Editorial: Needless Danger http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/326/needless.shtml Countless drug war tragedies transpire every day across our country. One from the most unfortunate variety was reported in San Jose this week, the sad case of Rudy Cardenas, 43-year old father of five, unarmed but gunned down by a narcotics officer looking for another man. As usual, the police and their allies have quickly trotted out their mouthpieces to slander the dead. They should be ashamed of themselves. It's true that even in situations such as this one, the killer by law must be considered innocent until proven guilty. But that doesn't justify the heaping of grave insult on top of deadly injury. An attorney general's spokesman bizarrely claimed that Cardenas "wasn't the wrong man" -- even though police weren't looking for him -- and justified the shooting by saying that Cardenas was running away. I don't consider running away from police officers to be a justification for the use by the police of deadly force, at least not in and of itself. Running away is a natural and time honored response to danger, and Cardenas was quite correct in his perception that the police officers approaching did represent danger. They killed him, after all; it doesn't get much more dangerous than that. Cardenas' death suggests that running away from police may be an inadvisable strategy. But people don't always think clearly when confronted with threats to life and limb. To blame an unarmed man for his own death by firearm, because he was running away from the person who moments later would end his life, and to cast such blame in the media no less, is morally repugnant. One of the strongest critics of the drug war is a former police chief of Cardenas' own city, Dr. Joseph McNamara, now of Stanford University's Hoover Institution. McNamara blames these kinds of killings on drug policies, and he doesn't mince words. In a 2000 article on police killings published in this newsletter (http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/156/policeshootings.shtml), McNamara opined, "This is a real ethical issue, and evidence of the kind of callousness abroad in the land. It results from the emotionalism surrounding drugs and the whole war mentality that goes along with it. Things happen in war that we would not excuse in a civilized society." He also predicted more fatalities, one of the reasons being the nature of the underground drug trade created by prohibition. "These shootings are inevitable," McNamara said. "Police are doing military operations in drug raids, not because dealers are anxious to shoot it out, but because dealers are armed to avoid being robbed." If the past is any guide, Cardenas and his family are unlikely to get justice, at least not in a criminal court. But that's not a reason not to try. Nor, however, should the desire to hold his killers accountable and have their possible culpability examined by an impartial court of law, be allowed to distract from discussion of the root causes: the political and law enforcement leaders who've encouraged the paramilitarization of policing, and the system itself -- drug prohibition -- that creates such conflicts in the first place.
Predictably, the police just start to disparage the victim. When are we going to step in and put a stop to the ever escalating violence in our society?
Well, that one didn't generate any debate so I will assume that everyone finds that as big a tragedy as I do. Here is another article that I will post here so as not to have too many prohibition threads cluttering things up. This one would have gotten the title "Needless Pain" if I had started a thread. The War on Patients by Roxan Lucan Every time I read about doctors being arrested for prescribing pain medications all I can do is shake my head. As an RN, I see the insanity of the Drug War at work on a daily basis. I think this must be the first time in history that the sick and dying were denied pain medication. In fact, people have been so brainwashed that even cancer patients are sometimes afraid to accept medication – assuming they have a doctor who dares to prescribe. Every day I see 90-year-old patients, with both feet in the grave, protesting that they are afraid they’ll become addicts. As if they were going to run out and mug someone with their walker! When I was in nursing school, I was shocked to see the cruelty with which cancer patients were treated. Not only did they receive inadequate medication, the nurses regarded them as complainers. They were not really sick but merely whining in order to receive drugs and undue attention. I was assigned to a woman dying of bone cancer, and told it was my job to make her get up and do her "activities of daily living" as they call washing and dressing yourself. She cried at the slightest touch, and even my untrained eye could see that she had a mountain range of tumors protruding from areas of her chest where protrusions were not supposed to exist. Worse yet, when her regular nurse came with her morphine pill, she employed the meanest bait and switch I have ever seen. She showed the patient her MS Contin briefly, then took it away and shoved a giant laxative pill at her, saying, "Isn’t THIS the pill you want? You don’t want that other pill do you? It’s making you feel worse…." I see this sort of thing all the time. Patients are offered blood pressure medications, anti-psychotics – anything that might shut them up and keep them quiet rather than an actual pain medication. Even more bizarre, nurses are pressured to refrain from giving the medications that are prescribed. For instance, if a patient has something like Percocet ordered PRN (as needed) every four hours, and she gives it every four hours, she may very well be fired for handing out too many pills! The MAR (medication administration record) is carefully scrutinized to make sure nurses are not giving out too many pain medications or sleeping pills. Once I saw the same