by Tina Godby-Ware, RN Otero/Lincoln Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner Program

The goal of sexual health promotion is to foster healthy relationships and comfort with sexuality. It is based on the premise that adults who are comfortable with their sexuality and at ease with open discussion of sexual issues will create a family environment that supports healthy sexual behavior and responsible sexual choices. Healthy sexuality is based on respect, value, honesty, and joy.

But first, we must work diligently to challenge the institutions and practices that uphold male domination, the powerlessness of children, the turning of sexuality into a commodity, and the glorification of violence and exploration of fellow human beings. Every two minutes, somewhere in America, someone is sexually assaulted. Only 83 percent of victims ever report this crime, with a large majority never telling anyone, allowing this silent epidemic to multiply and explode. The literature states that sexual violence is perhaps the most insidious manifestation of patriarchy, because it involves the corruption and distortion of that which is fundamental to our existence; our sexuality.

We are taught every other part of the amazing human body except in the unmentionable area—“down there.” This leaves us unprotected and vulnerable. Women developed a deep anger as the truth of violence against the female body was revealed—in the form of rape, childhood sexual abuse, anti-lesbian violence, physical abuse, sexual harassment, terrorism against reproductive freedom, or the international crime of female genital mutilation.

The pervasive belief that sexuality is derived from a weakness in humanity promotes the detachment of sexuality from self. This pervasive cultural norm shames us out of accepting and/or embracing our sexuality as a positive part of our own humanity. Thus sexuality exists on a foundation of relatively rigid and well-enforced ideas about gender. Males learn that their sexuality is characterized by action, control, and achievement, making it a game that man’s worth is to be judged according to the ability to play this game.  Females are taught that their sexuality involves learning how to balance being a “good girl” with pleasing men.

The Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) Program along with NMSU-Alamogordo, Peace and Justice of La Luz, COPE, and other community citizens have joined forces to locally direct, produce, and act in Eve Ensler’s award winning masterpiece The Vagina Monologues. The Vagina Monologues give voice to women’s deepest fantasies and fears bringing the hidden experiences into the open, naming them, and turning rage into positive action. It is witty and irreverent, compassionate and wise. The Vagina Monologues has been performed in cities all across America and at hundreds of college campuses. It has been translated into over 24 different languages, and has inspired a dynamic grassroots movement—V-Day—to stop violence against women. The V-Day movement is growing at a rapid pace throughout the world, in 130 countries from Europe to Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, and all of North America.

The Vagina Monologues is the truth-telling that our bodies are sacred.  With the help of outrageous voices and honest words, the grandmothers, mothers, and daughters of the future will heal their selves—and mend the world. Eve Ensler believes that nothing is more important than stopping violence toward women. The desecration of women indicates the failure of human beings to honor and protect all life and if we do not correct it, it will be the end of us all.

It will be difficult to encourage people to overhaul their experience of sexuality through a lens of well-being, rather than a lens of shame, fear, and power. Doing so directly confronts our culture’s unhealthy sexual status quo, and therefore threatens to upset the numerous interests that benefit from it. Those of us that want to positively redefine this status quo will need to forge alliances in order to surmount these formidable barriers to change. Join us in the global movement to change the story of women and end the violence.

The Vagina Monologues

Rohovec Performing Arts Center NMSU-Alamogordo campus

February 6 at 7:30 pm

February 7 at 2:00 pm

Tickets $5 at the door or at the COPE office 909 South Florida in Alamogordo

Our traditional justice system has been inadequate to the task of breaking the cycle of substance abuse and crime. Four out of every five offenses are committed by someone with a drug or alcohol problem; and we just keep locking them up!

In just the past 20 years alone, state prison systems have added 1 million new cells to incarcerate the 2.3 million adults now behind bars in the U.S. That’s far more than any other country on the globe with 1 out of every 100 adult Americans currently serving time. Approximately one-half of these individuals are addicted to drugs or alcohol and most do not pose a serious threat to public safety.

Prison for these individuals has accomplished little to stem the tide of crime or substance abuse. Upon their release from prison, two thirds of drug abusers commit a new crime and virtually all relapse quickly to drug abuse. And yet, despite these disappointing figures national expenditures on corrections well exceed $60 billion annually. On average, states spend $65,000 per bed, per year to build new prisons and $23,876 per bed, per year to operate them. Despite the staggering cost to incarcerate these individuals, most return to their communities without treatment, without jobs and without hope.

Given the abysmal outcomes of incarceration on addictive behavior, there’s absolutely no justification for state governments to continue to waste tax dollars feeding a situation where generational recidivism is becoming the norm and parents, children and grandparents may find themselves locked up together.

