AMARILLO JURY TAKES STEP TOWARD SANITY WITH POT CASE ACQUITTAL

"Never say, 'Of this water I will not drink.'"

Spanish proverb

I was gratified to see last week that an Amarillo man was acquitted
on a charge of possessing marijuana.

Amazed, too.

Tim Stevens, who was arrested last October, is HIV positive and
suffers from cyclical vomiting syndrome. He uses the marijuana to
relieve the nausea. This "necessity defense" - that the need to
reduce the nausea was of greater importance than the law he broke -
was something even a local jury could accept, and from my point of
view they did the right thing.

I understand the visceral resistance many Americans have when anyone
advocates an end to the harsh treatment our society inflicts on those
who use illegal drugs. Those of us with children tend to look on
illegal drugs as a corrupting influence, and we tend to want our
children as far removed from such influences as we can get them.

But it seems to me we go way beyond this simple consideration with
our laws. It isn't enough to educate our children, to lead by
example, and to accept that some people will indulge drugs to a small
or large extent no matter what we do. We want to imprison anyone who
violates these laws. We want to punish anyone who produces or
delivers illegal drugs. We want to rip the plants from the ground and
salt the earth to eliminate even the "occasion of sin." And we want
to cloak our extremism in moral authority, science, historical myth
and patriotic fables.

In doing so, we violate the very morality we seek to establish.

The simple truth of the matter is that all of us make our own
decisions about drug use and abuse. Some people never display even
the urge to experiment with illegal drugs. The vast majority who try
any kind of drug - legal or illegal, recreational or therapeutic -
eventually reach a personal accommodation that permits them to live
otherwise productive and honorable lives. Some get hooked and stay
that way, using chemicals to avoid a reality that is just too painful
or difficult to address without altering their state of consciousness.

And some of us who don't like drugs and wouldn't use them under any
normal circumstance will, nevertheless, take them when the pain is bad enough.

Our society has decided that there are "good drugs" - manufactured by
pharmaceutical companies and distributed in everything from grocery
stores to the Internet - and "bad drugs." These are value judgments
which are, more often than not, the product of prejudice. Those who
use marijuana know it isn't the killer or even the "gateway" that we
claim it is, but we all rally around the fiction as though it were
gospel and we punish people who use it as though progress toward a
more pure society can be measured by how many users are behind bars.

But even as we prosecute the offenders and celebrate each victory in
court with a martini at Marty's we are also denying compassion and
justice to some who can only live a tolerable existence by using the
substances we insist they cannot have.

Let's forget for a moment the recreational aspect. Let's even ignore
for a moment the incredibly obtuse commentary from the medical
community that marijuana lacks "efficacy." Let us, instead,
concentrate on the fact that all forms of relief are subjective and
that what we have on this planet is all we have. The chemicals we
hate so deeply may yet prove to be useful enough to leave alone, and
our challenge is to figure out how to use these resources and not to
destroy them.

We seem to forget that recreation is a legitimate pastime in our
culture. But before we even arrive at the argument favoring
recreational use of illegal drugs we must first listen to the
arguments from those who insist that a joint does them more direct
benefit and less direct harm than anything else we've figured out how
to make. These arguments may well be right. And no one alive today
can say with certainty that come tomorrow we, ourselves, will not be
the ones defending ourselves before a pitiless court unwilling or
unable to put itself in our shoes.

Amarillo is the last place on Earth I would expect to see a jury
render the kind of verdict we saw in Tim Stevens' case. But I commend
jurors for their courage and their open minds.

It was a small, but important, step toward social sanity.