Brittney Griner: Russian Hostage or American Pothead?

The fact of the matter is that there is no “global government”, at least not yet and especially if Russia can help it per President Putin’s latest condemnation of this American plot on Thursday while speaking to top parliamentary representatives, so there’s no genuine reason for Americans to expect other countries to have the same liberal laws towards cannabis as they do.

WNBA star Brittney Griner pleaded guilty on Thursday to charges of attempting to smuggle cannabis oil into Russia, where she was living after earlier signing a contract with a national basketball team. The US decried her detention in mid-February as supposedly being politically motivated, an allegation that Russia has fiercely denied. The 31-year-old athlete is now facing up to a decade behind bars, which has prompted speculation among some that she might be swapped for American-imprisoned Russian arms trafficker Viktor Bout due to the US public’s growing interest in her case.

Some remain convinced that she’s a so-called “Russian hostage” captured on the orders of President Putin himself in order to create the conditions for proposing such a swap for his famous citizen, yet that’s not an accurate reflection of reality if one looks at the facts as they objectively exist. Griner pleaded guilty to being caught with cannabis oil in her luggage after arriving at a Russian airport from abroad, which is literally the dictionary definition of drug smuggling. Russia has extremely strict laws against this and all illegal substances like cannabis in general, hence why she’s facing 10 years in jail.

Had she not sought to smuggle drugs into Russia, she wouldn’t have been arrested and could have continued living her new life there without incident. Regrettably, she’s clearly a pothead because only someone with a psychological addiction to cannabis would consider breaking Russia’s extremely strict laws against this substance, not to mention by smuggling it into the country from abroad. These indisputable facts discredit the false claims that she’s a so-called “hostage” and prove that she’s simply someone who’s facing justice for the crime that she committed.

Having said that, it’s also understandable why many Americans would be surprised by the stiff sentence that she’s possibly facing. Cannabis isn’t considered a “drug” among many in the country anymore and quite a few states have even decriminalized it. In their minds, nobody should be arrested for carrying a miniscule amount of that substance, even if they were smuggling it across international borders. Nevertheless, they should also acknowledge that Russia is a sovereign country with its own laws that it very strictly enforces, especially regarding drugs.

The arrogance attitude of some Americans – not Griner per se – that other countries should comply with their domestic legislation on whatever the issue may be is further proof of how deeply rooted the discredited supremacist ideology of “American Exceptionalism” has become. On the one hand, many Americans are angry whenever immigrants come to their country and break the law with the false expectation that their new homeland’s are the same as their own, yet these same Americans also do that too when they’re abroad or at least expect other countries not to react whenever it happens.

The fact of the matter is that there is no “global government”, at least not yet and especially if Russia can help it per President Putin’s latest condemnation of this American plot on Thursday while speaking to top parliamentary representatives, so there’s no genuine reason for Americans to expect other countries to have the same liberal laws towards cannabis as they do. Simply put, Griner broke a law that in her mind probably wasn’t all that big of a deal but which is actually a major crime from the perspective of Russia’s national legislation.

She’s an American pothead, not a Russian hostage, and is presently going through the legal process to account for the crime that she committed. It’s possible that she might eventually be swapped for Bout, which would be more than a fair exchange to be honest since she still has the rest of her life ahead of her and is reportedly in pretty good health while he’s already old and in declining health after having been locked up for over a decade already. The US would therefore do well to seriously consider this scenario, which could also provide a mild boost to Biden’s sagging popularity ahead of the midterms.


By Andrew Korybko
Source: OneWorld

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