Drug WarRant

A very good post by David Bratzer at the LEAP blog: Black police officers? You can’t talk about them here

Definitely worth reading.

I’d like to focus on one part of that post, a response David once got from “Inspector Leviathan Hobbes,” the pseudonym for the founder of the Thinking Police Blog.

It’s impressive.

Not only have I been reading, but I’ve been thinking. It’s difficult as a police officer to agree with the legalisation and regulation of drugs. Why? It’s because we see the evil ruination that it has upon addicts. Not only that, but those who are the real dealers, the Mister Bigs, are extremely difficult to bring to justice. Add to this the consequential victims, the ones who have their property stolen to fund habits, and it seems difficult to say to all of them that what LEAP proposes is the way forward. However, after nigh on 20 years of reading philosophy, I’ve fallen foul of the Platonic adage I swore I never would – ‘an expert is someone who knows nothing at all.’

What I mean by this is, just because as police officers or MOPs we see the full impact that drugs misuse has on the wider community, not only on the user themself – and because we know the law inside and out regarding drugs – we can sometimes become blind to the alternatives. Just because the law and societal opinions have been the same throughout the lives of almost all of us, it doesn’t mean it’s right. It doesn’t mean the law was devised because it works. Sometimes it’s wrong. I can point to many examples, as I am sure many of you can. Think about it this way – if drugs WERE legalised and regulated, the Mister Bigs would suffer – the ones who deserve to suffer. Prostitution, a drug-reliant trade, I’m guessing would halve at the very least, as would most ascquisitive crime. You can’t get away from the fact that the majority of acquisitive crime is committed by habitual drug users. Yes, there are issues around the practicalities of this proposal, but they’re not unachievable in the overall aim.

To have someone see the light like that is a beautiful thing.

And it’s also a point that we who are in drug policy reform need to remember…

Not everybody knows, or has been able to absorb, what we know — that which gives us the certainty of our convictions regarding legalization.

We understand that to a certain extent. We understand, for example, that there’s a vast part of the general public that has been propagandized for so long and have not been well exposed to the truth that it’s going to take a fair amount of education and time to get them on board.

And then we know that there’s another group of opponents who will never be interested in reform, either because they are venal and profit from the war on drugs, or because they are sadomoralists. We can write them off.

We have to be more aware of a third category — those immersed in the drug transaction world whose experience has been so skewed that they are already certain that they know the full truth, and are just unable to open up that tiny bit to absorb the legalization message. They’re a hard nut to crack, and tend to be in areas like law enforcement and treatment (and sometimes religion), where they can easily be mistaken for profiteers or sadomoralists.

These people fervently believe in the rightness of the drug war because they have been overwhelmed by the wrongness of the drug world. Ironically, they are so close to it that they are unable to step back and see that their drug war has caused the problems that they want to solve.

But just like with Inspector Hobbes, it is possible to crack that nut, and when you do, you’ll probably have a strong ally. This is another reason why groups like Law Enforcement Against Prohibition are so critical to our effort.

My dad is a retired minister and was very supportive of the war on drugs (he had seen the devastation of addicts in his ministry). I helped him learn why the war on drugs wasn’t the answer, and now every time I visit him, he asks me how long it’s going to be before I succeed in getting rid of this war on drugs!

This is just unbelievable…

NV judge orders drug offender write report on pot

A Nevada judge has issued a homework assignment in the form of an unusual sentence for a 25-year-old Sacramento man who sold marijuana to a police informant in a casino parking lot at Lake Tahoe.

District Judge Dave Gamble ordered Matthew Palazzolo to write a report on what the judge called the “nonsensical character” of California’s medical marijuana law.

Gamble gave Palazzolo 90 days to complete the paper discussing his self-admitted realization that marijuana was a gateway drug that led him to use more powerful narcotics.

The judge clearly has some strong views about marijuana.

Palazzolo, who works for a law firm in Sacramento, admitted he grew it after obtaining a medical marijuana card. […]

“So you decided to grow your own?” Gamble asked. “If this isn’t testimony to the absolute asininity of medical marijuana laws in California and the path Nevada is choosing.”

OK. I really, really, really want that report. 90 days will make it somewhere around Thanksgiving, unless he gets it done earlier.