unopened bottle of Roxanol (morphine) passed along for a week, each shift proudly announcing they had not opened it and expected the next wouldn’t either! The patient died quietly, never having received a drop of relief, and the nurses were congratulated on the good job they did, preventing another addict from being created…. Nursing homes are especially bad where pain control is concerned; there seems to be a general consensus that the elderly don’t feel pain. The fate of my favorite patient, Helene, still haunts me. A lively 70-year-old lady, I always tried to carve out some time to spend visiting with her. She had untreated uterine cancer and diabetes, but it was a broken hip that had brought her to our institution. Although the cancer didn’t seem to be causing her much distress, like many diabetics she was having problems with her circulation and developing gangrene on both feet. I tried to get the doctor to pay attention; he was uninterested. Still, she was receiving some pain medication – a lone Percocet every four hours, which she always asked for on the dot. The day before she was finally scheduled for surgery, she confided that she was terrified of losing her toes. I tried to console her, but I thought she would be lucky if that’s all she lost. It was worse than I expected, however. Two weeks later Helene came back…legless. After multiple ‘salami surgeries’ they had successfully removed both legs almost at the hip. She had decompensated mentally, and was now confused at times. She wept and screamed, demanding to be allowed to die. Every morning, the nurses' aides got her out of bed and sat her in the wheelchair on those fresh stumps, and there she remained for the day. When I protested, I was told that was "Orders" and nothing could be done. If that was not bad enough, her doctor had decided she was an "addict" and discontinued all pain medication while she was in the hospital. Now, she was receiving nothing, so she could "recover from her addiction" as he put it. All night, she shook the bed rails and screamed, "PAIN! PAIN! Help me, oh please let me die." Her roommate requested to be moved but there were no empty beds. One day the aides said they saw something ‘strange’ and asked me to examine Helene. I was horrified to see a tumor the size of a baby’s head crowning, protruding from her vagina. Once again, I tried to get her more medication, but the doctor was adamant – she was a manipulative addict who would do anything for a pill. Her son, who appeared to be mentally ill, agreed, as did the nursing staff. I was overruled. Finally, after six weeks of sheer agony, she expired. When I saw her doctor, I couldn’t help saying sarcastically, "Well, Helene finally died. Gee, I’m surprised she lasted so long." He replied proudly, "That’s because I took care of her!" I just looked at him and walked away. February 28, 2004 Roxan Lucan [send her mail], a magna c*m laude graduate of Temple University and Hahnemann University, has been a psychiatric nurse, and now works in nursing homes. Copyright © 2004 LewRockwell.com
Andy, I'm with you on the so called drug war. Refresh my memory, however. Don't you work as a drug counselor or something?
This is a disgusting example of how short-sighted and inhumane public policy can aggravate the problems caused by individuals who are already short-sighted and inhumane. In a just world, that doctor would be working as a fry cook at McDonald's, not making $200,000 per year and driving a luxury SUV. Seriously, even if the woman was a raging drug addict - she was destroyed completely and dying miserably, why not let her escape the pain of the last few weeks of life by popping a few pills? It's not like she was going to be driving a school bus or leading U.S. troops into battle. She was a ruined and decaying woman locked away in a nursing home.
Did at one point. Then I found out that a B.A. in psychology plus a buck would get me a cup of coffee at Denny's. I continue to work with recovering addicts, but I do it in my personal time and work in IT so that I can maintain at least a minimum standard of living.
Andy, that is interesting. One thing I notice about the bbs, is that though it is diverse in many ways, there is an almost total lack of people who have spent any significant time in their work life in the social service area, which tends to give you a differnet perspective towards these folks and their problems. My guess is that most people in the social services don't tend to be fanatical bb fans.
Interesting biased story. They make it sound like he was running from a rogue plainclothes officer on foot. They did leave out the fact he was leaving the home of a wanted fugitive, and when police attempted to stop him with police cars, he led them a 15 minute car chase through a populated area. The fugitive they were seeking was origionally put in jail for assault with a deadly weapon, and had a string of prior assults -- not "just" drug offenses. They were seeking him because he skipped out on Parole. I'm not saying that the shooting was justified -- it should, and will, be investigated. But he shouldn't be the posterchild for the "end the war on drugs" campaign.
Link? It is not the "poster child" to be certain (see the book "Shattered Lives" http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...f=sr_1_2/002-6264958-9501665?v=glance&s=books for "poster children"), but it is indicative of the culture we live in. We are in a culture where the police have been militarized to the point that they have to shoot first because of the untenable situation we have placed them in. We can reduce the violence inherent in the system AND eliminate 99% of the deaths due to drugs virtually overnight. Most importantly, we can reduce the number of young people who use drugs by using a healthcare and education approach to the issue of drug use in our society. It should be obvious after nearly a century of failure that the criminal justice system cannot effectively deal with this issue.
