Wasted Lives: The Pain of America's Pot War

About one morning a month is really, really bad. For 38-year-old John Precup, first diagnosed with multiple sclerosis 15 years ago, just the act of waking up can be a frightening adventure in pain and suffering. Most days he gets up feeling pretty much normal, but on those mornings he doesn't, it's ugly.

"I wake up sick as a dog, huffing, gagging, trying not to puke," he relates. "I never know when to expect it, but when it hits, it's pretty scary." Precup keeps two things by his bedside: a bucket, for when the nausea overcomes him, and a loaded pipe. Three or four puffs of marijuana, he says, and the change is almost immediate. Like magic, the retching and wooziness fades and his shaky equilibrium is restored.

The pot even gives him back his appetite; without it he loses all desire to eat and starts shedding weight at an alarming rate. When initially hospitalized back in '86, John remembers, he lost 15 pounds in 10 days before discovering the miraculous power of marijuana. Even now, on his rough mornings, he can't even hold down even a sip of water until he's fired up a bowl, rendering the anti-nausea pills his doctor prescribes effectively useless.

"When I first tried the marijuana, I felt hunger for the first time since I felt sick. It was amazing. From that day forward, I've been a convert," he states, proudly pointing out that his weight's been stable ever since. In fact, though his disease has progressed to where he needs a walker around the house and a wheelchair outside it, with the marijuana at hand to control his symptoms, he considers himself to be in "pretty good health overall."

But the very drug that has given John Precup back his well being has also made him a criminal.

"I've never gone to jail myself, thank God," he says, "but I know plenty of people who have." It's a state of affairs that leaves him frustrated and outraged. Alcohol and tobacco are legal despite the harm they cause, while pot, with its medicinal and recreational properties, remains strictly illegal. In his eyes, this smacks of blatant hypocrisy. And it hits many other Americans that way, too.

From seriously ill patients who swear that marijuana is the only drug that effectively controls their symptoms, to college students stripped of financial aid for smoking a joint, to unlucky smokers and petty dealers caught up in the ever-expanding dragnet of our criminal justice system, America's relentless war on pot damages countless lives.

Drug war, race war

In 2000, 734,498 people were arrested across the United States for marijuana offenses, the largest yearly total in our nation's history, and more than twice the number busted in 1992. Fully 88 percent of those arrests were for simple possession, rather than manufacture or sale. Or to put it another way, new people are getting picked up at the rate of more than one every 45 seconds, and at any given time, 60,000 Americans are jailed on pot charges, more than one-quarter of those for possession.

Unsurprisingly, minorities are hit the hardest by this culture of criminalization. Blacks and Hispanics comprise 20 percent of the pot smokers in the U.S., but make up 58 percent of the marijuana offenders sentenced under federal law in 1997. "The system chews up blacks and other minorities at much greater rates," confirms Allan St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) Foundation in Washington, D.C., who points to a study based on government data that compares racial differences in pot busts around the country.

Nationally, African-Americans are two-and-a-half times more likely than whites to be arrested on a marijuana charge, and the difference is even higher in many urban areas, particularly in the North. As St. Pierre puts it, based on recent data, "it's the rust belt, running from Albany to Detroit, which comes out hottest as far as racial profiling goes."