>What are we going to do about all of the victims of the Drug War sitting in jail while weed entrepreneurs make bank amid the Green Rush?
This is one of the particularly nasty bits of hypocrisy our society has allowed to flourish over the past decade. We now have a situation where (almost exclusively rich white men) are making millions of dollars selling legal marijuana on an industrial scale, as red state prisons sit full of petty dime bag dealers (overwhelmingly people of color) doing decades of hard time for something that is not even a crime a few hundred miles away.
Massachusetts will give priority in getting licenses to marijuana retailers that employ people with prior drug convictions. additionally, if the owners (or immediate family members) themselves have drug convictions there is assistance with taxes, accounting, and so on along with help soliciting investment.
a lot of this also applies, with slight differences, to people regardless of conviction history who have lived for a long time in "areas of disproportionate impact".
i hope these provisions succeed in their goals and become the norm for other states that want to legalize cannabis.
Drug related convictions are really mostly drug-related plea deals.
We know for sure that the convicts thought it safer to go to prison on drug charges than to go to court. We don't actually know whether they broke some other laws, and the DA simplified the paperwork. Seems to me that we ought to know this, before deciding what to do.
I like the idea of a justice system where all trials are public and you're tried for the crime you actually committed. But that ship sailed a long time ago, in the US -- it's something like 95% plea deals now. Only we pay lip service to old ideas.
Under the current system, it seems to me that plea bargains act as contracts "I agree to serve X years & not go to court", despite being phrased as "I admit guilt for Y crime" on paper.
Of course people actually convicted of crime Y also exist. I'm just surprised that this whole thread assumes that only they exist.
I would too but does this happen with other crimes when the law changes? I would hope it's automatically applied for everything that becomes legal. Being convicted of a drug crime isn't more unjust than for having gay sex or drinking alcohol.
But the reason we have laws isn't to stop people from breaking them, it's to stop people from doing $BadThing.
Breaking the law isn't itself immoral, it's just one person breaking someone elses rule. Who is to say the law itself wasn't immoral? Certainly the application of the law in this case has been wildly immoral.
There is a data point in "Person X broke a law Y times" but I don't think it's an important one. We all break laws, probably unknowingly.
Prior drug conviction is one thing, but Oakland has a pretty unbalanced system where you get an advantage by living in a high-drug-arrest area. That means the smartest people from the high-arrest area who are already advantaged by doing whatever they were doing to not get arrested are given a double advantage of priority access to a cannabis license. The real intention is racial discrimination but they probably can't do that so they found other ways to judge someone's race - income and neighborhood. It should be strictly limited to drug convicts/arrestees of all races, incomes, and suburbs, not just people who fit the same group as them.
That's a tough one. And I think these sentences need to be reviewed and some of them revoked.
However, the underlying problem was that these people who are currently in jail were doing something that was illegal at the moment. Their sentences need to be revised, but it's probably not something I'd exonerate from all guilt.
According to the Ex Post Facto law [1] definition, a court could issue amnesties or pardons for scenarios like this, but I don't think it would be an automatic process over all convictions.
Nixon advisor John Ehrlichman told a journalist that the main purpose of the War on Drugs was to attack Nixon's "enemies" and that they knew the WOD was based on lies about drugs:
> "You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar Left, and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
90% of the world's heroin supply is from the Poppy fields in Afghanistan, and everyone knows where those fields are. Do we (the USA) destroy those plants in our Drug War efforts... nah. Some reports say US troops even guard them.
I believe it was in the book "Everything We Had" (although I am not certain of the source, because I read about it a while ago) that the only reason we were in Nam, was so the CIA could protect the Poppy plants which they needed to fund their Black Ops.
This point is controversial, in, as far as I know, we have to take someone's word that Ehrlichman made this quote.
