With Philadelphia Eagles coach Andy Reid’s sons in jail, and with media folks of all stripes throwing him a giant pity party, Kansas City Star and Fox Sports commentator Jason Whitlock hits the nail on the head with this column that eviscerates Reid & his wife, the “drug emporium” that became of their house, the sports media, and the War on Drugs.
America’s morally bankrupt war on drugs, a cause that has killed and destroyed more lives than Vietnam and Iraq combined, has finally put Andy Reid’s kids on the front lines (incarceration), and Andy Reid doesn’t have a damn meaningful thing to say about it.
That’s unacceptable. It’s cowardly.
Andy Reid knows my pain, and he’s too worried about a freaking football game to verbalize it. He could make Middle America and the power structure understand the helplessness and the pain you feel when people you love get caught up in America’s political ploy called a “war on drugs.”
Echoing Whitlock’s sentiment, is a piece in the Ed/Op section of today’s Philadelphia Inquirer by Douglas Marlowe.
For too long in this country, the approach toward substance-abusing offenders wavered between incarceration without treatment and treatment without supervision – one or the other, rarely both. The incarceration-without-treatment approach is an outgrowth of our “war on drugs,” a nationwide response to the scourge of drug addiction that failed miserably on a number of levels, not the least of which being the flawed assumption that jails are an effective response to the problem of drug-related crime.
Marlowe applauds the judges use of the combination of treatment and monitoring with small jail sentences. It’s time for Andy Reid to step up, do the same, and insist that it the norm for everyone, not just for the affluent.
But, oh yeah, he’s got a game to prepare for.
The problem is, Andy Reid’s kids didn’t just get caught up in the “War on Drugs”. If I recall, Britt Reid was involved in a road rage incident where he threatened another driver involved in an accident with a gun. If he had done that to me, he’d be Andy Reid’s dead son. That doesn’t have much to do with the War on Drugs, that has to do with his kid being an violent miscreant.
Garret Reid was caught driving under the influence with drug paraphernalia in his car. He was caught because he hit someone and injured them.
I’m not sure that his kids are good poster boys for what’s wrong with the War on Drugs. Andy Reid pretty unsurprisingly hasn’t said anything, because I doubt he wants to draw attention to the fact that he’s pretty obviously a shitty father, which, to me, is the real story here.
The jail time is appropriate in their case. However, there are many other instances where people do far less than what Britt and Garret Reid did and end up with longer jail sentences. Britt and Garret are going to get the treatment they need and will probably be fine. However, most of the people who get tossed in jail who are addicts never get the treatment they need or they relapse because no one is keeping tabs on them.