I often feel like I can sense the feelings of the people I care about regardless of words or even space. Whether the distance is a close embrace, or across the globe we are all connected in a way that transcends both time and space and I feel that all of humanity has the capacity to do this if they will embrace compassion and empathetically reach out to their brothers and sisters from the light to save them from their own personal demons and doubt. I will make no secret of my religious beliefs as a Christian Buddhist and will in fact boldly proclaim that it is this attitude that has led me to the fight for drug law reform.

I put myself into this fight for social justice for a myriad of reasons; the most basic of which was that I wanted to fight evil in the world. I had this notion that I could change the world put an end to the stigmatization of people who become addicted to one thing or another. I would like to say that I chose to get involved with drug law because it was the best field, but in fact the universe chose the field for me. I won't go into the gritty details of how I got involved but essentially a very good opportunity to get involved presented itself and so I took it, for although I did not know the issue thoroughly, I thought that it would be a very interesting and fun field to get involved in. I had no idea I would experience so much in such a short time.

I began working for lawyers who did a lot of drug law and the job was everything I expected and more. I saw the prosecution of a 73 year old medical marijuana patient. I saw the children of medical marijuana patients seized by Child Protective Services and used as bartering chips in both the child custody case and criminal trial. I saw witnesses harassed by police. I saw clients receiving death threats and broken limbs from sources that they "just didn't want to talk about." If the issue of medical marijuana is a battleground, California is the Western Front, and all the stops are being pulled out. I was in the trenches.

All of this injustice, wrong an evil that I witnessed and fought against pulled me back to some very deep philosophy discussions that I engaged in during my college days where my friends and I tried to explore the issues of good and evil. As we tried to discuss good and evil, and nail down definitions and meaning, one issue disturbed me the most. Many people who I knew and cared for believed that neither good nor evil existed. To them good and evil were simply relative abstract ideas with no basis in objective reality. I found this to be a very trenchant moral frailty.

I saw this very same moral frailty in the opposition of all of our cases. They say, "Show me a ruler that measures good and evil and I will show you an arbitrary scale." Laws determine right and wrong, regardless of compassion or reason. It is a form or moral relativism that equates to moral nihilism; this frame of mind is rampant throughout much of the world. In opposition to this phenomenon my friends and I developed a definition of evil. Despite what the naysayers had to say about our definition that day, I still rely on it to guide my moral compass in the fight for drug law reform because it is very relevant.

My friends and I determined that an act of evil is when a person or group of people act without empathy or compassion towards another person. The drug war is evil because it compels people to act without compassion or empathy towards hundreds of thousands of addicts and families each year. This is what I am fighting to change.