While Nixon is remembered for "war on drugs", the actual substance of his policies seems to be different than what people think it was:
>...Their consensus is that because he was dramatically expanding the U.S. treatment system (by 350% in just 18 months!) and cutting criminal penalties, he had to reassure his right wing that he hadn’t gone soft. So he laid on some of the toughest anti-drug rhetoric in history, including making a White House speech declaring a “war on drugs” and calling drugs “public enemy number one”. It worked so well as cover that many people remember that “tough” press event and forget that what Nixon did at it was introduce not a general or a cop or a preacher to be his drug policy chief but…a medical doctor (Jerry Jaffe, a sweet, bookish man who had longish hair and sideburns and often wore the Mickey Mouse tie his kids had given him).
> are currently in jail were doing something that was illegal at the moment.
"Sorry, we weren't enlightened 20 years ago, so you're going to stay in jail" is an embarrassing cop-out. This is a systematic flaw in the legal system, and is unjustified. If it took decades to figure out that marijuana was wrongfully illegal, then those persecuted under such a law should be removed from incarceration at once. How can it be any other way? This is common sense.
Keeping people in prison for actions now known to be harmless is a terrible and embarrassing flaw in moral structure.
Maybe if a law is found outright unconstitutional, sure, exonerate those who are serving time for it.
This isn't the case with marijuana. No conclusion has been reached that it is "wrongfully illegal," it's just not something we want to continue prosecuting for.
This does not excuse the actions of those currently in prison for drug offenses-- we aren't punishing them because marijuana is/was illegal, we're punishing them because they decided they didn't have to abide by the law at the time it existed.
> No conclusion has been reached that it is "wrongfully illegal,"
The same could be said about being black, or gay, or whatever.
I mean, if alcohol is a legal and regulated drug there is absolutely no reason marijuana shouldn't be too. This should be obvious to anyone who's drank till they passed out and also smoked weed till they passed out.
> we're punishing them because they decided they didn't have to abide by the law at the time it existed.
Should we punish lawmakers for implementing oppressive laws which prevented good people from pursuing viable businesses? Why can't there be accountability in the reverse direction?
We can't criminalise making mistakes, even if it is lawmakers who are making them.
I see wisdom in a general amnesty for light drug crimes if it is decriminalised; but it isn't like there is a double standard being applied here. This is how a fair legal system works - the consequences of your actions are clearly known when you act, and you face the consequences of your actions once the legal system catches up to you.
you are at once arguing "we can't criminalise making mistakes" and "you face the consequences of your actions when the legal system catches up to you"
The first you apply to the elites, and the second to everyone else.
Only in the case of the elites are we talking about serious, intentional, and known in advance to be illegitimate, irreparable harm to millions of people's lives.
But its just a "mistake", but you demand those who perpetuated victimless crimes continue to suffer.
There's a difference between a mistake and violating the law. If the lawmakers have knowingly voted for an unconstitutional law, they should be persecuted, because they violated the law. If, on the other hand, they had merely voted for an unwise law, it's a mistake that shouldn't be persecuted.
Also, I find it curious that you single out lawmakers and forget the public that voted them in on anti-drug platform. Should we persecute all Nixon voters as well, for example?
Actually, you'd be keeping people in prison who you know have a disregard for the law, and decide for themselves what they think is okay. They are criminals, they broke the law at the time, and as such, are people that deserve to spend time in prison.
Of course, that's a very broad way to think of it. I'm sure for this particular topic there are lots of cases of outright discrimination which means people are serving sentences for marijuana-related laws that just aren't helpful to society at all (probably detrimental).
So, you may be right regarding this particular law, however, I think it is a very dangerous precedent to simply pardon anyone who committed a crime, for which that act is now legal.
If someone believes something that's currently illegal should be made legal, there are non-anarchist ways to deal with it than simply disregarding authority and committing a crime.
You can apply the same logic toward civil disobedience and people ignoring unjust laws during the civil right movement era or ghandi's era.
I think many would agree that kind of 'law breaking' should be cleared, and they apply the same logic to non-violent drug offences.
There is also a good segment who were forced into plea bargains due to the structure of the US legal system, the pattern of racism in arrests, convictions, evidence planting and so on. We know a chunk of those people are in jail for bullshit reasons, and thus the push towards releasing these people and removing the records.