The addicted in prison truth is:
We want them to have self-worth
So we destroy their self-worth
We want them to be responsible
So we take away all responsibility
We want them to be positive and constructive
So we degrade them and make them useless
We want them to be trustworthy
So we put them where there is no trust
We want them to be non-violent
So we put them where violence is all around them
We want them to be kind and loving people
So we subject them to hatred and cruelty
We want them to quit being the tough guy
So we put them where the tough guy is respected
We want them quit hanging around losers
So we put all the losers in the state under one roof
We want them to quit exploiting us
So we put them where they exploit each other
We want them to take control of their lives, own problems and quit being a parasite on society
So we make them totally dependent on us

I am speaking up about this matter because I have personally been addicted to Meth for 17 years (other drugs and alcohol 30 years total). I am clean and sober for many years, but unfortunately I had to go to another state (other than my home state of New Mexico) to go to Rehab. A recovery friendly community made all the difference in my miracle

Please help stop the war on drugs. Prohibition has never worked and never will.
Thanks, Ken Larson

The coordinated sexual assault response team  is designed to ensure that victims are provided with a broad range of necessary care and services (legal, medical, social services) and to increase the likelihood that an assault can be successfully prosecuted. The SART team includes a nurse examiner, a sexual assault advocate, a prosecutor, and a law enforcement officer. All responding actors follow specific protocols that set out their responsibilities in treating and providing services sensitive to the needs of victims of sexual assault.

You can contact members of the response team at the following numbers:

Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner,  Tina Godby-Ware:  575 430-9485
Otero County Sexual Assault Coordinator, Sandra Wilder:  575 437-7404
Response Team Coordinator,  Detective Lt. Lee Wilder:  575 439-4300

. . . . .

The SART presentation was  followed by a showing of  “V-Day, Until the Violence Stops”. “V-Day” is an international movement to stop violence against women (and men).  An Alamogordo stage presentation of “The Vagina Monologues” is slated for February of 2010.  Men are encouraged to attend.

August 21, 2009

MEXICO CITY (AP) – Mexico enacted a controversial law on Thursday decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and other drugs while encouraging government-financed treatment for drug dependency free of charge.

The law sets out maximum “personal use” amounts for drugs, also including LSD and methamphetamine. People detained with those quantities will no longer face criminal prosecution; the law goes into effect on Friday.

Anyone caught with drug amounts under the personal-use limit will be encouraged to seek treatment, and for those caught a third time treatment is mandatory – although no penalties for noncompliance are specified.

The maximum amount of marijuana considered to be for “personal use” under the new law is 5 grams – the equivalent of about four marijuana cigarettes. Other limits are half a gram of cocaine, 50 milligrams of heroin, 40 milligrams for methamphetamine and 0.015 milligrams of LSD.

LEAPing to legal drugs

(J.R. Oppenheim/Daily News)

Drug warriors from across the country are banding together to ask people to support the legalization of drugs.

Judges, prosecutors, prison wardens, corrections staff and police officers have organized to educate the public about the damage and cost of the war against illegal drugs.

The premise of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, or LEAP, is the war on drugs cannot be won and the benefit of regulating, taxing and controlling these substances far outweighs the cost in tax dollars and human lives trying to suppress them.

“We are spending more than $80 billion a year to arrest, prosecute, and incarcerate people in the war on drugs,” said Mike Jones, a speaker for LEAP who was visiting Otero County during the county fair this weekend.

Jones, who now lives in Rancho de Taos, spent 20 years with the Gainesville, Fla. police department. His first year there was spent as an undercover narcotics agent, and his last three years were as deputy chief of police.

“It was obvious to me the effort to control drugs was doomed to fail,” he said. “It was impossible to achieve. We were spending time dealing with narcotics when we could have been using resources in different ways.”

Jones said his anti-drug war position was not popular in Florida.

A few years ago, after he retired to New Mexico, Jones found LEAP on the Internet, joined the cause, contributed, bought bumperstickers and volunteered for the speakers bureau.

“After 40 years of fighting the drug war, drugs are cheaper, stronger and easier to get than ever,” Jones said. “So after 40 years we haven’t achieved our goals. Any company failing at goals and objectives for 40 years wouldn’t be in business.”

Over that 40-year time period, Jones said, violence associated with drugs has continued to escalate. He said it’s like a chess match with the good guys coming up with new ways to fight and the bad guys matching by coming up with violent solutions every time.

More money poured into the drug war means “more troops, more guns, more violence and the drugs continue to flow,” Jones said.

