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Brittney Griner’s Imprisonment Indicts Us All
What are we doing to each other?
Around the world, millions of people languish in jails and prisons for all sorts of crimes and violations of public codes of conduct.
One of them is a great basketball player, born in the United States named Brittney Griner.
Griner, an American, is serving a nine-year sentence in Russia for possessing a harmless substance called THC oil. She does not belong in prison.
There is nothing rational about the law or punishing a professional athlete’s use of a substance that helped them remain functioning professionally. You would not for example jail someone for using Lexapro or Prozac unless your society’s laws were borderline stone age.
Of course, the irony is, in Ms. Griner’s country, the United States, millions of people are in prison for possession of controlled substances. Many of them also possessed a version of the substance she possessed as she was leaving Russia. Many of them are serving long sentences in state prisons.
It is craziness. The U.S. system is especially mad funky because it has a racial slant to it.
And despite the talk of change to that system, the U.S. system has been maintained for decades. States that have legalized marijuana now continue…