What is this dangerous precedent? I struggle to think of a reasonable hypothetical scenario where it is just to continue punishing someone for something which isn't a crime. On the other hand, there are actual thousands of people locked in confined spaces for acts that society no longer believes merits locking people in confined spaces.
But, you say, they are the kind of people who disregard the law so we should keep them there anyway. They are in prison because of a specific crime, not their general audacity to defy the state. Imprisoning someone because of an error and continuing to do so after it has been realized serves no societal purpose and is a cruel and excessive use of force.
Marijuana was explicitly prosecuted [edit: criminalized] more aggressively to target certain groups of people. https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich... The laws were never just and that's why the "criminals" should be exonerated.
Not if the law is corrupt. Would you call people who "committed" same sex intercourse criminals if the place they did it had such laws that it was a "crime" to do so? What about people of which presence was declared unlawful because of their race and administered death penalty on the spot?
I've been thinking about that too. In Virginia we had a long-time sheriff who was a homosexual and for most of his office, homosexual acts were serious felonies. He'd also been brought up on charges of kidnapping and some kind of attempted sodomy - while in office - but to deal with this they moved the trial to a rural town with an all white jury who would see the nonwhite victim in a predictable way. So much for equally applicable protection of and liability to the laws. Political patronage trumped the rule of law here.
It's a tricky subject though. In the US, it's been used to bring judgements closer to what we consider legal today, like refusing to convict on the Fugitive Slave Act or alcohol control laws during prohibition. But there are also cases of all white juries refusing to convict for hate crimes despite obvious evidence.
Should that maxim become universal standard, I don't know that we would be better. I think you could make a case that at some level, every single law is corrupt, especially if we allow for relativism (every law will be in someone's opinion, corrupt). The word loses all meaning at that point.
I think reasonable people can tell the difference between something they wouldn't personally do and something that should be illegal because it hurts other people. There's not really a slippery slope in GP's argument.
The point of the discussion, that we're keeping a bunch of people locked up for violating laws that we have recently decided were unjust, isn't relativistic at all. In a just society those people would be freed immediately.
I agree with you, but just because we believe that doesn't make it common sense or "just." To someone else, the idea that someone who broke the law would be released simply because the law changed is a violation of justice (the ex post facto argument). The fact that I personally think it's an unjust outcome to leave them in jail (or throwing them in jail in the first place), doesn't mean that my opinion is the only correct one (I'm not a strict moral relativist, but I concede they have some good points).
There are some values more fundamental than others. One might be that inconsistency or hypocrisy is bad.
One might stipulate that whether marijuana should be illegal isn't an absolute that can never change.
But if it is in accordance with our values that it should be legal now, and this is our best attempt at instituting just laws, then leaving people in jail for reasons we don't currently think are valid is relatively worse than any arbitrary rule about drugs.
Just because you don't know for sure what is truly and absolutely right doesn't mean you can't stop doing things you know are truly and absolutely wrong.
Agreed, I think this is where I generally fall as well. Pragmatism as a philosophical discipline is often criticized as lacking a purity, but at some point we have to stop philosophizing and actually make policy.
I think a lot of nasty laws we have are a consequence of voters not being able to distinguish between “I don’t like this” and “this should be illegal for everyone“
> people who are currently in jail were doing something that was illegal at the moment
But consider that their actions are the reason why marijuana is becoming legal. The public sentiment against the War on Drugs is partly or mostly due to outrage the public felt at long sentences for possessing or dealing in marijuana. The people who did the most to get the laws overturned (even though they did it unwittingly) do not benefit from the changes. Everyone should benefit from the relaxed laws going forward except for the people who suffered to make it possible?
I believe it is morally wrong to keep people imprisoned for actions that are now legal, especially given the viciousness of our penal system. This is a great injustice of our time.
If you simply follow the basic compassionate principle that you should lock up as few people as necessary for as short a time as necessary to maintain the law then the answers are obvious for both cases:
If someone committed an act which was illegal at the time and is now legal, they should be freed.
