Who built
Seeds of Vice?

Seeds of Vice began with my life, but it is not built to depend on my testimony alone. My experience explains why I started the work. Evidence, primary sources, corrections, and an open public record govern what the institution asks others to believe.

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I learned pain before I had words for it.

A childhood fall broke my leg in several places and injured the base of my spine. The full consequences were not understood then. I grew up, worked, raised a family, and carried pain that became more severe and more complicated with time.

I have lived through multiple spinal fusions, failed relief, hardware complications, arthritis, sleepless nights, and years when hot water was the closest thing I had to dependable mercy. For a long time, pain divided my life into small pieces: the next hour, the next bath, the next position I might be able to tolerate.

I was told I was too young, too heavy, too healthy-looking, too complicated, too suspicious, or too dangerous to be trusted with meaningful control over my own pain. The reasons changed. The result did not. Decisions about my body were repeatedly treated as though they belonged to everyone except me.

I am still here. I am a husband, a father, an Oklahoma businessman, an author, and a man responsible for the consequences of his own choices. Pain has shaped my life, but it does not get to define my character.

I wrote my way out of silence.

I began writing because I needed to understand what had happened to me. Then I kept writing because I wanted my daughters to have a record if they ever found themselves facing the same kind of fear, dependence, or institutional power.

I wrote what I had once been afraid to read, think, or say.

Somewhere along the way, I learned something about myself too:

That work became Seeds of Vice.

The poem is personal. It is not a threat, an instruction, or organizational doctrine. It is the clearest image I know for one part of my character: when a choice is reduced to surrendering my conscience or accepting the cost of refusal, I would rather bear the cost myself.

The line beneath all of my work

My moral position is simple: a harmless person must be left alone. When someone has caused no measurable physical or financial harm, the person who would coerce, punish, manipulate, or control them bears the burden of justification.

I do not argue that every drug is good. I do not argue that every decision is wise. Drugs are tools, and tools can be used well, badly, carefully, recklessly, legally, or illegally. I argue that human beings should be judged by what they actually do to others—not by a label, a prescription, a substance, a diagnosis, or the worst possibility someone can imagine.

I do not ask government to approve of me. I ask it to answer for the harm it causes harmless people. I do not ask anyone to abandon evidence, medicine, caution, or responsibility. I ask that those words not be used as disguises for unaccountable power.

From one man’s testimony to a public institution

Seeds of Vice grew beyond autobiography. It became a place to preserve public records, map authority, identify the people and agencies responsible for policy, distinguish documented fact from analysis, and turn suffering into peaceful, lawful, answerable requests.

My story is allowed to be personal. The institution’s claims are required to be verifiable. That separation matters. Personal experience can tell us where to look; it cannot excuse weak evidence. Conviction can sustain the work; it cannot replace a source.

• Primary sources come first. Laws, rules, board records, agency documents, court filings, and official statements should carry the record.
• Fact and analysis remain distinct. Readers should be able to see what the record proves, what it suggests, and what remains unknown.
• Corrections are part of the work. Accuracy matters more than protecting my pride.
• The method is peaceful and lawful. We identify authority, document outcomes, ask answerable questions, and preserve the response.

I have written books because a website can be changed, buried, filtered, or forgotten. A book becomes a durable record. A public archive gives other people somewhere to begin. Together, they let one life become evidence of a wider problem without pretending that one life proves everything.

Why I continue

I continue because I know what silence costs. I continue because people in pain are too often spoken about while being denied a meaningful place in the conversation. I continue because my daughters deserve to know that their father did not confuse obedience with goodness or fear with truth.

I am not interested in being another man’s soldier. I am not asking anyone to become mine. I want people to think clearly, examine the record, remain within the law, refuse dehumanization, and speak in their own names.

Seeds of Vice is the record of that effort: lived experience disciplined by evidence, moral conviction restrained by truth, and peaceful resistance made specific enough to answer.

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Kenneth L. Vice
Founder and publisher, Seeds of Vice
by Vice · The Sporting Gentleman