By legalizing and regulating drug use, not only would the violence be eliminated, but negative health issues would be reduced, impurities and mystery substances would be eliminated, Jones said.

The first step, he added, is for lawmakers and policy makers to take swift action.

“Citizens need to advise their representatives to end the insanity and move forward,” he said.

The goal of LEAP is to education people on the issue, Jones said.

“This is not a partisan issue,” he said. “It effects everyone. One of our members will tell you his views are just to the right of Atilla the Hun but drugs need to be legal.”

LEAP does not advocate the use of legal or illegal drugs, Jones said.

“We believe that [it] is a personal decision attached to personal responsibility.”
Contact Elva K. Österreich at eosterreich@alamogordonews.com.

In spite of the nationwide prohibition of street drugs, New Mexico and Otero County, as well as the rest of the United States, has a persistently growing drug problem with increasing numbers of younger students using drugs and alcohol.

With that is the typically disastrous results of addiction, incarceration, unintended pregnancies, failing grades and school drop-outs. While education and law enforcement are making strides in stopping the illegal drug trade while educating our youth about the consequences of drug use, drug and alcohol use continues to be a devastating problem, suggesting once again that peer-pressure can be a stronger force than education.

Making drugs illegal has, no doubt, been a deterrent to the vast majority of Americans. On the other hand, this has put the burden of the drug war on law enforcement and the judicial system, especially since 1986 when Congress enacted mandatory minimum sentencing laws, which mandated judges to deliver fixed sentences to individuals convicted of the crime of addiction, regardless of culpability or other mitigating circumstances.

Overwhelmingly, drug defendants 85 percent of them are nonviolent, according to Families Against Mandatory Minimums. Yet many mostly minorities and the poor are convicted of felonies and receive mandatory minimum sentences of five to 10 years or more. Also, those addicted at the time of their incarceration are generally still addicted upon release and still need treatment.

While giving a big boost to the private prison industry, incarcerating drug offenders is expensive for the tax payer. In New Mexico, the average cost of incarceration is $30,000 per inmate per year. The average cost of probation and parole in New Mexico is $1,533 per person per year. According to a 1998 study conducted at the Brown University Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies, the average cost for drug treatment per year is between $1,800 for regular outpatient care and $6,800 for long-term residential care.

For each person that receives treatment, rather than being incarcerated, New Mexico could save between $22,000 and $27,000 per year (prison savings less probation/parole and treatment costs), according to the Drug Policy Alliance.

The American Medical Association has given formal recognition to the disease concept regarding addiction since 1956. Medically, addiction is classified as a chronic disease similar to other chronic diseases such as Type II diabetes, hypertension, asthma and cardiovascular disease. Research conducted by the National Institute on Drug Abuse has shown that they all have similar relapse rates.

Addiction is a chronic, relapsing brain disorder that should be managed with all the tools at medicine’s disposal. While lifestyle choices may be a contributing factor in diabetes, lung cancer or cardiac disease and is the only factor in an addict’s first use. No one regards lifestyle choice as a reason to withhold treatment for any of these conditions, except for addiction.

Just as it takes an average of seven attempts for a smoker to quit tobacco, we should understand that relapse is an integral part of the disease of any addiction. We should treat the addict with the same care and compassion we treat diabetes or cardiac patients struggling to make prescribed lifestyle changes.
Ken Nicholson represents Peace & Justice, of La Luz. This column is provided as a service of the Otero County Community Health Council and the Alamogordo Daily News as a way to provide the latest in health and wellness information, services and events. This column is submitted by OCCHC partners and does not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the OCCHC.

Giving credit where credit is due while holding my nose, Glenn Beck has shown a rare moment of intelligence and sanity in his interview with Andres Rozental, former Foreign Minister of Mexico.

I will, however, question the Fox News statistic stating that US marijuana use is down 24% since 1998.

One of the tenants of capitalism is that the free market will regulate prices for a commodity. I personally don’t think that health should be a commodity, but some do, maybe even yourself.

If consumers get together in the “free market” and decide to start a health insurance cooperative and influence the price of health to the consumers’ advantage by initiating a new payment system, isn’t that capitalism in action?

And if health consumers decide that it would be to their advantage to enlist the aid of government in getting this new payment system in place and making it the law of the land, shouldn’t that be ok and within the functions of capitalism.

This is, by the way what the corporate health insurance lobby did when they wanted government help in deregulating their business.  Shouldn’t we be able to do this too? Please excuse my ignorance, but shouldn’t we be allowed to implement a health care payment system that is to our advantage?

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