If someone committed an act which was legal at the time and it is now illegal, they should not be prosecuted.
They're not two sides of the same coin at all.
EDIT: This compassionate principle is known as "lex mitior", which simply means that you should apply the mildest version of the law (from the perspective of the accused) in these cases. This is also in line with the widely accepted innocent-until-proven-guilty principle.
I don't see them as the same at all. If something is made legal, it indicates that the act is OK and that the person should not _continue_ to be punished. On the other hand, people should only be prosecuted for acts that were illegal at the time they were committed - it isn't equitable to prosecute people under laws they were not subject to at the time of the action, and even on a practical level it is necessary for maintaining trust in the law.
Would you hold the same position if instead of being imprisoned for drugs, they were imprisoned for homosexuality or marrying someone of a different race?
Depends on what you view the law for. Personally I think the law is a tool that acts as a proxy for group morality, and is useful as much as it serves that aim. The law itself is not sacrosanct and can be wrong, which is why we revise it. Under this view, those who broke a law we then get rid of should be released, as we have agreed that the law was wrong, we also have agreed that they were right. If the law itself is not put on a pedestal, then if the law was wrong then those people who broke it should also no longer be regarded as criminals as we are simultaneously admitting that it was also wrong to have labelled them as such in the first place.
Ex post facto applies both ways - you can do something legal today and be punished in the future if it becomes illegal (UK tax law has some good examples of this).
It would be inconsistent to say past crimes should be revoked if the law changes, but present legal acts cannot be retrospectively classed as illegal if the law changes in the future. That's a contradiction I'm sure many people operate under however (myself included).
Ex post facto is not required to operate the same way for new laws vs laws being removed. In fact, there are good reasons for when criminal laws are changed to automatically review people prosecuted under them. The law was made for people, people weren't made for the law.
There doesn't appear to be any law of physics or higher power that enforces us to make these two things consistent, why would you assume they have to be?
This is a pretty popular item to bring to these discussions. I'd be interested in seeing some actual statistics though as to number of those incarcerated for marijuana-related crimes.
I'm not questioning one way or the other, but I'd like to see some statistics to better understand this.
"Marijuana arrests now account for over half of all drug arrests in the United States. Of the 8.2 million marijuana arrests between 2001 and 2010, 88% were for simply having marijuana."
So that's 7.2 million arrests simply for possession.
In 2010 police arrested someone for weed-related things every 37 seconds.
However it is important to note that an arrest is not a conviction. Most are fined or are placed into community supervision. About 40,000 inmates of state and federal prison have a current conviction involving marijuana.
That's a lot, and there are likely a lot more that ended up in prison due to problems with having an arrest record (that should also be wiped imo) so that is a lower limit but the point is that overall - even without a ton of active prisoners there is still a massive effect of all those arrests.
Also it's worth noting that black people are nearly 4 times as likely to be arrested for these things even though usage rates are the same across races.
I know that this is not a good sample by any means, but from my own life thus far here in the UK as someone with a middle class accent and pale skin tone, who smokes a bit of pot and these days stay out of trouble, however used to get exceedingly drunk and got into numerous stupid drunk incidents in public, I have been held in police station cells 6 times and officially cautioned twice.
2 of the times in the station were alcohol related, everything else is weed from stop and search. One thing to note, as soon as I opened my mouth in each incident, there was no further threat from the police of taking it to court, despite me having no decent legal representation. Sounding posh goes very far with the police here.
I always want to know how many are really in for marijuana, as opposed to this being a plea deal for something else.
Since something like 95% of convictions are plea deals, it seems to me that the official charges probably aren't a great guide to this, at all.
My example is this: the police want to crack down on a gang, and have some informants. They round up all the foot soldiers, who are standing duty on street corners etc. To put them away on conspiracy charges will be hard work, and will expose informants. But they don't have to -- once the gangsters are scared of having last week's murder pinned on them, they'll sign anything with a few years sentence. And so they get locked up for possession.