I’m hoping it’ll be made public, or one of my readers will have access and get it to me. Seriously.

I plan on grading it.

Nope, not talking about the Showtime series. Just like the word.

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Californians must look at science of marijuana by Timmen Cermak, president of the California Society of Addiction Medicine.

Cermak supports Prop 19, but is also full of crap, looking to promote marijuana addiction as a cash cow for his industry.

The question of legalizing marijuana creates a conflict between protecting civil liberties and promoting public health, between desire and prudence, between current de facto legalization in cannabis clubs and revenue-generating retail marijuana sales. […]

Physicians see many people who seek help in quitting marijuana. If Californians decide to legalize marijuana, who will pay for the additional treatments that will be needed? This question becomes profoundly more relevant if your own child has become devoted to smoking pot. If marijuana is legalized, a truly fair, socially just public policy would use tax revenue from marijuana sales to pay for increased treatments.

There are a small number of people who have addiction problems who also abuse marijuana. That has very little to do with the issue of legalization.

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Legalizing marijuana is bad for California by Susan E. Manheimer, president of the California Police Chiefs Association, the group most likely to be hurt financially by the legalization of marijuana next to the drug cartels, despite what Susan would like you to believe.

The truth is the production and distribution of marijuana is already big business and controlled by violent drug cartels. Should this initiative pass, the cartels are well positioned and eagerly awaiting a greatly expanded marketplace. We need only look at the violence occurring among warring drug cartels along our border with Mexico to imagine what California might experience.

How corrupt do you have to be to try to sell this to the public?

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Finally, in today’s Doonesbury, Zonker wants to go to Oakland…

I don’t blame him.

A little Sunday reading for you:

Liberty Lost: The Moral Case for Marijuana Law Reform
by Eric D. Blumenson (Suffolk University Law School) and
(Eva S. Nilsen) Boston University School of Law.
Suffolk University Law School Research Paper No. 09-20.
Indiana Law Journal, Vol. 85, 2009

(Note: If you have trouble downloading the paper there, it’s available here.)

In this essay, we present a civil libertarian case for repealing marijuana possession crimes. We put forward two arguments, corresponding to the two distinct liberty concerns implicated by laws that both ban marijuana use and punish its users. The first argument opposes criminalization, demonstrating that marijuana use does not constitute the kind of wrongful conduct that is a prerequisite for just punishment. The second argument demonstrates that even in the absence of criminal penalties, prohibition of marijuana use violates a moral right to exercise autonomy in personal matters – a corollary to Mill’s harm principle in the utilitarian tradition, or, in the non-consequentialist tradition, to the respect for personhood that was well described by the Supreme Court in its recent Lawrence v. Texas opinion. Both arguments are based on principles of justice that are uncontroversial in other contexts.

The arguments used in this paper are not ones that you could likely use in a courtroom today (even the Supreme courtroom) because drug war precedent has too far warped the concept of liberty, yet it is important to have discussions like this to remind us of the roots of liberty in this country, and how the drug laws have damaged them (and to give us something to strive for).

The authors point out that most discussions about marijuana laws revolve around pragmatic terms.

Such debates are crucial elements in any examination of marijuana law and policy, but they ignore the deeper level of justification that may be required by restraints on individual liberty, of which marijuana criminalization is arguably an instance. Restraints on religious practice, for example, cannot properly be evaluated by merely calculating the utilitarian costs and benefits; something of greater moral weight is required to override the fundamental right to free exercise of religion. A key threshold issue regarding the prohibition and criminalization of marijuana use is whether such laws implicate fundamental individual rights, and if so what kind of grounds are required to justify doing so.

In this essay, we argue that these laws do unjustifiably infringe fundamental moral rights. We present a non-consequentialist, civil libertarian case against marijuana prohibition and criminalization, based on the requirements of liberty and just punishment.

The essay takes some inspiration from the Supreme Court decision in Lawrence, which struck down a law criminalizing homosexual sex. The Court’s words in that case ring true in other areas as well…

Liberty protects the person from unwarranted government intrusions into a dwelling or other private places. . . And there are other spheres of our lives and existence, outside the home, where the State should not be a dominant presence. . . Liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate conduct. ….At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State. . . .The petitioners are entitled to respect for their private lives.

