidate me into doing for just three more years exactly what I'd been doing as an expression of free will for the previous 30+ years, the entire sordid perversion of justice could be expunged from the record.

The reason for this charade was that the victim-less crimes with which I was originally charged were "hard" felonies that were exempt from back-room deals, and couldn't be expunged. Only crimes against others can be wheeled and dealed, and ultimately forgotten.

The final plea bargain worked out slightly better than expected. In return for pleading no contest to a single charge of "delivery for consideration", the original pair of "hard" felonies for manufacturing and possessing medication for personal use (with a potential sentence of 30 years and $300,000 in fines) were dismissed. I was sentenced to two years "bench" (unsupervised) probation, and a $200 fine (plus $105 in fees and $20 in court costs).

Apparently I'd been selling my medication to myself. Even worse, I was apparently reluctant to divulge just what I'd been charging myself - my imagination was absolutely shocked by the possibilities....

The trial took about an hour in the court room - most of which was spent checking that I understood the legal slight of hand that was being performed, and that I would play along with the fiction that a plea bargain isn't a promise of an expected outcome in return for not requiring the prosecution to prove their charges.

Some period of supervised probation before being put on bench probation, restrictions on consuming alcohol, at least the drug abuse interview part of the "standard drug package", and a 6 month driver's license suspension, are commonly imposed in drug prohibition plea bargains.

I managed to get through the entire hour without drooling, leering at the clerks, or going on a homicidal rampage. This must have convinced the judge that the "standard" probation restrictions would waste even more of the county's time and money than they would mine, so he dropped all but the token fine and paperwork probation. The "criminal lifestyle" I've maintained for the all of my productive life was specifically approved as a condition of my probation, so I was literally sentenced to continue living and working just as I was doing before being so rudely distracted by the county's injustice system nearly three years before.