Anyone have any idea how to get a handle on how big this effect is? While the rest of the thread seems to believe 100% of soft drug convictions are for drugs, it seems equally plausible to me that this could be close to 0%. How would we tell?
The system should not get to have it both ways - they shouldn’t get to fail to prosecute people for things, then argue that actually everybody should be in prison anyway because of the things they were never convicted of.
OK, but aside from discussing "should", I'd like to find information about "is" first.
My impression is that what I describe basically is the system right now. But I'd be interested to find ways to understand better whether this impression is true.
The argument is that "is" is entirely irrelevant, because as far as anyone is concerned, under the law, these people have been convicted of drug crimes. There is no way to tell, short of actually attempting to convict them of something else, whether they're guilty of something else under the law - and so, following the principles of most sane countries, they're by definition innocent of those other crimes.
If the prosecutors wanted to convict them of something else, they should've followed the procedure to do so - to refuse to prosecute and then to claim that people are actually guilty of something they've never been tried for is something dictatorships and fascist states do.
I'm very interested in "is" questions even for dictatorships. I think it's worth knowing how the world is really running, even bits of it I violently disagree with.
I was truly astonished to learn that plea deals were such a huge majority of convictions. The negotiations which lead to them are entirely behind closed doors. So it looks to me like the US has had an almost complete rewrite of its justice system, while preserving a little of the old UI. I would love to be wrong about this, but actually struggle to find good information (hence my question). But supposing that I am right, do you really think this would not be worth understanding? Would pretending that we are running the old system be a good path towards changing it back?
If you want to answer the question of "should we let people solely convicted of drug crimes free", then the point is that whether it might be possible to convict them of something else is irrelevant - at present, they're innocent of those crimes.
If you want to discuss plea bargains in general, you're wildly off-topic in a harmful way - there's context in this discussion that you've decided to ignore without saying so, and in doing so, appeared to support the argument that people shouldn't be let free because they might actually be guilty of something else (that they've never been convicted of). I can promise you I'm not the only person who read your comment and thought you were saying that.
Well we're all off topic considering that the headline is about dogs' sense of smell! But I thought the point of such discussions was to exchange information... maybe other smart people stop by here, who know things I don't.
We aren't gathered here to vote on the fate of these people. And I resent the idea that every comment needs an elaborate bow to your preferred policies, elaborate avoidance of "harmful" ways to read things I apparently said "without saying" them.
Actually, believe it or not, public opinion is a huge driver of public policy. As a result, when speaking in public with the opportunity to influence people's opinions, one needs to be careful not to influence people's opinions in a way that may result in support for harmful public policy.
To say otherwise, in my opinion, is to say that speech has little value - in which case why does the US protect it so highly?
I hope that public opinion will be swayed most strongly by facts, not by random internet guys’ opinions. This got started with pugworthy’s request for numbers above, and I think the facts I’m asking for are relevant.
I actually worry that this plea bargain business is a sign that we have implemented a justice system much more scary than what everyone else is discussing. A system which locks people up for having a little weed is bad... and also pretty trivial to work around. A system which locks people up for reasons known only to the DA, who is free to lie and threaten behind closed doors, is fucking terrifying.
Do we even know which of these systems we have? That's what I was hoping people could help me understand.
One interesting thing to look up is the places you can still get a major felony for small amounts less than the amount you're legally allowed to carry in some state.
> We now have a situation where (almost exclusively rich white men) are making millions of dollars selling legal marijuana on an industrial scale, as red state prisons sit full of petty dime bag dealers (overwhelmingly people of color) doing decades of hard time for something that is not even a crime a few hundred miles away.
While I am supportive of freeing low level nonviolent offenders and sealing their records, I think the insinuation here that those locked up somehow deserve the profits from the new industry is silly. Running a black market business is very different from running a real business. Look at what's happening in Humboldt county to see that just because the product is the same the business is not.
