… and her mom.
One of the toughest things in the world of drugs and drug policy is the parent who loses a child to drug overdose.
I feel for them, and their feelings of disbelief and rage. I can understand their immediate reaction to want whoever did this to their child to be punished immediately and severely, and to push for tougher laws to make sure other parents won’t have to go through this.
They are not in a state of mind to be able to listen to the realities about prohibition’s failures or to handle the counter-intuitive truth that reducing punitive laws can actually make children safer.
And this makes What Martha Did Next all the more powerful. It is the story of Martha, who spent too brief a time on this earth, but also her mother, who was determined to respond in a way that would make a real difference.
I have spent many hours painstakingly deliberating about drug policy since my precious girl died. It was important to me that when I felt ready to disclose my views, they were well constructed and more informed, rather than knee-jerk and too immersed within the wrath of the initial raw emotion I felt in the early days.
(Note: click on the 3 lines at the top right of that site to see the rest, including a link to info on the book Martha’s mom has written.)
This is just a really really sad story. It seems almost insensitive to say that I agree with you completely. I feel so bad for the mother in this situation however it’s the strict drug policy that got us here in the first place. No regulation means complete chaos on the streets and that means we have heroin overdoses, because there is fentanyl in the heroin, and many other similar situations where drugs are not regulated at all and so you don’t know what you are getting.
Telling someone they can’t take ecstasy doesn’t work. They are going to find a way to do it with or without permission. The question is do we want to have a better handle on the safety of drugs released to the public or not? In my opinion I would rather have safer drug use than outlawed drug use.
The simplest truth is using pictures because as they say a picture is worth a thousand words,,,find a picture of a methamphetamine addict that was used in the era documentaries and reports in the 1060’s when meth was produced by drug companies and then look at one addicted to what is on the streets.
That is the product of prohibition and it can only get worse when the enforcers control the materials used to produce the meth..
Information is the single greatest asset in any war. No wonder the DEA tries to control it so tightly, sway it in their favor… it is too dangerous for people to know the truth.
Too dangerous for the survival of an agency that has no business existing in the first place. So long as people die tragically, they have jobs. They can rationalize their existence.
Any agency that profits from ongoing war profits from death. I say when we’re done with this drug war bit, we go after the health insurance companies. As far as I’m concerned, you should be able to get anything with instructions and of reasonable purity — and if something goes wrong you should be able to get support.
I’ll buy this book.
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Meet Lydia, or more accurately the memory of Lydia: