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Community => Social Issues and Causes => Topic started by: billy rubin on September 22, 2020, 06:09:59 PM

Title: well, my number two son has been busted
Post by: billy rubin on September 22, 2020, 06:09:59 PM
LSD, of all things. not possession, just disorderly conduct charges.

he ate too much and didn't have anybody to stick around with him, whiuch is stupid. so he wandered over to the neighbors and banged on their door, thinking it was our house. hollering that he was god, he tried to push through to get inside.

at least they didn't shoot him, which is a real consideration in the country. instead, they locked the door and called the cops, who told him to get down on the ground, which he didn't do.

no guns, no taser, luckily, but we had to bail him out at 0200 in the morning.

felony charges of resisting arrest have been dropped, pending cooperation with court-directed behaviour, but he still gets to appear on misdemeanor charges of various sorts.

but he's alive, which these days is a serious benefit.

many years ago before the Flood, i was busted for possession of opium and opium smoking utensils in a country far, far away. managed to get through that. hoping this will be similar.
Title: Re: well, my number two son has been busted
Post by: Tank on September 22, 2020, 06:42:47 PM
Well you can empathise with his position which is good and he's hopefully had a learning experience.
Title: Re: well, my number two son has been busted
Post by: billy rubin on September 22, 2020, 07:00:02 PM
lol

he's been very quiet the last few days.

seriously, the cops took it easy on him, and in fact thought he was fairly amusing.

that sense of humour is not very common these days, and he has benefited from it.

in general i am very critical of american police, but these people demonstrated that discretion is not completely absent, and i am hopeful.
Title: Re: well, my number two son has been busted
Post by: Tank on September 22, 2020, 07:17:58 PM
Well that all sounds good.
Title: Re: well, my number two son has been busted
Post by: Dark Lightning on September 22, 2020, 10:16:42 PM
Well, that must have been fun!  ::) It's good that he's OK. I hope he comes out of it without too bad a spanking. I wouldn't take psychedelics ever; I see enough weird shit when I'm fatigued enough. :lol:
Title: Re: well, my number two son has been busted
Post by: billy rubin on September 22, 2020, 11:55:35 PM
it was only the second time for him.

but the person who gave him the acid obviously has a consistency problem.

i have told him never to do that again by himself and not to take whatever he gets all at once.

but i am not 18 years old. my own experiences with psychedelics has been, what? almost fifty years ago.

but the issues are the same.
Title: Re: well, my number two son has been busted
Post by: Randy on September 23, 2020, 02:21:49 PM
Wow Billy, just wow!

At least my daughter hasn't done anything to get arrested. My son on the other hand has been arrested several times although I don't know what the charges are and I'm getting this through the grapevine.

He was lucky he ate it all I suppose, although I can't imagine the trip he took with that. At least he couldn't be charged for possession.

And now we know who god is!
Title: Re: well, my number two son has been busted
Post by: billy rubin on September 23, 2020, 02:45:29 PM
drug use is very common out here. when the oil companies moved inthey had trouble hiring people who could pass a drug test. they brought in people from oklahoma and texas

i signed on at a natural gas refinery construction site a few years ago when i came in from over the road. 60 people showed up to apply. they announced a drug tezt and 30 people stood up and left. of the remainder, 15 failed.

when i left there was a puddle of urine on the floor from where someone spilled the container of drug-free pee he had brought with him to use in the test but spilled instead
Title: Re: well, my number two son has been busted
Post by: Ecurb Noselrub on September 23, 2020, 09:40:06 PM
Billy, that could have been me when I was 18.  I did almost the same thing, except when I knocked on the door I had just encountered God, but didn't claim to be him. I spent the night in jail, and got off with a Class C Misdemeanor.  I'm also lucky the owner of the house didn't shoot me.  My cell mate that night was in for alleged attempted murder, awaiting trial.  New experience for a sheltered white boy.
Title: Re: well, my number two son has been busted
Post by: billy rubin on September 23, 2020, 10:46:34 PM
yes

they put me in a holding cell with a bunch of chinese gang members and a captured chinese communist from the jungle. but i got out that evening. i had a bunch of contraband i threw into the monsoon drain when nobody was looking
Title: Re: well, my number two son has been busted
Post by: Tank on September 24, 2020, 09:18:01 AM
Quote from: billy rubin on September 23, 2020, 02:45:29 PM
drug use is very common out here. when the oil companies moved inthey had trouble hiring people who could pass a drug test. they brought in people from oklahoma and texas

i signed on at a natural gas refinery construction site a few years ago when i came in from over the road. 60 people showed up to apply. they announced a drug tezt and 30 people stood up and left. of the remainder, 15 failed.

when i left there was a puddle of urine on the floor from where someone spilled the container of drug-free pee he had brought with him to use in the test but spilled instead

A good 20 years ago I was working in the US and got to know the HR lady who was looking after us quite well. She said they didn't drug test for jobs in marketing or sales any more because they couldn't get anybody to even interview. If an add mentioned a drug test nobody applied. If it didn't then people rang and asked if there was a drug test. If they said there was the person usually just hung up, some made excuses but went anyway. She reconed that about 1 in 20 carried on with the application. In the end they simply stopped testing for those rolls.
Title: Re: well, my number two son has been busted
Post by: billy rubin on September 24, 2020, 08:09:57 PM
for jobs where drug use is irrelevant i'm not in favor of it. and for most jobs it is irrelevant.

back when i was a tech writer in silicon valley the south carolina-owned company decided to impose drug tests on all its employees in order to get an insurance break.

these were office jobs with no driving or machine use. just people sitting in a cubicle, typing into a computer.

there was a revolt that went all the way to discussions with the ACLU. eventually they dropped the requirement except for sales people who drove a company vehicle, but they were astonished that anybody even had an issue with it.
Title: Re: well, my number two son has been busted
Post by: Icarus on September 24, 2020, 11:49:46 PM
One of my all time best employees was a single woman named Barbara.  She was immensely valuable and was paid in accordance with her company contribution.  She smoked cigarettes and one day decided to quit.  She did quit, cold turkey!  She got a notion that she wanted to get a Scuba divers certificate. She did that in short order.  After that, sky diving. Did that too.  It seemed that she was capable of doing anything. She had the discipline to do whatever needed to be done to achieve her goal.

One day I noticed that she was behaving a little differently. I had trained her to be a pretty good machinist. She was always fastidious and very careful of safety concerns.  She sliced her hand pretty badly that day when working at a milling machine.. There was blood. I took her to the emergency clinic.  They asked if this was a workers comp insurance claim. Yes it was. A drug test was then mandatory. They told her that she had to pee in a bottle. She refused.  I lost one of the most valuable employees, and friends, that I have ever had.  She quit before I was forced to fire her.

Why in holy hell would a responsible, intelligent, ambitious, 35 year old woman decide to get messed up with drugs?  I am still sad about that chain of events because that high class intelligent person tossed her future into the cesspit. 
Title: Re: well, my number two son has been busted
Post by: Randy on September 25, 2020, 05:47:08 PM
Why does anyone, Icarus? I was sick once and had to take codine I think for my cough. I hallucinated badly on the stuff.

I've never smoked, never done any illegal drugs... It's something I promised my mother when I was young. One of the kids in one of the apartment buildings apparently did and overdosed. I don't know what the drug was, who the kid was, or any of the details. I promised and went back to playing.
Title: Re: well, my number two son has been busted
Post by: Tom62 on September 25, 2020, 07:23:40 PM
I started to use some drugs when I was in my thirties. That was purely for recreational purposes and just to figure out what the fuzz was all about. My older brother grew cannabis plants in our garden, so we had some fun smoking that stuff. I stopped using it after a couple of months, because I didn't like the smell and assumed that it was pretty bad for my lungs. My brother stopped a few months later after me and sold the plants to one of his friends. I tried some other stuff a couple of times, like XTC (before it became illegal), cocaine (warning: stay away from it!) and opium. Never got addicted, but with cocaine I came pretty close.
Title: Re: well, my number two son has been busted
Post by: Dark Lightning on September 25, 2020, 08:13:19 PM
If you ever consider using cocaine, here's a picture for you. I don't remember where I saw it, and can't find it, I'll just have to describe it. Picture a low walled tank with lots of coca leaves in it. There's a bunch of people stomping on the leaves, which are immersed in some sort of solvent, in this case I think it was gasoline. The people were in there for hours, so the expectation is high that they defecated and urinated in it.  :o Since they aren't putting it up their noses, why would they care? I remember back in the '70s when I was driving a delivery truck and listening to talk radio. Some guy called in and was upset that probably not all the benzene has been rinsed out of the coke he had snorted, and that he might end up with cancer from it. I'm an empathetic person, and I did feel sorry for him. But then I realized that he put illicit narcotics up his nose, which, if improperly consumed, could make him dead right there. I lost a bit of empathy, right there.
Title: Re: well, my number two son has been busted
Post by: Anne D. on September 26, 2020, 01:31:05 AM
Billy, I hope your son comes through the system relatively unscathed. Did you say they originally charged him with a felony? That is insane. I'm glad the cops who responded had a sense of humor. Not much of that with the cops around here.
I've been lucky with my own drug experimentation; there but for the grace of the universe go I. Only did acid once, but it was a lovely fun time with people there to watch over me. I wish I would've tried coke at least once when I was younger for the experience. If I tried it now, I think I'd probably have a heart attack.  :)
Re: Drug testing for jobs: Back when we lived in Austin, TX, my husband worked for a company that regularly drug tested at its branches elsewhere in the country, but they had given that up in Austin, where everyone smokes pot. Supposedly they wouldn't have had a workforce otherwise.
Title: Re: well, my number two son has been busted
Post by: billy rubin on September 27, 2020, 08:56:51 PM
hey anne thank you for the kind thoughts. he'll do fine. apparently his m,istakes were as much due to inexperience with hallucinogens as anything else. i have emphasized that street acid is NOT something you do by yourself, because you have no control over the composition.

the felony was burglary, i think, because he tried to push past the house residents through their front dor. so he has disorderly conduct (hollering he was god in the middle of the night) and reisting arrest (not lying down on the griound when he was told to). he's got another hearing in two weeks or so, and before then i've got to scrape up another grand to the attorneys for getting the felony dismissed.

my own past drug experience is fairly extensive, and i don't have any problems with drugs at all, if only the stuff were regulated. street drugs are the problem, not drugs in the absrtract. the american war on drugs has done nothing but make drug cartel owners into billionaires, and has made the US number one for incarcerated citizens in our for-profit prisons. i think that's wrong.

Title: Re: well, my number two son has been busted
Post by: Asmodean on October 23, 2020, 12:32:22 PM
Quote from: Tom62 on September 25, 2020, 07:23:40 PM
I started to use some drugs when I was in my thirties. That was purely for recreational purposes and just to figure out what the fuzz was all about. My older brother grew cannabis plants in our garden, so we had some fun smoking that stuff. I stopped using it after a couple of months, because I didn't like the smell and assumed that it was pretty bad for my lungs. My brother stopped a few months later after me and sold the plants to one of his friends. I tried some other stuff a couple of times, like XTC (before it became illegal), cocaine (warning: stay away from it!) and opium. Never got addicted, but with cocaine I came pretty close.

I can sort-of relate to this.

Nicotine junkie since before I could legally obtain it, and caffeine junkie since about the age of sixteen, but I never liked the drugs that noticeably mess with my head. Cannabis made me puke myself inside-out, alcohol makes my world spin around weird axes, which I don't like... Then there is that same puking inside-out issue, morphine is good for various pains and aches, but makes clear, rational thought difficult... Yeah. some people are just not made to get high.

I don't have much to say about the broader discussion, beyond that I'm glad it didn't end too badly... As a point of general age-grown wisdom, if a police officer tells you to get your ass on the ground, it may be prudent to do just that. An open street and a potentially volatile situation may not be the best arena to figure out whether or not you didn' do nuttin'.
Title: Re: well, my number two son has been busted
Post by: billy rubin on October 23, 2020, 02:30:44 PM
actually asmo, the cops weren't the dangerous part. he was banging on the neighbors door in the country, literally miles from any other dwelling. there's no police closer than 30 minutes out here and most everybody has firearms. luckily, most everybody has common sense, too, so they just shut the door on him.

he had his second hearing. he didn't even go in. the attorney spoke with the DA and the felony charge was dropped pending a psychiatric evaluation.

so he did the psychiatric interview:

are you messed up?

no.

is your family messed up?

no

please pee in this cup.

okay.

so the psychiatrists ar emilking he health insurance company for another visit, and we have a trial scheduled for election day, of all things.

still waiting for a meterorite to fall and mess everything up.
Title: Re: well, my number two son has been busted
Post by: Asmodean on October 23, 2020, 02:46:10 PM
Is the concept you are referring to what they call "stand your ground law?" As in, if someone is on your property without more or less a signed and notorised paper stating that they are allowed to be there, then you may shoot them full of lead, then call it in and go about your day?

I'm unfamiliar with such legislation. How far is my deliberately-outtakish example from what is actually in it?

...Meteorite, you say..? The Asmo may know somebody who may or may not be needing a test site in relation to some plan involving mountain duchies and large-scale... Landscaping.  ;D
Title: Re: well, my number two son has been busted
Post by: billy rubin on October 23, 2020, 08:30:02 PM
well, in america you are legally permitted to shoot and kill someone in self-defense. there are legal requirements that have to be satisfied first-- you must not have initiated the attack, you must be in reasonable fear for your life or safety, you must respond only with appropriate force, and your danger must be immanent. all these have qualifications.

some places also state that you have "a duty to retreat." this means that if all the circumstances ^^^above apply, you must still try to leave the encounter if it is possible. this is common sense, but if you are being attacked it isn't always possible to run away. there are two exceptions to th eduty to retreat that most places recognize. on eis in your own home, or sometimes your car, called castle doctrine. if you are attacked in your own home and all of the ^^^above apply, you generally don't have to retreat before defending yourself. some places reject castle doctrine and do require you to keep backing up and going from room to room or climbing out the window before you can shoot someone. most places say that in your own home you can choose whether to retreat or not, and if not, you can choose where to stop retreating.

"stand your ground" is a related legal concept that says that you can defend yourself against attack-- without a duty to retreat-- in any place where you have a legal right to be. so if you are in a parking lot putting your groceries in your car, and yuo are attacked, you can legally defend yourself right there without first having to try to run away.

none of this gives anybody the right to shoot someone unless their circumstances satisfy th elegal requirements for self-defense, but people try to use stand your ground laws all the time to get away with murdering someone. in general, if somebody is trespassing and you shoot them, most courts will crucify you for second degree murder or manslaughter. so unless my son had put someone in fear for their life, demonstrated the ability and inclination to harm them, and was in the process of making good on that threat, they would not have been justified in shooting him. but of course, if they had, he wouldn't have been around to dispute the circumstances.

all of this is the way it is supposed to work most everywhere in america except in texas. in texas you can shoot anybody for anything.
Title: Re: well, my number two son has been busted
Post by: Asmodean on October 23, 2020, 08:50:57 PM
In a perfect world, where there is still a need for an occasional firefight, I actually kind-of like that.

Well, maybe not the Texas part - that one I like in the way I like post-apocalyptic fiction; fun to read and watch - probably less so to live with.
Title: Re: well, my number two son has been busted
Post by: billy rubin on October 24, 2020, 02:42:57 AM
lol

ask bruce about texas