The legal repercussion for getting involved in selling Marijuana at industrial scale has diminished substantially within certain avenues. Nobody is preventing or encouraging anybody from a particular race to capitalize off of that opportunity.
There is nothing hypocritical at work whatsoever. The activity has become less and less criminal, so people with a lower threshold for criminal repercussion have become more involved as the threshold lowers. What is hypocritical about that?
It's like saying that it's hypocritical that people who drank when prohibition was active were in jail, and then people who drank after it was repealed were not in jail. I fail to see the hypocrisy. I also fail to see where race comes into play.
Your way of viewing things is so foreign to me (and I'm a foreigner so makes sense I guess). I think prisons should be all about rehabilitation. If you crime is selling drugs, and selling drugs is no longer something we train people out of... What's the point of staying in prison?
Race does come into play as well, because your argument seems to be that it's "fair" that these people are still imprisoned. But by and large, they were set up by a society that left them few other choices, which is far from fair. Refusing to release them is tantamount to denying the error of our past ways. It was always a trap, ever since the lies that enabled marijuana prohibition in the first place.
It's not hard to miss if you don't bother to get beyond "systemic racism" as a justifiable and primary explanation for the disparity in racial outcomes. If you are interested in a more wholistic understanding, then you should be aware that it, like most social phenomenon, is very complicated.
You hear things like "crack carries a much heavier sentencing than powder cocaine, because crack is done by black people and powder cocaine is done by white people." It sounds like it might be a racist policy, but it simply is not. First of all, the drugs are not demographically comparable. Crack is a street drug, cocaine is a white collar and party drug. There are vastly differing levels of criminality surrounding them. Crystal meth, a drug much more comparable socio-economically to crack cocaine, not only carries the exact same federal sentencing as crack, but is predominately done by white people.
Another might be if you look at the different rates of incarceration for drug offenses by racial breakdown. Black people and hispanics are clearly over-represented as compared with their representation of the population. They are also, however, over-represented in their involvement in drug criminality. That isn't to say that their level of criminality is exactly proportional to their over-representation, because they do get incarcerated at disproportionately higher rates, but it is important. Where the disproportionality manifests can be found in statistics that while entirely true, often make no attempt at controlling for location or socioeconomic factors. For example, black people with identical drug usage as white people for something like Marijuana encounter much higher rates of incarceration. It sounds racist, but, surprise, is complicated.
Geographically and socioeconomically, there are massive differences in average black and average white distributions. Black Americans tend to have disproportionately higher representation in heavily policed urban areas, white Americans tend to have disproportionately higher representation in suburban areas. The extent to which this is motivated by racist policy is also, as is expected, very complicated, but should not be conflated with differing outcomes in criminality and arrests.
If you want to go over specific statistics, I'm happy to, but I don't find the explanation that systems are just inherently racist to be a satisfactory explanation for complicated problems, because systems that are inherently racist have trivially simple solutions. We are not dealing with the Civil Rights Movement 2.0.
Would love to see more direct sources/citations, but I thought this reddit thread on what happened to victims jailed to be interesting, most of those individuals still had to serve out their time as the law was repealed vs being ruled unconstitutional
Marijuana is illegal everywhere in the US. Weed growers exist and make millions only because the DOJ has chosen to exercise discretion, which they can stop doing at any time.
When it’s actually legalized, nobody will be making money, as it’s an agricultural commodity that is pretty easy to grow.
In terms of justice for those who are incarcerated, all governors have pardon powers, and legislatures have the power to take actions as they deem appropriate. It is a political problem.
Growing weed may be easy, but it isn't that easy. Marijuana is a lot pickier about grow conditions than most people think (if you want a quality product at least. Crap weed is much easier to grow). It also takes several months from seed to being smoke/edible-making ready. Just the harvesting and curing process alone is a massive PITA.
There will always be a market for quality grown weed, just as much as you buy produce at the grocery store.
>When it’s actually legalized, nobody will be making money, as it’s an agricultural commodity that is pretty easy to grow.