The authors even address the basics from the Declaration of Independence.

There is also a more quotidian moral right, perhaps less exalted but no less important, which is recognized in the Declaration of Independence as “the pursuit of happiness.” This right should protect those who seek affective rather than cognitive benefits from marijuana – users for whom it serves as a relaxant, a social lubricant, an anti-depressant, or a palliative.50 The right to pursue happiness in one’s own way is worthy of respect, and we disdain countries like Iran partly because they do not respect it. There, certain music and dress is deemed decadent and banned. Here, the default position is that people should be free to pursue their individual and idiosyncratic tastes in recreation, even risky ones like boxing and mountain climbing. Only in a few cases does the majority presume to control the personal pleasures of a minority; marijuana is one of them. (That marijuana use often takes place in the privacy of one’s home greatly compounds the violation.)

A very interesting read (and a nice diversion from the daily slogging through the drug war). The authors specifically chose not to apply their argument to other drugs, but certainly much of their points could easily extend beyond marijuana.

In drug war, the beginning of the end? by Bernd Debusmann of Reuters. Excellent OpEd.

Between 1971, when Richard Nixon launched the war on drugs, and 2008, the latest year for which official figures are available, American law enforcement officials made more than 40 million drug arrests. That number roughly equals the population of California, or of the 33 biggest U.S. cities. […]

“Taking all this together, there is reason to believe that we are at the beginning of the end of the drug war as we know it,” says Aaron Houston, a veteran Washington lobbyist for marijuana policy reform.

Far-fetched? Perhaps. But how many people in the late 1920s, at the height of the government’s fight against the likes of Al Capone, would have foreseen that alcohol prohibition would end in just a few years? Prohibition lasted from 1920 to 1933 and is now considered a failed experiment in social engineering.

Alcohol and marijuana prohibition have much in common: both in effect handed production, sales and distribution of a commodity in high demand to criminal organizations, both filled the prisons (America’s population behind bars is now the world’s largest), both diverted the resources of law enforcement, and both created millions of scoff-laws.

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Reconsidering addiction: a film about Bruce Alexander’s remarkable ‘rat park’ experiment. An interesting discussion, and one that makes clear that the simplistic view that “drugs,” in and of themslves, are “addictive” is not only wrong, but it’s dangerous.

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This war was lost long ago by Michelle Teheux in the Pekin Daily Times. A surprisingly good OpEd by an editor of a local paper just down the road from where I live.

Many people living in pleasant neighborhoods like those in Pekin, Morton, East Peoria and Washington like to feel they are insulated from the drug trade, but that’s rot. Pay attention to arrest records and you’ll notice it’s not uncommon for a person living in a nice neighborhood in Tazewell County to travel to the south side of Peoria to buy drugs. This is not just a south side of Peoria issue. It affects all of us.

Drug users who go home to their nice safe neighborhoods to do the drugs they just picked up on the south side ought to know their patronage helps fuel the drug and gang war, both in Peoria and in Mexico.

As drug customers, they have the blood of thousands on their hands.

So the solution would seem to be to impose severe penalties for drug use and to throw billions of dollars at law enforcement to just stamp out this drug problem once and for all. Right?

Well, we tried that, and it worked even less well than Prohibition worked against alcohol use.

It’s time to try something new.

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Apparently the notion of “legal Acapulco Gold” is just too much for some people. The headline of this article was “Legal Acapulco Gold Gets Calderon’s Consideration as Drug Killings Climb” but it’s been changed to “Legal Pot Gets Calderon Consideration as Deaths Mount.”

I liked the first headline better.

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Thomas D. Elias: Voters lying about legal pot? is an incoherent OpEd that wanders all over the place without quite lighting on anything.

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Keith Humphrey’s discovers the notion that legal marijuana in California might lead to “drug tourism.” Duh. Anyone driving into Missouri and seeing all the Fireworks stores right by the border could have told you that. Yep, “at least some California communities would endure the externalities of drug tourism that the people of Maastricht are facing now.” A small price to pay, compared to all the death and destruction of prohibition.

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Jeralyn and TalkLeft has some interesting reading about the Latest on Obama Administration and Medical Marijuana

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It’s Stupid Press Release time!

