If you smoke a little weed, does it mean you’re not a hero?
Scott West (Photo by Wiley Hendrix, Branson Daily News)
Hello, soldier. Hello, Scott West of Branson, Mo. Thanks for your service.
We read about you in Phillip O’Connor’s story in the Sunday Post-Dispatch. Thanks for enlisting in the Army, especially back in 2004. By then the Iraq war had gone to hell, and people weren’t exactly beating down the doors of the recruiting stations. But you signed up, so thanks for that.
They tagged you 11-Bravo, infantryman, and assigned you to the Third Infantry Division, the same outfit that had led the Thunder Run into Baghdad. That was in April of ’03, when the whole deal was going to be a cakewalk. By December of ’04, when you showed up, the bloom was off that rose and the 3rd ID was mounting up for a second tour.
If you hadn’t gotten hungry for some hot chow and volunteered for that run to Camp Anaconda, you might have pulled the whole tour. You were 20 years old and had been in country almost a year when, on Dec. 16, 2005, you drove your Humvee over an IED, and it blew off both your legs.
By the way, have we thanked you for your service lately?
Fourteen months later, you finally get out of Walter Reed Army Medical Center and go home to Missouri. You buy a condo with your insurance money and everybody calls you a hero. The thing they don’t know is that you’re smoking a lot of weed.
A lot of guys do. They come from Iraq, torn up inside and out, and they start self-medicating. Most guys don’t, but a lot of guys do. One in five, even those in one piece, comes home with post-traumatic stress disorder. They drink, they smoke dope, they beat their wives and girlfriends. A thousand vets a month try to kill themselves, the Department of Veterans Affairs finally acknowledged last year, after trying to hush it up.
The cop who pulled you and two buddies over in Taney County in October 2007 said you told him there was medical marijuana under the seat of your new pickup. Getting your legs blown off and undergoing 86 surgeries, a guy might need some medical marijuana, but Missouri doesn’t allow it. Turned out there was 12 ounces of pot, which is like a coffee can full.
On Dec. 11, 2008, you cop to felony possession with intent to distribute. You get probation and avoid prison. And maybe your luck starts to turn. You’ve met a nice girl, gotten engaged and, just before Christmas, you find out that a charity outfit in Massachusetts called Homes for Our Troops, along with Missouri Credit Union Association, has accepted your application for a free custom-built home, all tricked out for a hero with no legs.
But whoa. A reporter for the Springfield, Mo., News-Leader gets a tip from someone that you’ve pleaded guilty to a felony — thanks for your service, but someone dropped a dime on you, anyway — and the reporter calls up the outfit in Massachusetts and they change their minds. The deal is, if you’ve committed a felony, they can back out of the deal.
Hey, there are plenty of Iraq war vets with traumatic wounds. The donors — philanthropies, suppliers, contractors and so forth — need some assurance. It’s fine you’re a hero, but God forbid you’ve got, you know, weaknesses. You can’t be selling weed. You can’t be making any mistakes. You get your legs blown off, you should take it like a man. We know we certainly would, especially if it had been in a noble cause like the Iraq War.
Anyway, Scott. You’ve got the condo. You’ve got disability payments. You’ve got a job delivering pizzas for Domino’s, so you’re probably picking up some nice tips, walking to the door on your artificial legs. Your country is proud of you. Thanks for your service.
Barack Obama smoked marijuana and snorted cocaine…so why is it okay for our President to do drugs but it’s not okay for a wounded vet?
Americans are so selectively puritanical. Even the Catholic Church allows marijuana use as licit, even for purely recreational purposes, so long as one does not smoke so much or so often as to destroy one’s reason or seriously endanger one’s health.
So where do we draw the line?
If this guy came home and joined the Klan would you be telling your “and then just screw ONE dog…” story on his behalf? Would you be telling the story this way if it were POTUS # 43, a repugnican under-accusation of possibly having admitted to a “spritual advisor” he’d smoked pot, or is this more to do with trying to make the current sitting President’s recreational pharmaceutical indiscretions look less odious than in really trying to point-up an injustice in regard to this wounded War Veteran?
So tell us, Oh Great Sachem: where is the line drawn? Let’s say the man really was distributing the drugs, didn’t just have an amount for personal use which can be legally described as “intent to distribute”–is he still a wrongly put-upon hero? What if it was meth and he was cooking it in a subdivision instead of herb?
What if we could trace that particular batch of “bud” back to it’s origins and we found that particular batch had several killings associated with it’s production and distribution before those guys eventually bought it and partially paid for a murder or two?
Sad to say, but in the current climate of insane hysteria about recreational drug use and until that hysteria is converted to a policy stemming from rational thought, the rules are the rules. First you do the “heavy lifting” to change the underlying situation, then you get rid of the type of injustice you claim to be pointing out.
