Autumn 2005
O'Shaughnessy's
Journal of the California Cannabis Research Medical
Group
|
Scripture and Strategy
By Joe Talley, MD
"The Hold-out" by Norman Rockwell |
Inspiring sermons are not commonplace today. But I did hear one this
morning that might be (1) a little comfort to any prescriber currently
beating himself up, and (2) more importantly, may have implications
for future defense of some of us.
Even those of us who last saw the inside of the church as a 12-year-old
forcibly deposited there will probably remember the parable of the
wheat and the tares. The one where farmers woke up to find their
wheatfield all grown up with weeds that some wise guy had sown. They
asked the
boss whether they should pull up the weeds, and he said, “No,
you can’t tell the wheat from the tares at this point. If you
go after the tares, you are bound to sacrifice a lot of good grain
with it. So treat the wheat field with the same TLC you always did.
The good grain is your priority. The tares we will deal with later.”
For many people, that parable simply promises them that their enemies
(all designated tares) will someday get theirs. (For a few, maybe
it worries them that they might some day turn out to be tares themselves!)
But the real point for today, the minister pointed out, was that
all
the trauma, bloodshed, discrimination, and other horror stories
done in the name of religion today, everything from bloody religious
wars
down to squabbles about gays in the congregation, comes from Christians
(Not to mention Muslims!) doing what the servants in the field
wanted to do —go after the tares now. But that won’t work —we
can’t tell who are tares and who are wheat— and it
is not what our faith teaches us to do.
Some day I will be facing 12 men and women tried and true from
the mountains of North Carolina (all there because they were too
dumb
to know how to get out of jury duty). They will live in little
houses on the hillside, with American flags flying on their porch,
and perhaps
a sign saying “America! Love It or Leave It!” They
will be haunted by the usual demons - communists, gays, liberals,
foreigners,
drugs (excepting alcohol and tobacco, of course), abortionists,
and their rebellious teenage kids! They will almost all be professing
Christians. They may not spend much of their time in a careful
study
of their faith,
but they will remember, vaguely at least, the parable of the wheat
and the tares.
At my trial, on direct exam I would want my attorney to say: “Dr.
Talley, you admit you must have at some time or other given opioids
to people who in fact didn’t need them, or at least that
many of them, for pain relief. Why did you do that?”
I would answer, “Because there was no way to be sure. There was
no accurate way to foil the drug abusers and dealers without denying
mercy to people tortured by pain. All of us will remember the parable
in Matthew, about the wheat and the tares. The government wants me
to do what the Master’s servants wanted to do —to separate
them out when there was no way to separate them out. To ignore the
needs of the grain just to make sure the tares don’t get
away with anything. There is no way to justify that scientifically
or
morally. Just as in the case of the wheat and tares, time will
tell who is who,
but there is no way to tell when the guy sitting across from me
in my office appears to be suffering. There are things to do to
try
to narrow it down, and I did those things. But in the end, there
is no
way to be sure. And to deny 10 people mercy just to frustrate one
drug abuser is just plain wrong.”
In most of the trials I have followed so far, the jury has not
had it hammered home to them convincingly that you cannot tell
the wheat
from the tares. The government has successfully advanced the scam
that we really could have if we had just tried, rather than being
criminally
indifferent. When my turn comes, I think of trying in some way
to put over Nancy’s sermon, “Why can’t we just pull up the
tares?” in a fashion they can grasp.
Anyhow, now let us all bow for the benediction...