From Nip It In The Bud: No on Prop. 19 – Opponent Questions Prop. 19 Flag-Bearer Richard Lee’s Silence: Is Richard Lee a Political Puppet for Marijuana Legalization in California?

Datig says, “I find it curious that Richard Lee, the proponent of Proposition 19 has not made public statements regarding his own measure. Instead we are seeing speakers-for-hire from the Drug Policy Alliance, members from L.E.A.P. such as Judge Gray, talking about issues that frequently do not relate to the measure. We are also hearing from Gary Johnson, the former Governor of New Mexico, who was unsuccessful in his own state with the legalization of marijuana and who now wants to meddle in California’s business. We are hearing legal opinions from former government officials, appointees and retired police officers who are no longer on the front lines, yet they support Prop. 19 while they seem to be completely out of touch with reality. They argue about history, about inflated, overblown and partial statistics, about industrialization and the so-called advantage Californians would have over the Mexican drug cartels if marijuana were legalized. Yet no one seems to be getting into what is in front of the voters except for those of us who oppose Proposition 19.”

Oh, yes. And then she lies. (no surprise, there)

Actually, I’ve never even heard of Alexandra Datig before, and all those cops and governors and judges seem to be pretty good spokespeople for voting yes on Proposition 19.

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Oh, wait, here’s someone else speaking up FOR Proposition 19. Longshore Workers

The longshore workers have jumped aboard the pro-marijuana legalization bandwagon, as the 25,000-member Northern California District Council of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union say they are pro-Prop 19.

And why would that be?

“The ILWU NCDC supports Prop 19 for good reason,” sez the union’s official statement. “The continued prohibition of marijuana costs society too much. Billions of our tax dollars are wasted annually on the prosecution and incarceration of many, whose only crime is using, growing and selling marijuana.

“Peoples’ lives are ruined for a lifetime because of criminal records incurred from using a drug that is used recreationally by people from all walks of life. Those criminal records fall disproportionately on the backs of workers, poor people, and people of color,” says the ILWU NCDC.

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Raid Victim Family May Hit Vegas Police with RICO Suit

Andre Lagomarsino, the attorney representing the estate of Trevon Cole and his fiancé, Sequoia Pearce, said today he is considering a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) lawsuit against the Las Vegas Police Metropolitan Department in the shooting death of Cole in a June drug raid at the apartment shared by Cole and Pearce. In addition to a possible RICO claim, the lawsuit would assert wrongful death, assault and battery, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. It would also assert civil rights violations.

Coroner’s Inquest was held today. Verdict may come later this weekend, but only one police officer has been found criminally negligent in about 200 inquiries.

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Wow. An actual bit of justice, here.

DA indicted over handouts from asset forfeiture fund

Grits for Breakfast notes:

“while the indictment says he misused more than $200,000, an audit done by his successor found that [Joe Frank] Garza had paid $1.2 million in drug seizure forfeitures to his three staff members and another $81,000 to himself between January of 2002 through the end of 2008.” That’s pretty darn brazen.

No kidding.

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Rolling Stone is on the Just Say Now bandwagon.

Speaking of Just Say Now… If you haven’t already, get over to the Just Say Now campaign sponsored by Firedoglake and Students for Sensible Drug Policy and sign up.

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This is an open thread

New York Times

A national group of African-American law enforcement officers has endorsed Proposition 19, a ballot measure that would tax and regulate marijuana in California. The National Black Police Association, which has more than two dozen chapters across the country, announced the endorsement in Sacramento, where the organization is holding a national conference. In a statement, Neill Franklin, the executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which supports Proposition 19, said that “prohibition takes a toll on people of color across the country.” He added: “Californians finally have an opportunity to do something about it.”

The Daily Caller reports that recent efforts to get Obama to reconsider his choice of keeping Michele Leonhart as the head of the DEA have failed.

But according to a senior White House official, not even the combined grassroot powers of FireDogLake’s Jane Hamsher, a leading voice in the progressive community and a supporter of the single-payer health care plan abandoned by congressional Democrats earlier this year, and the 10th Amendment Center, which has provided guidelines to states that wish to repeal Obamacare, can derail Leonhart’s nomination.

Obama is confident that Leonhart is the right choice, the White House staffer said, and that as of Friday the president wasn’t considering anyone else for the position. In other words, the response from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. to a chorus of concerns boils down to: Leonhart or bust.

