One of the issues I've noticed. I can say from first hand experience that many wealthy people and VC's use drugs fairly frequently. I'm sure most of these arrests involve poor people though. You never hear about the wealthy folks being busted for drugs.
This is one of the travesties of drug enforcement and has compounded inequality in America. The imprisonment of the poor for nonviolent drug offenses continues today. That a wealthy drug user would laud this as a good outcome of drug policy is honestly flabbergasting, but perhaps shouldn’t be.
The problem isn't that we're throwing them in jail for no reason. The problem is we aren't throwing non-poor non-minorities in jail for the same reasons.
Most friends of mine regularly do drugs. Even the self made multi millionaires. None of them have been to jail. They aren't subject to the random ass searches like the poor are.
If things were different - if the millionaires were treated with the same suspect, you bet your ass these laws would change.
But they aren't. So the laws stay the same. And that's a problem.
That makes sense to me. Chasing consumers is a waste of time and money. The arrest itself might cause more societal damage than the drugs if it ruins people's lives or is used to target minorities.
There is no legal justification for criminalizing the use of any substance. We can put people in jail for armed robbery, why should a non-violent drug user be put in jail?
The problem with this is it's biased against poor people. Rich addicts can afford to only be users, but poor addicts are the ones that need to deal to support their habit. So if you jail dealers, you're disproportionately jailing poor people.
We could arrest them but not send them into prison. Drug use should be a misdemeanour offence that simply forces you into increasingly more intensive therapy, rather than going with the 'therapy' of jailtime and cold-turkey.
And yet here we are imprisoning people for simply using drugs. Whether you agree that's good or bad it should be obvious that criminal penalties for drug use at least disincentivize a lot of potential drug use.
I am extremely against criminalization for any drugs, regardless of their impact to the person. Yes, some drugs are horrible and people should not take them. That does not mean ruining their lives and imprisoning them is something to even consider. Especially given that their family's lives are impacted even more so from them being absent, and the worse yet the dark cloud that continues to follow them for the rest of their lives now that they have federal charges, which makes them discriminated against for employment and forces crime through desperation.
Harmful drugs and drug addiction should be treated through education, healthcare and community involvement. It actually disgusts me at this point that people think drug criminalization is a good thing despite what prisons are in much of the world.
Do you support throwing non-violent drug offenders in prison too? Or are you in only in favor of jailing rich people who might actually have enough leverage to prove in court that the law is unjust (or better yet, completely unconstitutional)?
All drug offenses are violent. Illegal drugs channel money into large organized crime syndicates that kill, torture, terrorize and maim people. Just because those people are brown, poor, and not Americans doesn't mean we should care less.
If you ask me, we need substantially more drug enforcement. There are severe inequalities in how we police for drugs that often result in only the poor and marginalized locked up. We need to refocus our drug war on the rich and powerful and put them in jail to, to make things more equal.
College students are surrounded by drugs. They flow so freely that it seems like prohibition isn't really working. People who want drugs can get them. I don't do them either, nor do I have the desire but it just seems like only the poor and disadvantaged drug users go to jail.
Yes, that's often the case. Many interests (alcohol, police, private prisons) gain revenue from all the 'drug crimes' that really shouldn't be treated as severely as they are. It's also a common excuse to arrest, search, and oppress minority groups while the affluent majority generally gets a pass.
Rich people get to use drugs all the time without even any worry of arrest.
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