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Mrgecko

I was just thinking about how you can get away with many illegal activities because the police and feds don't have sufficient power. The sale of fresh shrooms for example, it's obvious that they're going to be dried at home and consumed. Buying a bong with marijuana leaves on it, really, is the "tobaco" excuse believable?

Basically, there are many things that are illegal, but you're allowed to do anyways. I was just wonderinf what you all think about this. My opinion is that it gives the cops and courts too much flexability, leading to unfair treatment. But I still wonder why the government doesn't simply unify everything. Like, you can drive 10 over (it's official policy in some states not to pull people over until they break the limit by 10) and not get in trouble, but 11 and your in trouble. Why don't they just add 10 to the speed limit, and anyone going over that is liable to be fined?

Is this just another illogical thing about out government or is it by design?

 

Buzzby

10% of burglaries are ever solved. This doesn't mean that the police don't care about burglaries. If you get caught you'll get prosecuted.

The off-topic (we deal only with marijuana here) drugs you mentioned are just as illegal if they're fresh or dried in the US. I know it's different in different countries.


You're not "allowed" to do anything that's illegal, except driving somewhat over the speed limit. It's all a matter of whether or not you get caught doing it.


Because everyone would drive ten mph over that limit and there aren't enough cops to bust them all. Where is it "official policy" to allow people to drive 10 mph over the speed limit? AFAIK, it's at the discretion of the officer. The current system works pretty well. Why screw with it?

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Cassius

I haven't heard of any official policies like you mentioned, but if they exist it's probably due to poor police coverage of the area (ratio of citizen vehicles to police vehicles), a simple case of the police wanting to devote their resources to the problems they can do the most good toward. It's the same reason some areas have chosen to make marijuana a low priority, and thus although it's still "illegal", you may not get arrested (probably just confiscate the weed) even though the officer could in fact arrest you if he wanted to.

Furthermore, I think the circumstances dictate the variance from "strict" enforcement of the law more than the locality does. Part of this relates back to population density vs police coverage (example: during rush hour in major cities, you're often less likely to get pulled over for speeding than during the day), but part of it also relates to jurisdiction: in Ohio, state cops will pull you over on the interstate for doing as little as 5mph over the speed limit (1mph on a bad day), whereas if you're not driving on the interstate then although a state trooper can still stop you, more often than not the squad cars that see you will be municipal or some other jurisdiction than state.

Each jurisdiction has its own policies, and, as pointed out above, the individual officer also gets to decide whether he really wants to bother with something relatively minor (misdemeanor moreso than felony, traffic citation moreso than misdemeanor). If you get pulled over for doing 8mph over, and you're polite and honest about what you were doing, I think our resident LEOs would probably agree that in most places there's a very high chance the officer would remind you to be careful and/or slow down at best, and give you a warning at worst. On the other hand, if you're in any way rude, uncooperative, or simply being an asshole, the cop is very likely to treat you in kind, and that 8mph is going to appear on your record and come out of your wallet.

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Phyxius

Most cops dont care too much about those going less than 10 over the limit because it distracts them from catching the ones that go 15, 20 over. Though if they want to, it's perfectly legal for them to catch someone going 2 over (though that might be disputed due to differences in spedometers). There was a story around here a while ago about someone who got pulled over for going 77 in a 75 then they searched his car and found pounds (dont remember exactly) of coke/heroin/something in the car. The widely believed theory around here is that the cops knew they had the stuff and were just looking for some reason to stop them. After all, if it had just been a routine traffic stop, the cops wouldn't have wanted to search them (unless they acted strangely, which is possible).

Niteshift

If you know of a place that has an official policy to stop officers from stopping people until they are doing 10 over, I'd like you to point them out so I could see it.

In most states (I'd say all, but I can't be sure), such a policy would be illegal.

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Mrgecko

Here's what I was getting at. I was a bit stoned when I made the original post .

Are lawmakers passing extra tough laws because they know that they can't be fully enforced? I mean, you'd think that with the laws we have today nearly everyone should be in trouble by now, but that's not so.

Yana Usdi

It's all a matter of opinion of course, but in mine they pass laws like they do simply because they are cowards and they play well on 30 second tough on crime commercials and bumper stickers. Sound policy or not, it's suicide to stand up against the laws. So they don't.