When compared to other cash crops, remarkably easy to meet market demand on a per acre scale, which is a contributing factor to why it's still illegal, and when legalized, why the who, where and how much are so heavily regulated.
> red state prisons sit full of petty dime bag dealers
Does anyone know where to get at the raw statistics for this kind of information? So that we can figure out how many prisoners there are in red states vs. blue states for marijuana possession?
The states have unilaterally decided to legalize while pushing extensive regulation on the market. This raises the barrier to entry and has resulted in those who can afford to comply, primarily white businessmen, coming out on top.
In places like California, these regulations have resulted in the black market continuing to exist en force.
I was under the impression that drug dogs we're mostly ineffective[1] anyway so this shouldn't be an issue. I guess this article would imply I'm misinformed. I'd welcome correction.
To put an even finer point on it, drug dogs don't need to establish probable cause, and they don't, they just provide a back door around the 4th Amendment.
So it's not the difficulty of untraining dogs, but the difficulty of untraining the handlers. Or the reason untraining drug dogs is difficult is that they hadn't actually been trained in the first place.
It's my understanding that that's trained out of them, and they are trained to stop and sit to signal their handler that they smell something (or whatever). This raises the question whether K9 "bite their arm off"[1] dogs are also drug dogs. I'm thinking "no," but I don't know.
Considering that laws are 'supposed to be' part of the structure that helps society be pleasant/bearable for its members...
On the one hand you have people who inhale smoke from a burning plant despite there being a law against doing so.
On the other hand you have people who want to lock a human being in a cage, sometimes for the majority of their lives, because of the abstract notion that they 'broke a law'; no matter what that law was or whether it's reasonable or justified.
I know which kind of person I'd rather be surrounded by in society. Seeing the way people toss around the concept of incarceration so lightly is somewhere between monstrous and disgusting to me.
While smoking marijuana is victimless crime selling it is certainly not. There are a lot of laws one might need to break to successfully sell drugs. Also a lot of convicts financially supported Mexican cartels and bear some responsibility for their crimes.
At the end of the day they new all the risks, chose to play this game to make fast easy money, and they lost. It is like casino where you could win $5M or lose and spend 5 years in prison. Now letting the winners to keep the money but let losers go would not be exactly fair.
Yeah, I assumed this was the standard mode of operation -- when officers are "sure" there are drugs, then bring in the dog as an "impartial observer" to show probable cause since everyone knows that dogs don't lie. Unless, of course, they are signaled to lie by their handler.
From context it seems to mean that cocaine itself isn't detectable, but that a person who has consumed cocaine can be detectable by odor. I can't find anything backing that up though.
and I don't see how drug dogs trained this way would help detect cocaine in, say, a suitcase, vs a person who had used cocaine but was carrying none with them.
That's how i read it at first, but it could also be that cocaine goes through fermentation during it's extraction, and that if that's done near human settlements, air pollution contaminates the final product, making it detectable.
Cocaine hydrochloride's vapor pressure is negligible, AFAIK. I always thought that the "smell of cocaine" is actually the smell of solvent traces or other impurities left from typical production routes.
> You can’t retrain dogs when it comes to marijuana,” adds James Woodford, a forensic chemist who created and patented the odor of cocaine that serves as the industry standard when it comes to training dogs to sniff out the substance.
That sounds like a fun job... I wonder how he did his research?
I am not sure retraining is necessary. Even in states where weed is legal, they probably want to clamp down on "illegal" (untaxed) weed. No one has to go to jail or even lose their stash - I expect a fine would suffice.
That pushes the question as to whether "regular" law enforcement would involve itself in weed searches or if a state revenue department would handle it. Moonshiners might have a useful perspective on this.
This is one of the particularly nasty bits of hypocrisy our society has allowed to flourish over the past decade. We now have a situation where (almost exclusively rich white men) are making millions of dollars selling legal marijuana on an industrial scale, as red state prisons sit full of petty dime bag dealers (overwhelmingly people of color) doing decades of hard time for something that is not even a crime a few hundred miles away.