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This is just so far away from the world I'm living in.
In my city, people who have committed literally dozens of violent crimes are being released same day only to commit more offenses. Meanwhile, more than 1 in every 2000 people in my county died of a drug overdose last year, and drug use is practiced openly.
I am honestly starting to even doubt how many of the abuses of the War on Drugs even happened. Whenever I hear a story about "he dindu nothin', just some weed", you dig deeper and find a criminal with a rap sheet a mile long, and so they stick him with some trumped up drug charge. A bad thing? Possibly. But its a far cry from the paranoid fantasy that smoking a reefer could land you in prison for life.
The number of people in U.S. jails for drug possession approaches zero.
Let's not let more than 100,000 people die each year, and millions more become addicted because we're worried about very rare police or prosecutorial abuse. And if they really wanted to get you, they could get you for something else anyway.
FWIW, back in my youth in a deep Southern college town in the early 2010s the local cops still took the War on Drugs pretty seriously and weed was still very much illegal. I had multiple otherwise law-abiding friends get raided by the local narcotics task force and/or go to jail for simple possession. I myself had my apartment get raided by five undercover cops (aka. roided up thugs) because one of my retarded roommates sold a few Xanax pills to a confidential informant (I didn't go to jail because I didn't have anything illegal but it was a thoroughly unpleasant experience.).
Amusingly, aside from the driver's license impacts, the conditions to get a possession charge dismissed are virtually identical to those for a first offense DUI, aka. having to go through the local drug court's CLEAN program (at the cost of several grand). My buddy who'd been caught with a gram of weed and maybe drinks a six pack of beer a year was having to attend AA meetings.
The drug task force had their Pickett's Charge moment when they did a big raid on campus. They must've arrested a fed's kid or something because the FBI very quickly busted the former head of the force for embezzling seized funds and wound up throwing him in prison for a year.
A decade later and you can legally buy Delta 8 gummies that are vastly stronger than weed used to be (I don't habitually smoke weed, but the last time I took some of those gummies I was too fucked up to drive 14 hours later.), so I guess the cops gave up on weed enforcement, judging by how nonchalant the normies I know these days are about having it in their vehicles/on their person. Hell, one of the former cops who frequents the bar I work at usually has a weed vape on him.
I agree that what happened to your friends feels silly and excessive.
After all, what's wrong with a couple of nice college kids doing some party drugs, and maybe doing some light dealing on the side? The kids can handle it (usually) and then they'll grow up to be nice married men with nice white collar jobs. That's mostly true. I knew two kids who dealt drugs in college and they weren't complete fuckups.
But a lot of people can't handle drugs. You can see then stumbling around like zombies in pretty much every major city nowadays.
And so I'm willing to send a few nice college kids to AA for smoking a join if that means 100,000 people don't OD every year, with millions more lives ruined by addiction. Everything they said about the slippery slope was true after all.
And, honestly, the explosion of weed culture post-legalization is nothing to celebrate either.
I don't exactly disagree with you, nor am I a big fan of weed culture.
I was just pointing out that there were places that did take drug enforcement seriously (sort of...this was the height of the "pain as a fifth vital sign" era of narcotics prescriptions such that pills were everywhere), to the point of alienating the sort of nice white collar folks whose support is needed.
Personally, I wonder how much of the drug stuff is just a byproduct of the explosion in prescribing children drugs such as stimulants and antidepressants along with the "pain as a fifth vital sign" era of doctors dishing out benzos and oxys like candy. I joke that I've never cared for cocaine because it just feels like Ritalin on steroids but IMO it's kind of fucked that I was simultaneously on Ritalin and Zoloft at the age of nine years old (Mom doctor-shopped psychiatrists until she found one who would diagnose me with OCD because I was sad about losing everything in a house fire and vigilant about checking lint filters in dryers after that; the story was that our dryer had caught fire and burned our house down.). Meanwhile, back in the early 2010s I got a script for some variety of opioid after a very minor surgery (more than I got years later for getting all four wisdom teeth yanked out) without asking, much to my confusion as the procedure had completely fixed my pain problem. I wound up selling them to a coworker for beer money for his pill head girlfriend's "headaches".
I just don't see how you keep taboos over drugs when they're so commonly prescribed. I hear so many people talking about being on this or that psych drug that I feel like I'm the only one in the room who isn't on anything. Even the druggies I know still hold the stigma over meth and crack, but that didn't seem to stop meth from taking over much of rural America. Overdoses seem to be a fairly straightforward problem of opiates and especially fentanyl having an extremely low margin for user error, but supply interdiction seems to totally failed there as well. At the same time, while we could probably kill the market for that stuff by mass-legalizing safer stuff (as with alcohol; most people don't drink rotgut vodka but something like Bud Light or Whiteclaws), but we don't exactly want a mass opiate culture, do we?
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It turns out it's possible to make both types of errors. Anarcho-tyranny is nothing new. No, getting busted for smoking marijuana even when drug warriors were at their strongest wouldn't put you in prison for life. It would give you a quick ticket to the underclass however.
Because they always charge possession with intent to distribute, and the legal presumption is if you possess more than an absolutely trivial quantity you have intent to distribute.
This isn't that sort of abuse; it's not targeted. It's just the sort of thing where whatever goes into the system gets ground up. It's not rare; it's routine.
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