Half-Truth: The Problem With Advocacy
During a trip to MJBizCon, at one of the after-parties where Freedom Grow had a small book on a table listing prisoners facing long sentences for flower-related crimes, one of those names was Tameka Drummer, a 46-year-old mother facing a life sentence without parole, a jarring reality to even imagine.
At a glance, it’s obviously easy to be outraged — and most people should be, especially when they hear it involved less than two ounces. I had over 400 lbs in my car earlier, and that was just a Monday delivery. So I asked: how does something like this happen?
The first three articles I found — Change.org, Vocal Media, and Filter — all shared the same issue. They said she was sentenced under Mississippi’s repeat offender law, but they did not say what the prior offenses were. I had to look that up myself.
And that leads to my problem with advocacy and news in general: you do not always get the whole story.
Tameca (Tameka) Drummer v. State of Mississippi
Police stopped Drummer after an officer said her car had no visible plate and was weaving. After the stop, the officer saw a temporary tag, learned Drummer’s license was suspended, and arrested her. The officer testified Drummer consented to a vehicle search, during which police found cocaine in the driver’s door and Flower hidden in the steering column.
A detective testified Drummer said she was in Corinth to meet Ernest Banks, a man she was “dating” for money, and that when he didn’t pay her, she took the Flower from him and hid it under the dash. Drummer denied that account, claimed Banks put the marijuana in her car without her knowledge, and said she did not consent to the search. Another officer testified he heard her consent.
The fact is Drummer’s life sentence did not come from the possession charge by itself; it came from Mississippi’s habitual-offender law (Miss. Code Ann. § 99-19-83), which required life without parole or probation when a person is convicted of a new felony and has two prior felony convictions from separate incidents, with separate prison terms of at least one year, and at least one prior violent felony.
The court found those conditions were met because Drummer had prior convictions for manslaughter and aggravated assault, both treated as crimes of violence, and had served more than one year in prison, so the possession conviction functioned as the triggering felony while the habitual-offender enhancement is what legally produced the life sentence.
Read Case NO. 2008-KA-01225-COA
Street Cred
Over the last year, I’ve seen a lot of advocacy groups appear out of nowhere using prisoner reform as a vehicle for pushing broader ideologies. In general, I think advocacy and reform are good things and should happen.
But if you’re going to tell someone’s story, you need to tell the whole story and let people come to their own conclusions.
This is not an attack on Tameka. If anything, I hope people can hear the full story and still decide that she deserves reform and a path to freedom. The reality is that she served time for those cases. Whether those convictions were right or wrong, we don’t know the underlying facts. That’s exactly the point: we don’t know the whole story.
What pisses me off is the advocates and fundraisers who leave those priors out while asking for donations. That’s not reform, that’s marketing. Omitting facts kills movements faster than any prohibitionist ever could.
We should all support decriminalizing and reform—but we should do it with the full record on the table.