Michele is, of course, the bad girl of the DEA that thought lying on the stand was no big deal (it’s got to be a little bit annoying for her to put her name into Google and get my article from so many years ago still second on the list).

Of course, she’s horrible for the job. I think Eric Sterling nails it

The bigger issue is that Leonhart has demonstrated that she is unable and unwilling to take on the major job of the next DEA Administrator, which is to work with the states in developing medical marijuana laws that make sense.

But Eric also may have hit upon the reason for Obama’s decision…

I suspect that what compelled Obama to pick Leonhart is that he could not find anyone competent who was willing to take the lead in reforming an antiquated agency staffed with zealots committed to a hopeless mission. The rumor in D.C. is that everyone they asked turned down the offer.

The Drug Czar’s “blog” continues its orgy of back-to-school “advice,” this time from Assistant Deputy Secretary Kevin Jennings.

It may be obvious but, as students across the country head back to school and colleges this fall, it bears repeating: young people who use alcohol and other drugs are much more likely to fail at school than those who don’t. Tragically, many are addicted to failure.

I’m hardly going to win a Nobel Prize for making that statement, but some cold hard facts from the Centers for Disease Control’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey paint a very stark picture:

• Young people who are getting D’s and F’s are about twice as likely to be current alcohol users than those who get A’s are (62% versus 32%, respectively)

• Young people who are getting D’s and F’s are about five times as likely to be current marijuana users than those who get A’s are (48% versus 10% respectively)

• Young people who are getting D’s and F’s are a stunning 13 times as likely to be current cocaine users than those who get A’s are (13% versus 1% respectively)

No, you’re not going to win a Nobel Prize. Nobel prize winners have to be achievers in science, which means that they have to at least be basically literate in it.

Notice how the data he presents very specifically does not support his thesis.

He starts by implying that the use of drugs necessarily leads to failure in school, and then for his data shows not that those who use drugs are more likely to get bad grades, but rather that those who get bad grades are more likely to use drugs (an entirely different proposition).

Of course, lots of things could explain the data. The notion that A students might be less likely to admit drug use in a survey. The fact that students who are uninterested in applying themselves to school (cutting classes, not participating in extra-curricular activities) will have more access to and time for drugs.

Also note that while Jennings mentions “school and colleges” and ambiguously implies that the data applies to “young people,” it appears that the data he references only applies to middle and high school students.

Here’s where it gets good…

Jennings knows he isn’t supposed to use the data this way.

Now the researchers will say we cannot infer causation from these data associations.

Yep, he knows it and even flaunts it, but it doesn’t bother him because he works for the ONDCP and… Scientists? We don’t need no stinkin’ scientists!

You see, he’s got something better than science. He’s got… common sense!

And here’s how it works:

…but common sense tell us it’s hard to study effectively if you are drunk or high.

Brilliant. And hard to refute.

Hey, I was a student once, and I admit that it could be hard to study effectively if you were heavily impaired by a drug.

But let’s take this common sense thing a step further…

It’s also hard to study effectively when you’re attending church services. I’ve tried it, but the minister looks at you funny, and if you’ve got your eyes closed during the prayer like you’re supposed to, it’s almost impossible to show your work on the math problems.

Maybe Kevin Jennings is suggesting that young people shouldn’t go to church.

You know what else common sense tells you? It’s hard to study effectively while you’re taking a crap. Trying to balance your textbooks on the edge of the tub… writing legibly about food groups while grunting…

Hey, I’ve got an idea. What if a young person didn’t spend all their time in church services or on the crapper? What if… there were other hours of the day when they could focus on studying effectively? What a novel idea that apparently completely slipped by “common sense boy.”

No, I don’t recommend that young people use drugs that impair them. But if they do, I recommend that they use them with caution and moderation. And whether they use drugs or not, I highly recommend that they carve aside some quality time to study effectively in order to not end up as mind-bogglingly stupid as Assistant Deputy Secretary Kevin Jennings.

California is a state in financial crisis. California also has the largest prison population in the country, after unprecedented growth in the past two decades. And California’s cost per inmate is $45,045 compared to the national average of $28,689. This makes California’s correctional system one of the biggest drains on the state budget.

