Who Breaks A Butterfly On A Wheel

1) Mr. Mick Jagger was convicted and sentenced to 3 months in prison for possession of 4 legally purchased amphetamine tablets from Italy, which he did not have a prescription for in Britain. 2) The drugs were not highly dangerous and were recommended as a travel sickness remedy. Many people could have unwittingly committed the same offense when traveling abroad. 3) The conviction was based solely on possession of the 4 tablets, though he was not charged with involvement in other drug offenses at the house. Justice requires his case to be treated separately. 4) It is unusual for first-time offenders of minor drug possession to receive imprisonment, but probation. Mr. Jagger's case involved a very mild class of

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Who Breaks A Butterfly On A Wheel

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Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel

Mr. Jagger has been sentenced to imprisonment for 3 months. He is appealing against conviction and sentence, and has been granted bail until the hearing of the appeal later in the year. In the
meantime the sentence of of imprisonment is bound to be widely discussed by the public. And the circumstances are sufficiently unusual to warrant such discussion in the public interest.

Mr. Jagger was charged with being in possession of four tablets containing amphetamine sulphate and methyl amphetamine hydrochloride; these tablets had been bought perfectly legally in
Italy, and brought back to this country. They are not a highly dangerous drug, or in proper dosage, a dangerous drug at all. They are a Benzedrine type and the Italian manufacturers
recommend them both as a stimulant and as a remedy for travel sickness.

In Britain, it is an offence to possess these drugs without a doctors prescription. Mr. Jagger's doctor says that he knew and had authorized their use, but he did not give a prescription for them
as indeed they had already been purchased. His evidence was not challenged. This was, therefore, an offence of technical character which before this case drew the point to public attention any
honest man might have been liable to commit. If after his visit to the pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury had bought propriety air sickness pills on Rome Airport and imported the unused
tablets into Britain on his return, he would of risked committing precisely the same offence. No one who has ever traveled and bought proprietary drugs abroad can be sure that he has not
broken the law.

Judge Block directed the jury that the approval of a doctor is not a defence in law to the charge of possessing drugs without a prescription, and the jury convicted. Mr. Jagger was not charged
with complicity in any other drug offence that occurred in the same house. They were separate cases, and no evidence was produced to suggest that he knew Mr. Fraser had heroin tablets or
that the vanishing Mr. Snidermann had cannabis resin. It is indeed no offence to be in the same building or the same company as people possessing or even using drugs, nor could it reasonably
be made an offence. The drugs that Mr. Jagger had in his possession must therefore be treated on their own as a separate issue from the other drugs that the other people may have had in their
possession at the same time. It may be difficult for lay opinion to make this distinction clearly, but obviously justice cannot be done if one man is to be punished for a purely contingent
association with someone else's offence.

We have therefore, a conviction against Mr. Jagger purely on the grounds that he possessed four Italian pep pills, quite legally bought, but not legally imported without a prescription. Four is
not a large number. This is not a quantity which a pusher of drugs would have on him, nor even the quantity one would expect in an addict. In any case Mr. Jagger's career is obviously one that
does involve great personal strain and exhaustion; his doctor says that he approves the occasional use of these drugs, and it seems likely that similar drugs would have been prescribed if there
was a need for them. Millions of similar drugs are prescribed in Britain every year, and for a variety of conditions. One has to ask, therefore, how it is that this technical offence, divorced as it
must be from other people's offences, was thought to deserve the penalty of imprisonment. In the courts at large it is most uncommon for imprisonment to be imposed on first offenders where
the drugs are not major drugs of addiction and there is no question of drug traffic. The normal penalty is probation, and the purpose of probation is to encourage the offender to develop his
career and to avoid the drug risks in the future. It is surprising therefore that Judge Block should have decided to sentence Mr. Jagger to imprisonment, and particularly surprising as Mr.
Jagger's is about as mild a drug case as can ever have been brought before the courts.

It would be wrong to speculate on the judge's reasons, which we do not know. It is, however, possible to consider the public reaction. There are many people who take a primitive view of the
matter, what one might call a pre-legal view of the matter. That consider that Mr. Jagger has 'got what was coming to him.' They resent the anarchic quality of the Rolling Stones performances,
dislike their songs, dislike their influence on teenagers and broadly suspect them of decadence, a word used by Miss Monica Furlong in the Daily Mail.

As a sociological concern, this may be reasonable enough, and at an emotional level, it is very understandable, but it has nothing at all to do with the case. One has to ask a different question:
Has Mr. Jagger received the same treatment as he would have received if he had not been a famous figure, with all the criticism his celebrity has aroused? If a promising undergraduate had
come back from a summer visit to Italy with four pep pills in his pocket would it have been thought necessary to display him, handcuffed, to the public? There are cases in which a single
figure becomes the focus for public concern about some aspects of public morality. The Steven Ward case, with it's dubious evidence and questionable verdict, was one of them, and that
verdict killed Steven Ward. There are elements of the same emotions in the reactions to this case. If we are going to make any case a symbol of the conflict between the sound traditional values
of Britain and the new hedonism, then we must be sure that the sound traditional values include those of tolerance and equity. It should be the particular quality of British justice to ensure that
Mr. Jagger is treated exactly the same as anyone else, no better and no worse. There must remain a suspicion in this case that Mr. Jagger received a more severe sentence than would have been
thought proper for any purely anonymous young man.