Americans in general don't have the slightest clue what effect their laws are having, and nobody really has a stake in telling them. The ads are run by candidates themselves or police/prison guard unions, or by special interest groups such as MADD and the like. Most of them have only looked at one side of things themselves, anyone trying to explain the other side is automatically assumed to be either a drug user or soft on crime.

I wrote to my Congressional candidate last election and asked him about the issue, we exchanged a few notes to establish his position. He was well aware the system was broken, and didn't plan to say a word about it. Here's what he did say in part.

"The political problem is if one starts a thoughtful conversation on the subject, those on the other-side use the bumper sticker/sound bite that one is "soft on crime." As we live in a sound bite world, people such as yourself must stage engaged, talk with media, and elected officials. In order to affect change, thoughtful people must come forward and work to change the public view so such sound bites will not automatically stop the conversation."

You want change? We've got to do it. What do you think people will really think when they realize that though regular drug use is down in many cases lifetime use is actually up, a lot with some drugs. More people have tried them now than ever, the prices adjusted for inflation of some are actually lower than they used to be, and the death rates rather than dropping have climbed several times with the more potent off topic types.

The prison/jail system is a nightmare, it's increased about 6 times in the last 30 plus years of the drug war. "The Bureau of Justice Statistics recently reported that there are now two million people in the nation’s prisons and jails.1 This figure is a record high and represents the product of an unprecedented 30-year rise in the use of incarceration. The national inmate population is now six times that of the approximately 330,000 total of 1972, just prior to the inception of the modern day “get tough” movement."

http://www.sentencingproject.org/pdfs/pub9036.pdf

"In this regard, the U.S. rate of incarceration of 702 inmates per 100,000 population represents not only a record high, but situates this nation as the world leader in its use of imprisonment. The continuous rise in the prison population in the U.S. has vaulted this country ahead of our old Cold War rival Russia to become the world’s leading incarcerator."

To put those numbers in perspective, Japan imprisons 53 people per 100,000 as of the date of the study above, Sweden 73, Germany 91, Netherlands 93, Canada 116, England and Wales 139, and The United States 702. That's a rate of 5-8 times the industrial nations we're the most similar to.

We've got thousands and thousands of preventable HIV and hepatitis cases that spread to husbands, wives, girlfriends, and children. I can't think of a single aspect of the war on drugs that isn't an abject failure, but most people just don't have a clue.

If we want change, it's simple. Educate yourself, learn who's on our side for the credibility they'll offer when you quote them, and start teaching people. It's not going to happen any other way, until it's an acceptable subject for debate the politicians aren't going to touch it.

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Yana Usdi

Last thought on the subject for now. In addition to the obvious problems that the statistics themselves point out, we've also got another big one to consider. What happens to a drug user who has so far been non-violent all their lives, then we lock them up with animals and treat them like an animal?

I was reading an article recently called Hold On to Your Humanity, An Open Letter to GI's in Iraq. I don't know if anyone would appreciate the politics of the letter itself or not, but a line in it about what happens to some troops returning from war struck me as extremely relevant to the people we release from prison as well.

" So we finish our tour, and go back to our families, who can see that even though we function, we are empty and incapable of truly connecting to people any more, and maybe we can go for months or even years before we fill that void where we surrendered our humanity, with chemical anesthetics--drugs, alcohol, until we realize that the void can never be filled and we shoot ourselves, or head off into the street where we can disappear with the flotsam of society, or we hurt others, especially those who try to love us, and end up as another incarceration statistic or a mental patient. "

I don't imagine that every inmate sees or experiences stuff like this, but for every death there are multiple beatings and for every brutality by the system there are many by other inmates that are ignored or un-prevented at the least. It's a brutal place to spend time, and here's a video from the BBC that they seem to think explains how some of the prisoner abuse in Iraq happened. They just looked at where some of the guards got their first experiences in the field.

http://www.informationclearinghouse....o1/2prison.wmv

Here's an hour long audio documentary on how hard it is to get back into life after prison, and why.

http://americanradioworks.publicradi...ures/hardtime/

And one on the growing problem of prison gangs, and their new reach onto the streets. If you thought the crips and bloods were dangerous, you haven't seen a thing yet. We've sent them to university.

http://americanradioworks.publicradi...ngs/index.html

What effect do we really think prison is going to have, the way we're running them? We haven't prevented crime so much as trained new, smarter generations of criminals. Ones that have reason to hate us.