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SHORT (TRUE) STORY
Stop the
Drug War! Steve Hensley and the Great Speckled Bird
John R. Guthrie
It was Steve Hensley’s mother, Pauline, who came to
my clinic that day; she was a countrywoman, her hands were chapped and
roughened by the weather.
“Doc, it’s about my boy,
Steve. He’s 28. He’s been seven years in Central Prison, for drugs. He took
sick, over a year ago. They said ‘he’s just looking for drugs.’ But they
finally took him outside the prison, to a doctor. The doctor said Steve had
kidney cancer, and wouldn’t last six months.
“Warden Moore said, ‘You can take him home to die, but you gotta
get a Doc’ll take care of him. I can’t have that cost
coming back on the prison.’ Doc, would you sign papers to take care of my
Steve?”
I had a motorcycle then,
1100 cc Honda Shadow, in candy-apple-red. I’d ride out through the foothills of
The first time I saw
Steve there, he sat on the front porch. He was skinny, pale as a sheet, but he
was grinning. He’d traded those prison blues for a shirt of faded plaid. His
jeans had holes like saucers at the knees. He played his guitar for us, and
sang his favorite song; “The Great Speckled Bird.”
His death wasn’t easy.
It was Pauline who fed him when he became too weak to feed himself, and brought
him water when he thirsted, and in those dreadful final days, it was his Mama
who cleaned him when he lost control of his bowels and bladder.
When I made the final
call, his parents stood and wept silently as I checked him over, then performed
that final dread and tender mercy, closing his eyelids with two fingers and snugging the covers up again.
At his funeral in a
little country church, the sinners moaned as the preacher proclaimed that Steve
had led a worthless, wasted life, and what a shame it was to also spend
eternity burning in Hell. In the churchyard, the red dirt rattled onto the lid
of that gray coffin. Steve Hensley’s long sentence was done.
Though officials of the church and state thought him worthless, his friends and family had loved Steve anyway. He’d brought us all joy and celebration when he came home and played his guitar and sang about The Great Speckled Bird. His enthrallment to drugs was boundless tragedy, but he needed help, not the psychological, and physical torture that is imprisonment.
Drugs are bad. But the Drug War that imprisoned that young man is worse! We need to Stop the Drug War!
We now have 6 ˝ million people in prison or some extension thereof such as house arrest or supervised release in this country, more prisoners per capita the last time I checked than South Africa, than Russia, than North Korea, than Chile, than any country in the world with the possible exception of China. Land of the free? With 5% of the world’s population, we have 25% of the world’s prisoners, mostly low-level non-violent drug offenders. And for our ineffective and incredibly destructive Drug War and the related prison-industrial complex, we pay through the nose to the tune of $40 billion a year.
But drugs carry their own punishment! The solution for addiction doesn’t come from the barrel of a gun, from cages of steel, from chains to bind young limbs. It is a medical problem that has become cruelly, cynically politicized, and stands as metaphor for our fears of race, of the poor, of youth itself. Incidentally, drug abuse is over 2/3 a white phenomenon, but well over 2/3 of our prisoners are people of color. H. R. Halderman, once President Richard Nixon’s aide, reported that Nixon instituted the Drug War in 1971 as a way of “dealing with the race problem without being racist.” The Drug War: it’s Mr. Jim Crow, in a brand new suit of clothes. Yeah. Drugs are bad. President Jimmy Carter asserted that “we don’t want a solutions for the drug problem that is worse than the drugs themselves.” But the Drug War is worse. And the Drug War will stop. I don’t know how long the battle will last, and I know that as Dr. King said, “the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice!” And the day will come, in the matter of the brutish unreason of the Drug War that it will stop. And in that instance and in that matter, in the words of the Prophet Amos, justice will flow like the mighty waters, and righteousness like a river. We will have recognized that drug abuse is a complex medical and sociological problem, not amenable to knee-jerk, feel-good responses. And when that day of hope and reason comes, we can rejoice as we summon our lost, imprisoned children home for proper treatment, and welcome them, just as the prodigal son was so joyously welcomed so many millennia ago. And we can all hasten that day, that day of our redemption, by telling our elected representatives at every level, so many of whom in their lust for power have profited so greatly from this debacle, that Drugs are bad. The Drug War was worse!
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