Now, why is the correctional cost so high in California? Well, one fairly significant reason is the fact that California’s state correctional officers make a whole lot of money.

Figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wages survey shows California is the highest-paying state for correctional officers, employing 40,260 of them in 2008 at an annual mean wage of $63,230, which works out to about $5,270 per month or $30.40 per hour. The national mean salary for correctional officers is $41,340, or $19.88 per hour.

There was a really good opportunity recently to cut back on California’s prison costs through Prop 5, which would have reduced the numbers of specifically non-violent drug offenders in prison. This was defeated following a vicious and mendacious campaign funded by $1.8 million from… the California Correctional Peace Officers Association.

That’s right. They not only make the most money in the country by a long shot (38% higher than their highest paid counterparts), they have a union that insures they continue to get it, and that the prisons remain crammed full.

Now, even the union understands that the state has to cut costs, so they’re trying to show that they’re willing to do their part (as long as it doesn’t involve cutting salaries, reducing prison population, or laying off officers).

So they have detailed some cost cutting ideas directly from their members on the California Correctional Peace Officers Association Blog

COST SAVINGS

An officer at High Desert wrote, asking why “tax payers have to be responsible for 100 % of the outrageous medical bills of inmates! We as law abiding citizens have to pay a percentage of our hard earned money toward our medical bills. Why can’t they be held accountable for a percentage of their medical care through some kind of restitution? “

An officer at Folsom tells us that “. . . every morning there is a coach to show a couple of her hand selected inmates how to toss around a ball. You have got to be kidding me!!! I have to pay $250 for my son to play each sport in high school and the state is paying for a coach to show grown men how to play catch, this is crazy. Something is really wrong here.”

Another officer said:
“CDCR contracts out to a private company to provide the packages that inmates receive. But the taxpayers must still pay the institutional staffing costs associated with receiving and distributing those inmate packages. I believe those costs should be picked up by those who choose to invoke or participate in the privilege, not the taxpayers. The contracted vender should have a ‘Handling Charge’ associated with every inmate package processed. The “Handling Charge’ should go back to the State to off-set the costs associated with the staffing required to carry out the privilege. Inmate packages are not a right, they are a privilege. So why should taxpayers be forced to fully fund this privilege?

Thanks for the suggestions and as always, if you have any cost savings ideas, please send your comments to ryan.sherman@ccpoa.org

And these are the people in charge of rehabilitation! Completely clueless about what their job is, unable to see the irony of complaining about costs to taxpayers, and focused solely on what they can get themselves.

At the Drug Czar’s “blog,” the ONDCP’s Ben Tucker gives advice to students heading off to college.

Much of the advice is fine and appropriate: “Get to class on time, get to know your professors, be respectful of your peers and professors, read your course syllabus, know what is expected of you, complete assignments in a timely fashion, study for exams and show up to take exams as scheduled, make time to exercise…”

But you know that’s not why he’s writing this. And sure enough, he gets to it. And blows it.

And while many students adjust and learn to navigate the higher education terrain quite well, without the help of drugs or alcohol–and that’s as it should be– there are many who do not fare as well. And while this message is a cautionary tale for all students, it is the students in the latter category to whom I now speak.

Do not assume that the solution to your stress lies in the abuse of drugs and alcohol. The inherent dangers of drug abuse and underage drinking are real. At best they can derail your education and force you to squander your dreams, at worse they can…? Think about It!

Notice the existence of only two categories.

1. Those who never use drugs or alcohol.
2. Those who abuse drugs and alcohol, squandering their dreams or worse.

Pretty pathetic advice.

I work at a university, and while there are some students who will abstain from most drugs (including tobacco and alcohol), most students will experiment at the very least. Despite the lack of useful information given to them, many of these will go on to have productive educational careers. The abstinence-or-loser advice from the ONDCP is the absolute worst possible advice you can give to these students.

If you have a youngster heading to High School or College and want to communicate in a realistic way that respects them while emphasizing safety and offering your help, then I urge you to read a letter written in 1998 by Marsha Rosenbaum to her son Johnny, then entering High School.

Amazingly, we also have an unsolicited letter to her from her son, written 8 years later.

These have been around for awhile, but even if you read them years ago, I think they’re worth reading again: Mother and Son.