Hospitals use drug tests that return false positives from poppy seed bagels, decongestants and Zantac. Yet newborns are being taken from parents based on the results.
If it wasn’t for my mother and father letting me move back home afterwards at the age of 25, I’d have been homeless and I’m not sure I’d have gotten back on my feet. I was in a city away from home and nobody could get to my apartment to get my stuff. Eventually I got evicted and they tossed my shit on the side of the road there. I lost everything. Everything. Clothes, CDs, photos of friends and family and once in a lifetime experiences I was just blindly lucky to take part in. I left jail with 25-ish dollars in leftover commissary money, the clothes I got booked in wearing, and my ‘hard time’ cup. My hard time cup was a cheap plastic mug that I had taken a pocket calendar and glued to the cup. I marked my days with it. I stared at that cup a lot. They lost my wallet somehow so I couldn’t cash the check for 25 bucks to get food. Slept at the greyhound station while I was waiting for someone to pick me up and take me back to my folks to start over.
The original arrest was an overzealous Tx State Trooper who threatened me w mace to make me exit the car to begin with. He found a dime bags worth of Mexican brick weed in my sock because that’s where I tried stashing it when I panicked.
I’ve been homeless. I’ve squatted in the fifth ward in New Orleans. I’ve ridden trains. I’ve dumpster dived to eat more times than I can recall. But leaving jail with nothing, nobody, no way, and nowhere to go was more demeaning than being ignored for being homeless and dirty.
The war on drugs is a disgusting excuse to keep poor folks poor, to break apart families, to permanently disrupt lives and make slaves of those caught up in its trappings. Richard Nixon grave needs a fresh sprinkling of piss.
If it wasn’t for my mother and father letting me move back home afterwards at the age of 25, I’d have been homeless and I’m not sure I’d have gotten back on my feet. I was in a city away from home and nobody could get to my apartment to get my stuff. Eventually I got evicted and they tossed my shit on the side of the road there. I lost everything. Everything. Clothes, CDs, photos of friends and family and once in a lifetime experiences I was just blindly lucky to take part in. I left jail with 25-ish dollars in leftover commissary money, the clothes I got booked in wearing, and my ‘hard time’ cup. My hard time cup was a cheap plastic mug that I had taken a pocket calendar and glued to the cup. I marked my days with it. I stared at that cup a lot. They lost my wallet somehow so I couldn’t cash the check for 25 bucks to get food. Slept at the greyhound station while I was waiting for someone to pick me up and take me back to my folks to start over.
The original arrest was an overzealous Tx State Trooper who threatened me w mace to make me exit the car to begin with. He found a dime bags worth of Mexican brick weed in my sock because that’s where I tried stashing it when I panicked.
I’ve been homeless. I’ve squatted in the fifth ward in New Orleans. I’ve ridden trains. I’ve dumpster dived to eat more times than I can recall. But leaving jail with nothing, nobody, no way, and nowhere to go was more demeaning than being ignored for being homeless and dirty.
The war on drugs is a disgusting excuse to keep poor folks poor, to break apart families, to permanently disrupt lives and make slaves of those caught up in its trappings. Richard Nixon grave needs a fresh sprinkling of piss.