The sad fact is the paradigm is not going to shift in favor of rationality on this issue–too many variances from our constitutional rights have been passed out to too many institutions in our society whose job is made too much more easy in the name of saving us all from working next to a pothead. And we all know how much we’d hate to be struggling away at a job we do and ought to hate knowing there’s some joker who’s enjoying the heck out of the same boring job just because he “cheated” and smoked some dope. That is so WRONG!
OBTW: I used to work for a pot-head. Nobody in the company could keep up with that guy painting. Customers used to stand on the ground watching him paint with their jaws gaping in amazement at what they were seeing. It was just pot–usually a one-hitter in the morning and another at lunch. He saved the boozing for after-work.
This evil weed-smoking devil employed a number of other people gainfully, fed, clothed and housed his children by the sweat of his and our brows, and yes he was a veteran. One time he was supposed to watch his church xmas-tree lot. He needed to bid a job and had one of my co-workers fill in for him. The people in charge of the lot stopped by to check up on him and found “my boss” smoking a joint. His response, even though it hadn’t been him and even though he would not have done that while watching their lot, was to take responsibility for it even though a lot of his custom depended on word-of-mouth low-level “networking” within that parish.
If you could read his, thank your NEA-hack public school teacher.
If you were reading this in English, thank a Veteran.
If you found it even remotely entertaining, informative and well-put, thank Charles “Chuck” Norman. You are sorely missed in this community Chuck!
Great column. Could it be any more obvious that we need to lighten up our laws on marijuana? In fact, if we legalized it, that would cut of hundreds of billions of dollars that the Mexican mafia gets every year. It seems like many people are OK with the idea; after all, legalizing marijuana is now more popular than Republicans: http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=11742 . Now if only our politicians had enough guts to do touch the issue!
Marijuana–not always–CAN lead to drug abuse. It happens. Period. That’s why it’s illegal. Doesn’t matter you served your country, or that you’re a great Mom, or great son. Countless families have been destroyed by drug addiction. It’s a fact. Waiting lists for rehab, people cycling in and out of rehab, wasted lives, broken hearts and pocketbooks. The toll is immeasurable. I’ve seen these problems firsthand and weed is not the answer. Let’s demand better medical/mental facilities for our soldiers. Smoking pot just covers it. No different than drinking– and what happens then when he gets behind the wheel? Drunk drivers kill how many people? But if a drunk driver kills a family, and he’s a vet and served his country, it’s OK? These guys need help. Period. And making pot legal is not the answer. Moot point.
Excuse me, but I think we’re missing the point here. This is not about legalizing marijuana. This is not about Veteran’s services. This is about promises made and promises broken. Mr. West promised to defend his country. He did so honorably. “Homes for Our Troops” and the Missouri Credit Union Association promised Mr. West a “custom-built home” in return for his service and sacrifice. They welched. Also, if there is a version of the Hippocratic Oath for the media, then our Springfield News-Leader journalist has violated it. If there is no such oath, then there should be. Something about the press as an impartial observer? This reporter did something far worse than betray bias in his/her reporting, the reporter actually affected the outcome. There will be a special place in Hell for this hyena. Think of this the next time your ready to complain about the liberal media.
I love it when minko, horrigan and the other commies in the PD Editorial sess pool lecture us and make up statements like “Iraq wasn’t a noble cause.” It was pretty noble for the guys that fought and died or were injured in it. But that’s typical PD style, piss on the graves and wounds of soldiers by making easy statements like that from the comfort of their cushy office.
I don’t get it? Just because this brave soldier was injured in an American war, does that mean we owe him a job, a salary, and the ability to break whatever laws the PD thinks aren’t just? Is that how those veterans that returned from D-Day or Iwo Jima were treated? No they picked themselves up, said the world doesn’t owe them a damn thing, and went to work taking care of their lives and families (with reasonable assistance i.e. the GI bill). But according to the PD, if you fought in “George Bush’s evil and unnoble” war, then you are owed everything and can break whatever laws you feel like.
I don’t have a problem with people smoking weed,but the private organization that was going to provide money for him to have a new home did.This is not a government run agency.They have rights too.They get to pick and choose who to give money/homes to.I’ll bet there was an application form that he filled out to request their assistance. Was there a question about felony convictions and if so,what was his answer?It’s THEIR charity!They give to people who meet THEIR criteria!Nuff said.
A FELONY??? Who is the piece of crap Prosecutor that demanded a felony plea? I promise you this… if it had been one of his Political Friends or their kids this would have been long gone buried. This country is loosing it’s Honor more and more every day.
This guy has no right to a free house. But that doesn’t mean prohibition of marijuana isn’t idiotic. It’s less harmful than alcohol. Legalize it and tax it.